Beyond the Books: Meet the Creator of Sunny Stella® World

I never intended to write a book!

One evening, just before Christmas 2020, my caregiver and I were talking about my four-and-a-half-month-old ducklings. She made an off-the-wall comment that I had learned so much about ducks that I could write a book about them. I laughed it off. Before being struck by lightning and sustaining a traumatic brain injury (TBI) that left me with aphasia, I was an avid reader and writer. Afterward, reading and writing became incredibly difficult. It could take me hours to write a single sentence.

With speech therapy and compensatory strategies, I gradually learned to write in short fragments that I could move around and build into sentences and paragraphs. A few days after my caregiver's comment, I mentioned the idea to some friends. Their enthusiasm surprised me. Over the next week, the idea of writing a book about ducks took on a life of its own.

That's how Flock of Quackers: A Prayer With Every Step began. What started as an unexpected suggestion eventually opened the door to becoming an author.

My latest book is Homestead Harmony, the second storybook in the Sunny Stella® Series. It was published in September 2026, and I'm excited to share Stella's newest adventures with readers! The story follows eleven-year-old Stella Reese as she learns more about herself, her family, and the natural world around her.

One of the central themes is primary Raynaud’s, a condition that affects blood circulation. Stella learns to recognize her body's warning signs and make adjustments without giving up the activities she loves. But the book is about much more than a medical condition. Stella and her friends learn together about the purpose of a prescribed burn, turn beet peelings into natural dye for wool mittens, explore connections between the garden and the dinner table, and enjoy a community harvest festival beneath the night sky.

I wanted to weave real-world learning into the story naturally, rather than make it feel like a textbook. Along the way, readers encounter ecological stewardship, practical homesteading skills, friendship, and inclusion. The book also includes a foreword by Lynn Wunderman, founder and chairman of the Raynaud’s Association®.

My hope is that children come away with a greater understanding of primary Raynaud’s, along with new questions about the world around them and the curiosity to explore those questions for themselves.

Well, Stella certainly wasn't planned. She actually began as a simple sketch that I was creating for the cover of a backyard homesteading book intended for adults, but as I worked on her appearance, something unexpected happened. The more I sketched, the more I realized that she was a child! That changed everything. I began imagining how I could share my homesteading knowledge through the eyes of an eleven-year-old girl, and Backyard Homestead Adventures was born.

Looking back, I can see how much of myself found its way into Stella. She's a mini-me! Her curiosity, love of nature, and willingness to learn through experience reflect much of my own journey.

As for the other characters, I want them to contribute something meaningful to Stella's adventures. Friendship, different abilities, family relationships, and everyday experiences all provide opportunities for the characters to learn from one another. I don't want my characters to simply explain things to readers. I want them to ask questions, make discoveries, and sometimes figure things out together, just as we do in real life.

I generally break my days into two-hour chunks of time. The first two hours typically involve checking and responding to emails, catching up on social media, and sometimes making an impromptu post or two. After that, my caregiver arrives for the day, and the rest of the morning and into early afternoon are reserved for eating, household chores, and physical tasks.

In the afternoon, while my caregiver does laundry, grocery shopping, or other errands, I usually rest. Sometimes that means sketching out little scenes that have been playing in my head, reading, or simply lying down. Before she leaves for the day, my caregiver makes sure I've fed my mobility service dog and my quail. She provides assistance when needed. She also makes sure I have something to eat for supper. Once she's gone and I've eaten, my writing time begins.

The rest of the evening, and often well into the night, is when I do most of my writing. Because of my traumatic brain injury and debilitating muscle spasms, I have to be mindful of both cognitive overload and physical pain. Some days, I can only sit at the computer for short periods of time. Other days, I can sit there for hours. It really depends on how I'm feeling.

To avoid overdoing it, I'll write for a while, take a break to watch something on YouTube, or work on creating and scheduling social media posts for the following day. Depending on how I'm feeling, I may or may not return to writing before calling it a night.

But when those creative juices really start flowing? Well, let's just say it's not unusual to find me still writing in the wee hours of the morning.

For me, the most rewarding part has been proving that the doctors were wrong.

After I was struck by lightning and sustained a traumatic brain injury, doctors told me that I was mentally a three-year-old trapped in a ninety-year-old body, and that I would always be that way. For the first ten years or so after my injury, my brain and body seemed to confirm what they had told me. So, naturally, I believed them.

