Siri Magadi’s freshman year of high school involved immortals, hybrid species and a paranormal romance.
When biology sophomore Magadi started high school, she was a 13-year-old girl in love with reading. But, she was never fully satisfied with the books she read so she decided to write her own. Magadi is currently working on the sequel to her action-packed science-fiction romance, “Facing Silence.” In her first novel, Ali, the main character and Magadi’s supernatural alter ego, falls in love with a brooding, attractive, powerful being, Ashton, and must endure the ordinary struggles of being a teenager while also fighting villains to keep her loved ones from harm.
“It was all so new because I had never written anything at this scale before,” Magadi said. “I started writing this idea because every TV show and every book I read, it never leaves you with an ending that you are satisfied with. Once I had written something of my own I just kept adding to it and adding to it and when I realized I had a couple hundred pages, I thought, ‘This isn’t a piece, this is a book, I should probably do something with this.’”
Magadi decided to publish her work when she discovered she could self-publish through Amazon Create Space and Kindle Direct.
“It is one of the most satisfying things I have ever done,” Magadi said. “It’s not just about what people think about it, but it’s that I took this idea to completion and did something with it.”
When Magadi, a self-proclaimed romantic, was deciding how to write her first novel, she envisioned her perfect romance including science fiction and action elements.
“It would not be just a romance, it would be something out of this world,” Magadi said. “I thought, ‘What if I had superpowers? What if I was some magical mystical being?’ and the curious side of me was like, ‘What if everything I had ever known was a lie? What if my life was backwards? What if I was not even me?’”
Magadi said she was able to balance her school work and writing because writing is such a profound part of her life. Some of her characters and ideas are even inspired by her school work, such as the knowledge she learned from her genetics class which she used to create characters such as were-lions.
“All that creativity comes from science originally,” Magadi said. “When you have a scientific mind you can apply it to all other aspects of your life. On Friday nights, I stay in and I don’t go places and I write. I use writing as a sigh of relief.”
Sanajana Balachandran, Magadi’s friend who helped support her throughout her writing, was the inspiration for one of Magadi’s characters.
“Even though her genre is supernatural, she still manages to bring a very realistic vibe to her books,” Balachandran said. “Her characters go through issues that the everyday boy and girl go through and so you are able to feel like you are a part of that friendship. If you read the books you will be able to immediately see what she was feeling when she was writing a particular scene.”
When Balachandran found out that she was being included as one of the characters she said she was honored.
“When she told me about it I was floored because to be someone is one thing, to be someone’s best friend you are lucky, but to have an artist have you in one of their works blew me away,” Balachandran said.
Magadi said her sequel is coming along well and is near completion. For her new book she is trying to stay consistent with many of the ideas presented in the first, yet also add new elements that she hopes will make her characters more relatable.
“[I want there to be] maturity in the relationship. It’s not just about having a happily ever after, it’s not the ideal kind of life that you envision in high school,” Magadi said. “In college, there is always ups and downs: the equivalent of a bad midterm of a bad exam is a fight with a villain, it’s the same feeling of success or failure.”
