That’s how long it’s been since Sarah & Katy and the Book of Blank was published. It was my sophomore children’s book, independently published in November 2015.
Riding the high of a recently released novel, I immediately started writing The Mountain of Dempsey Molehill. Optimism launched the unrealistic expectation that I would finish the draft in 2016.
Reality started to set in when 2016 whooshed by. No big deal, I told myself. I’ll finish it in 2017.
Another year whooshed by. In 2018, I had a full draft that had gone through one or two revisions (the revisions have all blurred together in my memory). I almost flipped the switch on independently publishing Dempsey that year, but at the last minute I backed away because the book still didn’t feel quite right. Rewrites continued through 2018 and 2019.
By 2020, I shoved Dempsey in a drawer and started working on a book for older readers about a coven of witches. But Dempsey Molehill’s story about himself and his unintentionally mischievous siblings nagged at the back of my mind.
Over the next five years, I frequently pulled it out, dabbled, edited, revisted, rewrote, restructured. I handed chapters to other writers and asked for their input. I rewrote Dempsey’s mom into a softer character after people told me she seemed militant and unlikeable. At one point, I switched from third person POV to first person. I changed a character’s name. In 2024, I rewrote each chapter, one by one, to adjust the tone of Dempsey’s voice. I added excerpts from the fictional town’s newspaper between chapters. I cut two chapters completely (which was painful but necessary). I cut a third chapter, then put it back in.
And now, finally, ten long years later, the story is complete. It’s ready. It finally feels right.
The Mountain of Dempsey Molehill has entered the production phase. Mark your calendars for Tuesday, November 4, when it will be available for sale!
The Mountain of Dempsey Molehill
Middle grade fiction,Stroebel Independent Books, November 2025
Dempsey Molehill and his siblings—practically-a-grownup Brom, responsible Tilly, pesky little brother Penn, and wild child Bandi—don’t mean to cause mischief. But somehow, they always find themselves smack dab in the middle of it. When Dempsey’s dad decides to run for mayor of Pickettstown, the five Molehill kids try to be on their best behavior. Unfortunately for Dempsey and his siblings, their “best behavior” includes luring bullies in muddy mayhem, casting Halloween curses, exploding appliances, and terrorizing classmates with Scrap the one-eared cat. Will their antics cost their dad the election? Or can the family band together to put the best Molehill foot forward? The Mountain of Dempsey Molehill is a humorous middle grade novel about life in rural Illinois, small-town politics, and growing up in a big, rowdy family.
In January, I participated in a virtual visit with a third-grade class.
It’s the first classroom visit I’ve conducted in a few years. I originally wrote the Sarah & Katy books for my nieces back in 2014, when Sarah was in third grade and Katy was in first grade. As they’ve advanced to new reading levels and genres, I’ve slowly drifted away from working on children’s books. But occasionally, I still have a teacher or librarian reach out about visiting with students, and it reminds me why I love writing for that age group.
During my recent school visit, I discussed the writing process. To give the students a chance to engage, I let them guess how long it took to write each Sarah & Katy book. Guesses ranged from weeks to years. One student raised a hand and speculated, “Ten years?”
Each Sarah & Katy book took about eight months, but the student’s guess about ten years lingered in my mind after I said my farewells to the class. Ten years is almost how long The Mountain of Dempsey Molehill has taken to write.
The first draft of Dempsey’s story came together between 2016 and 2018. Since then, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve rewritten the book, shelved it, and then dusted it off for more rewrites. In mid 2024, I retrieved the manuscript after another hiatus. At that point, I told myself I would edit and finalize one chapter per week, with an April 2025 release in mind.
That schedule has already been revised and pushed back — probably late summer at the earliest — but the prolonged project got me thinking: how long does it take other writers to write a book?
I took heart when I stumbled across a September 2018 guest post on Jane Friedman’s website. Refuge author Merilyn Simonds recounted an experience that somewhat parallels my own. She wrote Refuge in four years, then her agent shopped it to editors. The book faced multiple rejections, and eventually Simonds filed it away. But with some discussion and a fresh perspective, she returned to the manuscript several years later to rework it. After another three years and her twenty-second draft, an editor bought the book.
