I wrote another book. You can read this one.

by Jill Macchiaverna

Years ago, when my husband was stationed overseas in a war zone and our daughter was still a toddler, I decided if there was ever a time to finally write a book, it was that time.

I had a pretty low-stress schedule as a freelance digital media specialist. My daughter was in daycare. My weekday was filled with work stuff. My afternoon was filled with my daughter. I didn’t have a village, so my evenings and nights were filled with large swaths of empty time, mostly spent hoping that nothing exciting was happening where my husband was. So I wrote a book.

My dad visited, and it was at a point that I was really starting to enjoy the story I was crafting, so I told him I was writing a book. “Really?” he smirked. “Is it about a wife whose husband is stationed overseas in a war?” I was stunned that he did not know that I am a creative person, and I started to understand my parents’ divorce just a little bit more.

My first novel was not about a wife, being overseas, or a war. I’m not going to tell you what it was about, because you’re never going to read it, because it probably wasn’t that good anyway.

I looked around online for how to go about submitting work to publishers, and one of the first pieces of advice was: “Do not ask your friend who is an English teacher to read it and be your editor!” Well, I didn’t have a village, didn’t know what early readers or beta readers were, and does an acquaintance who’s just a friend of a friend count as my friend? It does not.

I know this, because I paid her $600 to edit it and never heard from her again until she claimed over text that she “lost” the manuscript (printed double-spaced on a ream of paper that I secured in a three-inch binder) and, therefore, couldn’t give me any feedback on it. I’m talking six-hundred 2012-dollars, y’all.

I didn’t touch writing for the joy of writing again for a long time.

Seven years later, my dad called while I was on a work trip. He was choosing to stop chemotherapy and would die soon. I didn’t know what to do. My husband did. He scooped the kids (two by then) out of school, and we met at the closest airport I could fly into, then we drove to my dad’s house several states away. I stayed for his last ten days on Earth, and then a couple of months more while I carried out executor duties for his will. Working remotely, I once again had sweeping swaths of empty time.

I wrote a memoir about the experience. A whole book! I told a colleague what I was writing, because of my afore-mentioned excellent village-acquiring skills. “Well, don’t let anyone put your grief on a timeline,” he said, before abruptly pushing me to get past my grief.

You will never read that book, either. It’s too sad and boring. (That’s probably what’s going on my headstone one day: Here lies Jill. She was too sad and boring.)

Not long after that, I was in a wonderful reading and literacy graduate program through Oklahoma State University. We had fantastic professors! One assignment was to write a non-fiction children’s book. I had SO much fun writing and illustrating that assignment. I still have hope for that one. You might be able to read it one day.

Eventually, I became a classroom teacher. I had absolutely ZERO swaths of empty time. I actually needed to claw back some time for myself. I had always wanted to participate in NaNoWriMo (had no idea about the scandal that came years later and did not participate in the forums or boards or whatnot), but knew I would never have the time to commit to writing 50,000 words in one month. So I invited a friend to write with me.

We did it! Fifty-thousand words in one month, with our powers combined. And it turned out to be a good story. It felt fairly dystopian when we first started making query letters to seek publishers and agents. Now the unthinkable might be considered more of a Tuesday, so we felt a sense of urgency to self-publish. We luckily have the excellent indie publisher Quill Hawk right here in Oklahoma.

Traditional or self-published, we are confident we have a story worth sharing. We’ve built a world you can see yourself in, characters you can relate to and cheer for, and a modern-day problem that might only be solvable in fiction.

You can read this one. My co-author and I would be honored if you did, and then left an honest review. Eyes of the Sentinel is available in paperback and digital formats on September 17, 2026.