Montgomery Writer Hoping Her Career Blasts Off

Linda McReynolds is your average suburban mother of two.

Well, except for the part where she used to walk the high wire in the circus at Illinois State University. And the part where she spends a bunch of her free time as a member of the DuPage Derby Dames roller derby league. (Her derby name is Give 'Em L.)

Oh, and the bit where she’s written and published a children’s book about the first moon landing.

It’s that last one that has McReynolds the most excited lately. About three weeks ago, the first copies of her first book, an illustrated poem about NASA’s Apollo 11 mission called Eight Days Gone, arrived at her Montgomery home. The book has been in the works for seven years, and McReynolds is thrilled with the final product.

McReynolds, 38, said she’s been a writer for her whole life. (“Since I could form words,” she said with a laugh.) But it took a nudge from her husband Shawn to get her to try to publish some of her stories. She initially wrote Eight Days Gone in 2005, and she said as soon as she finished the rough draft—in about half an hour—she knew it would see print one day.

The book follows the timeline of Apollo 11, as listed on NASA’s website, McReynolds said. When she finished it, she spent a year sending it to publishers, and received rejection after rejection. She then decided to start contacting agents, and secured one on the strength of Eight Days Gone.

“I said, ‘I have this rhyming picture book about the first moon landing,’” she chuckled. “That sounds crazy, but he loved it.”

That agent found her a publisher: Charlesbridge Publishing in Watertown, Massachusetts. (Ironically, Charlesbridge was the first company McReynolds submitted the book to, in 2005. They rejected it then.) Her publisher then chose artist Ryan O’Rourke, from Connecticut, to illustrate it.

The children’s book publishing world moves slowly, McReynolds said—she signed the contract for Eight Days Gone in 2008, and then didn’t hear a thing until early 2010. But she spent all of the summer of 2010 revising the book, approving O’Rourke’s illustrations (and checking them for inconsistencies with 1969 life), and putting the finishing touches on her work.

All of that was worth it, she said, when those first copies arrived.

“I flipped out,” she said. “I wanted to open them with my kids (a son, 12, and a daughter, 10). I was like, ‘Come on, get home!’”

Now McReynolds is wading into even more unfamiliar waters—self-promotion. She’s thinking about launching a website, and about setting up book signings. And on Wednesday, she gave her first public reading of her work, at , where her daughter attends.

“They liked it,” she said. “They had a lot of good questions.”

McReynolds is thinking about a second book, but her schedule is pretty full. She works two jobs (one of them at a trapeze school in Chicago—really), and raises two kids. But she has a couple novels in the can, she said, including one based on the emotions surrounding her husband’s liver transplant about 10 years ago. (“That one’s my baby,” she said.)

For now, though, she's concentrating on this book—she's hoping to set up appearances at other local schools, Sci-Tech in Aurora, and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. A writing career happens one small step at a time. But as readers of Eight Days Gone know, a small step is often all it takes.

Eight Days Gone comes out July 1. Check it out at the Charlesbridge website here.