When someone in the audience asks, how long did it take you to write this book, I say, “Fourteen years.” But of course that’s not true. I wasn’t writing during all those fourteen years: I worked on the manuscript in bursts, the pages languishing for months and sometimes years while I gathered my thoughts for the next revision. – Merilyn Simonds
Simonds also noted how long other authors have taken to write some of the world’s best-known works. Some writers are able to churn out manuscripts quickly — John Boyne cranked out The Boy in the Striped Pajamas in less than three days — while others set a slower pace — Margaret Mitchell spent ten years on Gone With the Wind. My husband, ever the trivia enthusiast, told me Kurt Vonnegut spent 23 years writing Slaughterhouse Five, sometimes throwing out entire drafts to restart the project. (There’s a great article in TIME about his multiple drafts.)
For independent authors especially, it’s a good lesson to take to heart: the time it takes to write a book is the time it takes, and there’s no need to rush publication. In traditional publishing, there are teams of agents and editors to flag that a manuscript that isn’t quite ready. For indie authors, it can come down to our own discretion when we flip the switch on publication. I almost published Dempsey’s story too early.
In August 2018, after a couple of minor rewrites and edits, I had a draft of Dempsey that I decided to publish. I was eager to share the story and started the process of registering my new publishing imprint, buying ISBNs through Bowker, setting up metadata in Bowker and IngramSpark …
But something about the story still felt off. I couldn’t bring myself to release it into the world quite yet, and I’m glad I didn’t. Each revision since then has strengthened and honed the story. The latest iteration is stronger in its voice, trims away excess that slowed the plot, and tightens a few loose ends.
This marks Year 9 of working on Dempsey’s story. The book will be a long time in coming, but I’m in good company among fellow writers who have taken time to let a story evolve into its best final form.
When the original Home Alone film was released in 1990, one of my friends wasn’t allowed to watch it.
On its surface, the movie is just a family comedy. Unruly eight-year-old Kevin McCallister accidentally gets left home alone for a week when his family travels to Paris, and he gets into increasingly wild mischief as he booby traps his house to protect it from robbers.
My friend’s mom saw it through a different lens. It was a how-to manual for her own mischief-making son. She was especially worried about the scene where Kevin rides his sled down the stairs and out the front door, because their home had a similar configuration, and it wouldn’t be out of character for her son to try the same.
For an adult audience, Home Alone is a classic movie with slapstick violence. For younger viewers, it might be a funny film – or it might be an idea generator for copycat antics.
Creating a mischief-packed scenario in children’s media – be it film, television, literature, music, etc. – requires creators to walk a fine line. We want it to be entertaining. We want it to be believable. We want the stakes to be high. But we don’t want to have to add a big, red warning label that says, “Kids, don’t try this at home.”
In writing The Mountain of Dempsey Molehill, I’ve found myself walking a wobbly tightrope in a few chapters as I try to balance humorous mischief with authenticity – and without giving young, impressionable readers any bad ideas. The premise of the middle grade novel is five siblings with a penchant for mischief try to be on their best behavior the year their dad runs for mayor. Unfortunately, wherever the Molehill kids go, mischief is sure to follow.
One chapter in particular raised red flags for beta readers and has gone through multiple revisions. Seventh-grader Dempsey and his best friend Cooper are cleaning the garage when they find a moldy old encyclopedia that includes the chemistry for gunpowder. They decide to make their own (it’s surprisingly easy to make a basic form – it takes three ingredients, all of which can be found in the average garden shed), and their experiment causes a small fire.
A challenge I faced was writing the chapter with enough detail that it feels authentic without turning it into a how-to guide on homemade gunpowder. The first draft included the three ingredients by name; it didn’t take long for a nagging voice in my head to say, “Maybe that’s not such a great detail to include…” My most recent draft is less specific on those details.
What’s also important is the character’s intent. A growing criticism I’ve seen about Home Alone is that some viewers believe Kevin is a psychopath who derives thrill from creating chaos and pain. Rather than seeing slapstick humor in the robbers suffering blowtorches on their scalps and nails in their feet, the audience sees a remorseless child inflicting serious injury.
That’s not the message I want to send with Dempsey and Cooper and their gunpowder experiment.
In early drafts of the manuscript, science-loving Dempsey knew from the start what they were creating. One beta reader asked, “But why? What would be the point of them making it when they know there’s nothing they can do with it?”
That was a good point. Knowingly making gunpowder is just asking for trouble.
