Julia Wierzbicki is a 2/4 Mechanical Engineering student at Stevens. In her sophomore year of college, she is already a successful author that has three published books on Amazon under the pseudonym J.L. Willow. The Scavenger and Missing Her are both Young Adult novels. Her most recently published work, A Weighted Soul and Other Dark and Twisted Tales is a collection of six stories under the New Adult genre.
Wierzbicki has always had a passion for writing and from a young age, she knew that being an author was something that she wanted to pursue. She stated — “I’ve been writing honestly since I learned how to type. My first book was written when I was in first grade. It’s not good at all; but I wrote a bunch of stories over the years and I got the idea for The Scavenger. I just had this feeling that it had good potential for something bigger than just like a manuscript that I write and then throw under my bed.” The Scavenger was published in Wierzbicki’s junior year of high school. In her own words, “it’s a Young Adult (YA) drama and it’s from four different perspectives about a police investigation that takes place in New York City.”
Missing Her, Wierzbicki’s second published work, is a Young Adult paranormal thriller novel that was published in May of her senior year in high school. Recently, a viral TikTok video kickstarted Missing Her into Amazon’s “Bestseller” status. “I actually joined TikTok like two weeks ago and I made a TikTok video about Missing Her […] it started gaining some traction. I checked a few days later and it had 100,000 views and people were asking me about the book, asking where they could buy it and everything, and it became an Amazon Bestseller book. I couldn’t believe it,” Wierzbicki explained.
Wierzbicki also submitted Missing Her to a Book Pipeline contest for a chance to adapt the novel into a movie screenplay. Out of over 2,000 submissions, Wierzbicki and Missing Her became one of the finalists. She stated — “With Missing Her, that story was definitely a lot more complex than The Scavenger and that’s why I decided to submit it to Book Pipeline as opposed to The Scavenger; I think there’s a lot more meat to it, and I had a lot of issues getting that story to fall into place […] Definitely the overall process for Missing Her was really really fruitful and rewarding.”
A Weighted Soul is Wierzbicki’s most recently published work that was created during the COVID-19 quarantine. “For A Weighted Soul, most of the bulk of publishing and finalizing was done over quarantine, and actually that book is dedicated to the quarantine of 2020 for keeping me inside and making me finish that book.” A Weighted Soul is a collection of six separate stories that each fall under the category of a different type of fear. “There’s an introduction paragraph to each of them and it was cool because I had all of these ideas for different stories and I wasn’t sure how to bring them together. I just got this idea one day and I was like, well all of them are horror stories so how about we play on that fear and it ended up turning out, I think, pretty cool,” Wierzbicki said.
When asked what advice she can give to other young, aspiring authors, Wierzbicki responded — “I always give the same advice to any young writers, and that is to finish that first draft of that story because there is such a large pool of aspiring authors that can never get past that first step. […] Once you get that first draft done you can start editing, and you can’t edit a blank page.”
Wierzbicki is already working on another novel — “The book I’m currently working on, which is still very much a work in progress, I’m actually going to be able to pitch and hopefully get that traditionally published, so that might be my way in,” she stated. There are two popular ways for authors to publish their works. One is through self-publishing, which is a newer option that is becoming more and more common, especially with Amazon publishing. Second is the more well-known option, which is connecting with a professional publishing company. Wierzbicki’s next novel is the one that she hopes will forge this connection. “All of my other stuff have either been stand-alone or the collection, but this is either gonna be a duo-logy or a trilogy; all I’ll say for now is that it’s a Young Adult horror adventure story. It’s very creepy, it’s very cool, and it’s definitely different than anything I’ve seen before, so I hope that it’s the one that pushes me into traditional publishing.”
Wierzbicki is still working on turning her Amazon Bestseller novel, Missing Her, into a screenplay adaptation.
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