Then one day, someone finally challenged me to challenge myself. That changed everything. Little by little, I began pushing myself beyond the limitations I had come to accept, and slowly, my brain began to heal. It continues to heal to this day. I never imagined that I would become a published author, much less create an entire world built around nature, homesteading, and learning. Every book I complete is another reminder of how far I've come.

Being an indie author gives me the freedom to tell the stories I want to tell, in my own way and at my own pace, but more than anything, it has given me something I once thought I'd lost forever: the ability to write and share my thoughts with others, and that means more to me than I can put into words.

One of my biggest challenges has been dealing with aphasia, specifically Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia, as a result of my traumatic brain injury. Word-finding and sequencing can be particularly difficult for me. Sometimes I know exactly what I want to say, but I can't find the words to express it. Other times, I have all the pieces in my head, but putting them in the right order is another matter entirely.

Chapter 4 of Homestead Harmony was especially challenging for me because it involved natural dyeing, a process that requires several steps that need to be completed in a particular sequence. I understood the process, but translating that knowledge into a story while keeping everything in the correct order took considerable effort. I had to work through the chapter in small sections, making sure that the steps made sense and flowed naturally within the story.

Challenges like these are part of my everyday writing experience. I've learned to work with my brain rather than against it, using compensatory strategies, taking breaks, and giving myself the time I need. My writing process may look different from that of other authors, but it works for me, and there's a tremendous sense of accomplishment when I finally see all those pieces come together.

Over the years, assistive technology has played an important role in helping me communicate, read, and write. In the beginning, I used a Lingraphica communication device to help me express myself when finding and forming words was especially difficult. Later, I began using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, a speech-to-text program that allowed me to dictate rather than type. I still use Dragon occasionally, depending on what I'm working on and how I'm feeling.

Another tool in my toolbox is Kurzweil 3000, which helps make reading and working with written material more accessible. More recently, I've added assistive AI through ChatGPT. I use it to help with brainstorming, research, organizing my thoughts, and editorial tasks, particularly when word-finding or sequencing becomes difficult.

I also still love simple, hands-on tools like pencil and paper. I often sketch scenes by hand, and sometimes I use colored pencils as well. In fact, I recently sketched a cover concept for my next book, Winter Comes to the Homestead, and if you looked at my desk, you'd find scraps of paper with notes scattered everywhere. Sometimes an idea comes to me visually first, and sketching or jotting down a few words helps me capture it before I lose it.

Each of these tools serves a different purpose, and I don't necessarily use them all every day. What matters is having options that allow me to work within my abilities. Technology doesn't replace my creativity or make decisions for me. It simply helps me get the thoughts and ideas out of my head and onto the page. The stories, creative direction, and final decisions are still mine.

Unless you have the money to pay others to handle certain tasks, be prepared to wear a lot of hats. Writing the book is only one part of being an indie author. There's editing, formatting, cover design, publishing, marketing, and so much more. Sometimes I think I spend more time marketing my books than I actually do writing them!

Thankfully, I use a scheduler that allows me to create posts ahead of time and share them across multiple social media platforms. That helps, but marketing still requires a tremendous amount of time and consistency. For years, I was told that the average person needs to see the same advertisement or post about seven times before they even begin to remember it. More recently, I heard that number has increased to ten. I've also heard that social media algorithms may show a post to only a small percentage of your followers. I don't know how accurate those numbers are today, but I've learned that just because you publish a post doesn't mean everyone will see it. 

My advice is to go into indie publishing with your eyes open. Be willing to learn new skills, find tools that make the work more manageable, and recognize that building an audience takes time. You don't have to do everything at once, and you certainly don't have to do everything perfectly. Just keep learning, keep showing up, and don't let all the other responsibilities take away your joy of writing.

I've already started working on Winter Comes to the Homestead, the third storybook in the Sunny Stella® Series.

I'm still in the early planning stages, thinking through the main thread of the story, the experiences I want Stella and the other characters to have, and the things I hope young readers will explore and learn along the way. I've even started sketching ideas for the book cover.

Nothing is set in stone yet, and that's part of the fun of beginning a new story. I have an idea of where I want to start, but I also know things may change as I research, write, and listen to where the characters take me. I'm looking forward to seeing how this next adventure unfolds.