August 2 2025 was a big day for junior Coralee McGarvey when she self-published her fantasy book called Sunrise.

“I was relaxing one day,” McGarvey said. “I just got a sentence in my head, and, like, no matter what I did, I couldn’t get it out of my head.”

McGarvey says she was working on her book for around three and a half years, with each draft taking around a month on its own.

“I sat down and wrote like a very rough first chapter,” McGarvey said, “and I was like, okay, so there’s something here and it’s not going to leave me alone.”

McGarvey’s love of reading and writing started early in childhood.

“My parents were big into books,” McGarvey said. “When I was little, I would be read stories all the time, and [with] my dad being an English teacher, I think I just started writing stories because it was fun.”

Because McGarvey has been working on this book for so long, she has also grown up with the characters.

“I have found, especially as I’ve gotten older and grown up with [the main character], that I have a lot of shared characteristics with [her],” McGarvey said, “but we also differ in a lot of ways.”

But for her book, McGarvey decided to use an author name (or a pen name), Cora Sloane.

“Cora obviously comes from my first name, it’s just the first part of Coralee,” McGarvey said, “and then Sloane is my middle name.”

“I knew I wanted kind of an author name just so I could keep that professional name, and I could keep it potentially separate,” McGarvey said.

Since McGarvey was self-publishing this book, that meant she had to do everything from cover to cover herself – literally – she designed the cover art herself.

“I had to make sure the cover was in the right size and had the right dimensions and everything,” McGarvey said. “That was a very long, frustrating day of moving teeny, tiny lines over slightly so that it would fit.”

And this love of writing has now turned into her first trilogy as an author.

“I started and wrote a first draft of book two, [I] started it, I think, May-ish of last year,” McGarvey said. “I finished the first draft in June, I stepped away from it to do all the finishing touches for book one, but I’m in the editing process for it now.”

“The amount of support I’ve gotten from everybody has been almost the most unreal part,” McGarvey said, “I’ll get texts… like from family and friends, that’s like, oh, I was thinking about your characters all day.”