By Sarrah Peters/News Editor
The Gadsden Public Library invited best-selling young adult novelist C.C. Hunter to speak about her Shadow Falls and Shadow Falls After Dark series on Oct. 11.
C.C. Hunter is actually a local author named Christie Craig, who graduated from Glencoe High.
When Christie Craig was a child, she didn’t read much and she definitely didn’t write much. Craig had dyslexia, which made writing more difficult, but she was always a storyteller.
She wanted to write, but didn’t know how. In 1984, she wrote her first novel.
“It will not even line the bottom of a birdcage,” said Craig. “It was so bad. I didn’t know anything about writing. I knew a little about storytelling and I knew emotion.”
After that she joined an organization called Romance Writers of America, where she learned more about writing.
She kept writing and improving, and eventually started entering contests.
In 1994, she finally got Two Hearts Too Late, a humorous romance novel published. After the people at the publishers who knew her left, she was once again unable to get published.
Craig began writing short pieces for magazines to make a living and kept writing fiction on the side. After 13 more years of writing, Craig had accumulated over 10,000 rejection letters. No one thought her funny romances would sell.
Then she entered a big contest with four of the novels, in the hopes that one would place. Instead, all of her entries placed, and she once again had a publisher.
She published several romances, before being approached to do young adult novels based around a supernatural camp. Craig initially protested, saying that she had never even read young adult literature, let alone written it.
“I asked her, ‘Why do you think I can do this?’ and she said, ‘because you are a smart aleck!’” said Craig.
The publisher was right. Craig’s books hit the bestseller list in the United States, as well as internationally.
“You just can’t stop writing; write whenever you can,” said Craig. “Learn how to do it.”
She later gave advice for people to keep trying to do whatever they love, until they succeed.
Craig’s struggle with dyslexia was an inspiration for the Shadow Falls character Miranda, a witch that struggles with spells due to her dyslexia.
The character of Miranda inspired Jasmine Spicer to read the books and start writing, despite her dyslexia.
Spicer won a drawing to win the newest book in the Shadow Falls After Dark series, Reborn. Rebekah Armstrong Vinyard, a childhood friend of Craig’s, won the entire Shadow Falls series.