By Michelle Gibson

If asked to think back to the summer after seventh grade, most kids remember trips to an ice cream store, hanging out with their friends at the pool or family vacations to the beach. For 16-year-old Laya Anasu, that summer was about writing a book.

At that time, the junior at Dublin Jerome High School had just moved to Ohio with her family from Carson City, Nev. But Laya missed her friends and didn’t have many opportunities to meet people her age until school began in the fall, so she channeled her feelings of loneliness into writing.

“I had the idea to write about the adventures (my friends in Nevada and I) could have had together and I just made everything as intriguing and interesting as possible for myself,” she says.

The final product is Little Horizons, a 392-page, fantasy-adventure book about a brave fifth-grader Brinda Arora and her four best friends, a group collectively known as the “Hedrons.” Laya thought this name, which is derived from the five-faced Platonic solid tetrahedron, was “cool” because it represents the five different personalities of the friends.

Their story is set in Druniverse, an alternate universe Laya created. It is based on a social studies project in which she was to create a new world.

“I didn’t want to set the story in the actual world on Earth, so I set it in Druniverse. It means, ‘dream universe,’” she says.

From the Druniverse and the space-age technology that is commonplace in the lives of the Hedrons, Laya sought to create a compelling story that she hopes will interest her tween- and teen-aged readers.

That story focuses on the citizens of the Druniverse, a battle between good and evil, and the accidental involvement of the Hedrons in a fight to defeat an evil army. Laya finished the book in a year and a half and decided she wanted to get it published. Her father and mother, Anasu Rangarao and Manjula, helped look for agents, but no one would take on an author who was not already published.

“It was pretty hard,” Laya says. “We contacted about 25 agents, but they only wanted authors of literary standing.”

In his online research, her father discovered BookSurge, a subsidiary company of Amazon.com that offers do-it-yourself publishing and professional book design and editing for first-time authors. Books published on BookSurge can then be sold through Amazon.com. Laya and her father decided to give it a try, and Little Horizons was published on Aug. 25, 2009.

Kirkus Discoveries, a book review service for independent or self-published authors, calls the book “an engrossing fantasy that imparts lessons about real life,” saying, “Anasu concocts a teeming, lively fictive world stocked with colorful settings, amusing oddballs and intriguing conundrums. She strikes a nice balance between epic odyssey and comic mishap while exploring Tween-aged preoccupations with friendship, personality clashes and group pecking orders. Young readers will enjoy the Hedrons’ frenetic escapades while learning about the purposes and pitfalls of confidence, humility, loyalty and camaraderie.”

Laya believes these lessons are the backbone of the story. She thinks readers will find her book different from others in the same genre because it was written by someone with a younger perspective.

“I think my book lends a unique authenticity for several reasons,” she says. “I wrote it when I was 11 years old, just a year or year and a half after I was in fifth grade, and I still knew what I felt like when I was in fifth grade. I wrote it sincerely. I didn’t restrain my imagination. I just wrote everything I thought and combined it later, which I think helped the voice of the entire story. I consider the characters very relatable because they all have different personalities but similar interests in life, and they represent different types of people. They experience the same feelings and emotions that people experience in real life.”

Laya decided to donate the proceeds from the book to charity. She chose Asha for Education, an organization that promotes socio-economic change in India through the education of underprivileged children, to pay homage to the country where she was born.

“I write for enjoyment, not for money,” she says. “I wanted to donate the proceeds to an organization because it makes me happy to know that something I wrote will help someone. Asha for Education seemed like a good choice because there are a lot of different chapters and projects involved, and I like that it helps kids and education. I think that’s important.”

Laya writes a poem every day and has plans for a realistic fiction novel about “relationships, groups, society and life in general.” Outside of writing, she also enjoys listening to music, watching movies and spending time outdoors riding her bike, in-line skating or playing tennis. She is involved in many clubs and activities at school, including Jerome’s Student Senate, the International Baccalaureate program and the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network.

Little Horizons is available online at Amazon.com, BookSurge.com and through additional wholesale and retail channels worldwide.

Michelle Gibson is a contributing writer for Dublin Life.