Coronado local and high school junior, Jamie Piearcy, spent quarantine time writing her first book, The End Of Heaven: Explore the Depravity of True Humanity. Available on Amazon in both ebook and paperback versions, this 245-page collection of psychological thrillers is split into seven short stories and a novella.
Jamie has loved the idea of writing books for as long as she can remember. At the age of 13, she began to write the novella, Generation X, which is featured at the end of the book. Jamie showed the first draft of the novella to her seventh grade substitute teacher, Mrs. Graham, who was “incredibly helpful and encouraging” to help her pursue her dream of writing a book.
When the world shut down due to COVID-19, Jamie decided there was no better time to finish what she had begun three years earlier. On the first day of quarantine, Jamie started writing short stories in her paper journal and continued writing throughout the summer. Jamie drew on her emotions from the craziness of the world in quarantine and “twisted them to fit the roller coaster of emotion in my writing.”
Jamie wrote the original draft in her paper journal and then had to type it up manually which took multiple tries and complicated the publishing process. Between the writing, typing, and editing, the book took a long time to complete. In total, she spent about three years and four months writing the book with much of the work taking place since March 2020.
According to Jamie, the hardest part of writing the book was the editing. “My head is stuffed with ideas and phrases and emotions zinging all over the place, and I wanted to get my readers feeling what I’m feeling. It’s a hard thing to do when there’s only so many words in the English language, only so many ways a sentence can flow.” Jamie’s book originally included twice the number of characters, but in editing Jamie went through the painful process of reducing the number of characters. The final version of the book includes a range of original characters including serial killers, a crime queen, World War II victim, and survivors in a dystopian wasteland.
Jamie stated the reason she wrote her book was to make people think and “imagine how the world and other people work. I want my readers to contemplate how temporary we all are, how emotion is so meaningful and meaningless at the same time. How we are all connected, and how we are all so tiny but so loud in the endless cloud of Existence.” Jamie hopes everyone enjoys the stories and hopes they take good care of themselves and others.
As a junior at Coronado High School, Jamie’s hobbies include reading, ballet, contortion, researching cold cases, and daydreaming about story ideas. She plans to write more books in the future and is already working on another project. Jamie has not decided what she wants to do when she grows up, but she knows she will never stop writing.