In the latest revision, when the boys find the water-damaged encyclopedia, part of the page is too damaged to read – including the “gunpowder” label at the beginning of the encyclopedia article – but the chart for the gunpowder formula is intact. Intrigued, they try to guess what it is, which leads them to test the recipe to see if they can deduce its purpose. It’s a mix of simple curiosity and dumb luck that they find the three ingredients in the garage and successfully create a basic black powder.
Revisions are still in progress for the latest version of the book, but fortunately the gunpowder chapter is moving in a better direction. The Molehill kids might not necessarily set a good example, but ultimately I hope they don’t set a bad example.
In a digital world, I tend to collect recipes from the internet. Where my mom had a row of cookbooks, I have a Pinterest board.
That isn’t to say print cookbooks don’t have a place in my kitchen. I have four – a tried-and-true Better Homes & Gardens cookbook inherited from a grandparent, a staple-bound Southern cooking pamphlet my husband found at a secondhand book sale, and two of Alison Walsh’s cookbooks: A Literary Tea Party and A Literary Holiday Cookbook.
In March, Alison Walsh released her third literary cookbook. This time, the author and chef ventured into independent publishing to release the e-book A Literary Picnic.
Even though the majority of my go-to recipes are in a digital format, I’m somewhat disappointed there’s not a print edition of Walsh’s latest book. We’re a literature-loving household, so her cookbooks are on display in our kitchen. I wish I could add the latest edition to the shelf, but alas.
When it comes to practical use, though, the cookbook is handy because it’s accessible from my phone. My common practice in the kitchen is to prop my phone on the counter and open recipes on the screen, so it fits my habits nicely.
The cookbook features five picnic menus inspired by classic children’s literature: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, common fairy tales, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Secret Garden and Winnie-the-Pooh. Each menu is broken down into five items: appetizer, entree, side dish, dessert, and beverage. In the author’s note, Walsh points out the majority of the recipes are finger foods. That’s user-friendly for picnics.
At the beginning of each recipe is a quote from the respective story, which feeds insight into the menu selection. For example, the passage at the beginning of the Alice in Wonderland Mushroom Scones recipe reads, “After a while she remembered that she still held the pieces of mushroom in her hands, and she set to work very carefully nibbling first at one and then the other.”
The recipes are well-planned to fit their literary themes. Whether it’s the heart-shaped tarts on the Alice in Wonderland menu, key-shaped crackers on The Secret Garden menu, or the bunny-shaped hand pies for Peter Rabbit, the meal’s connection to its story is immediately recognizable. And the flavors tie into the stories, too – the ingredients are inspired by the characters and settings. The Winnie the Pooh menu, for example, prominently incorporates honey (or “hunny,” as Pooh would inevitably spell it).
Throughout the cookbook, users will find blue notes in the margins that offer a variety of tips to use leftover ingredients instead of discarding them, such as using trimmed bread crusts to make bread crumbs or what to do with homemade marshmallows if they start to turn stale.
The recipe instructions are written in a manner that’s friendly for beginning bakers; however, several of the menus include recipes that may be tricky for kitchen novices. A first-time pastry maker could probably assemble Rapunzel’s Braided Pastries, but I wager it will take a lot of practice before the final product looks like Walsh’s photo. Then there are higher level recipes like the Vanilla Bean Marshmallow Bunnies. The ambitious voice in my head says, “Cute! Let’s try it!” The realistic voice in my head says, “Let’s work our way up to that one.”
Some of the recipes will have novice bakers like me on the hunt for unfamiliar ingredients. I was especially intrigued by the color-changing Drink Me Potion for the Alice-themed picnic. It’s a four-ingredient beverage, which seems simple enough, but I had never heard of butterfly pea flower blossoms. I opened my Kroger app to see if the local store carries the ingredient and had a momentary shock when I saw 17 ounces of butterfly pea flower powder costs $87.31. Luckily that’s not the ingredient I needed (the recipe calls for the flowers, not the powder), but a quick search of local stores revealed it’s not stocked on shelves in my area. Fortunately, they are available (and affordable) online. Before scheduling a picnic, be sure to read the recipes closely and plan ahead to stock your cupboard.
One of my favorite recipes in the book is a relatively simple sugar cookie recipe. What makes it stand out is the way Walsh instructs bakers to pipe their own swans, which are then stood upright in a blue cookie to look like they’re swimming on a pond. As someone who bakes Christmas sugar cookies once a year and always uses a cookie cutter, this recipe created a lightbulb moment for me. I can pipe cookies into my own shapes! I’ve always just rolled the dough into balls or relied on cookie cutters.
