It’s a story that’s almost too good to be true, but it is. Rebecca Bourque had to work at it and now the moment is here.

The 18-year-old Morinville woman has just come out with her first book, a major accomplishment in its own right. Not one to boast of her success, she still exudes the quiet confidence of someone who knows that she still has an ace up her sleeve. Two, in fact.

“The other two are written. They’re just not finished yet,” she admitted.

It took her four years of slavish devotion to her craft to prepare The Protectors, her story about young people with extraordinary powers in a post-apocalyptic world. One person can get into people’s minds and see what they’re seeing. Another can control other people’s bodies.

Because of these talents, they are taken away from their families, trained to harness and strengthen their gifts, and assigned as guardians of royalty under siege by rioting marauders while civilization starts to rebuild. Her main characters – Sirenna, Tayen, Lanné and Aaron – are assigned to protect the four-year-old Princess Kayleen on an island kingdom.

With main characters ranging in age from 11 to 16, The Protectors is aimed squarely at the tween and teen markets. She mentioned that she has heard positive feedback from people in their 40s as well, giving her a great opportunity to expand into other demographics.

She worked on it with fervent vigour, much to her delight and her parents’ dismay. They would go out for dinner while she typed away on her computer. When they returned hours later, she was still in the same position. To call it a passion might be an understatement.

“I like to do things my way. I got to a point where I could have continued to read and edit those books over and over and over and over again,” she said, admitting to being a bit of a perfectionist.

“It was at a point where I thought, ‘Okay, I feel like everything is coming together,’ just for the first one at least. It was ready to be published. For awhile, people had been saying, ‘When are you going to get it published?’ because they had been hearing me talk about it for years.”

She would tell them that there was something missing and she had to tinker some more. When she was ready, she published it herself through the online service at www.lulu.com. The book came out Sept. 1.

“I figured the kinks out and I just decided that I needed to get it done or I wouldn’t get it done.”

That’s because her time is now occupied by post-secondary classes. She’s studying at Grant MacEwan University, taking English.

“Right now I’m really busy with studies and marketing this book. It’s taking a lot of my time up,” she laughed. “That’s OK with me.”

An ardent reader as well, Bourque admits that she was compelled to write in order to get better characters out into young adult literature. She said she loved the Twilight books but the movies left her disappointed.

“When I wanted to write a book, I wasn’t going to write it about vampires and werewolves. The actors weren’t really that good, and then everything was all about the supernatural. That’s what made me want to write this series.”

She had already begun her ambitious story when the Hunger Games series came out. She became a huge fan of that too. Tales of a certain boy wizard held her fascination too.

“J.K. Rowling is kind of an idol of mine. Harry Potter was what got me into reading books. Every time we’d come to Chapters I’d leave with an armload of books.

“I like the underdog. I like it when people underestimate somebody and then they rise up and turn out to be this great wizard or warrior. I like escapist novels and stories. I just felt like real life is so tedious and mundane sometimes. I feel like fiction … you can escape your world and essentially become somebody else. You don’t have to worry about real life for awhile.”

Nowadays, however, most of the books that she’s reading are textbooks.

Because of her schoolwork, she figures that she’ll probably wait until the summer break next year to release the second part, and the same for the third in 2014. She already can’t wait for audiences to get to the end.

“I’m really excited to have people read it. This one isn’t even my favourite one. I’ve had a lot of people say that they really, really liked it. Oh, I can’t wait till you read the rest!”

She divulged that the third is the best, in her opinion.

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