One of the delights of a new cookbook is finding a recipe that I never knew existed. A Literary Picnic introduced me to fruit leather (it looks like a homemade Fruit Roll-Up), which takes only three ingredients per batch. It may prove more challenging in the kitchen than it sounds on paper, but I’m looking forward to the experiment.
If I had kids at home, I would love to do a summer parent/child book club by letting my kids pick one of the stories that inspired Walsh, then read it together and host a picnic as a finale. Walsh’s picnics would make a great capstone activity related to children’s literature – in fact, for an extra learning experience, kids could help prepare some of the simpler recipes, such as Chamomile Muffins.
Be sure to check out her list of cooking tips at the back of the book – they’re helpful, both in relation to her recipes and in general. Walsh also includes product links to special tools and ingredients (including those elusive butterfly pea flower blossoms I was hunting for).
It’s been almost four years to the day that I introduced the cast of my next middle grade novel, The Mountain of Dempsey Molehill.
I started writing the book in 2016, with plans to release it in 2018. I missed that deadline, but instead of tabling the project, I revised the game plan. I kept working on the first draft, revising the direction certain chapters took and fixing plot holes spotted by a workshopping group.
By summer 2019, I was a year past my initial deadline, but I had an updated draft. I enlisted Hannah Jones for the cover illustration and started working on the back end of independent publishing.
As I went about buying and registering ISBNs, setting up the metadata, and prepping the book’s layout, something still felt off. A voice in the back of my head nagged that the story wasn’t ready yet. Revisions were still needed. I felt growing pressure to release the book because I had been working on it for three years, but I couldn’t shake that nagging voice. I finally decided to postpone the release for a few more months. I would step away from the manuscript, look at it with fresh eyes, make any final adjustments, and then release it in early 2020.
Then 2020 … well, happened.
The COVID-19 pandemic turned my home and work life inside-out. The total disruption to routine, coupled with the fears and stress of a global health crisis, took a toll on my mental health for several months. Once life settled into a semblance of routine again, I had no desire or inspiration to finish Dempsey’s story. I pushed that book deep into a drawer and switched gears entirely. I dropped all children’s book projects and instead devoted the next two and a half years to an adult urban fantasy novel.
In January this year, I was sorting through papers in my home office when I found a printed proof of The Mountain of Dempsey Molehill. I started paging through it, and I finally realized what had felt off. The entire book is narrated by Dempsey, but we never really get to know him among the cast of colorful and crazy characters around him. The tone of the book was that of a distant observer, rather than someone who is up close and personal to the action and who would have reactions and emotions.
In a burst of inspiration, I rewrote the prologue and the first chapter in a week. I devised a grand plan of rewriting and revising one chapter a week, workshopping the new version by early summer, and releasing the book this fall.
Then life got in the way again. Overtime at the office and a kidney stone that required surgery pushed Dempsey off my radar for a few months.
By the time I could revisit the Molehills, my chapter-a-week schedule was tattered. It was demoralizing to realize that, once again, I would miss the book release deadline I imposed. It was almost tempting to shelve the manuscript again.
Almost.
The thing is, I still believe in Dempsey’s story. I love the novel and want it to find its reader base beyond my writers group. Progress has been frustratingly slow at times, but at the end of the day I have to remind myself: Progress is progress. If all I’ve written in a week is a paragraph, that’s a paragraph more than I had last week. If a project sits on shelf for three months, there’s nothing to stop me from dusting it off and picking up where I left off.
In my case, postponing the project offered the chance to improve it. Missed deadlines gave me time to step away from the book and see it with fresh eyes. When The Mountain of Dempsey Molehill finally sees itself inked and bound, it will be a better version than its earlier self.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from years working in the newspaper and magazine industry, a missed deadline can cause headaches and challenges to catch up. But never once, in the thousands of papers and publications I’ve helped produce, has a missed deadline resulted in the project failing to hit the stands. My teammates and I have said more than once, “It always comes together in the end.”
The Molehill family’s story has had long delays and missed deadlines by years, but I’ve pulled it off the shelf again and am fanning the dust out of the pages. Rewrites are underway. While I won’t commit to a 2023 release, I will commit to Dempsey’s story being told.
Julie Stroebel Barichello | Author 