It wasn’t long ago that Sky Island resident Kim Derting only had the early morning and the evenings to write. Between raising three children, two demanding jobs and her marriage, she had to relegate her furious writing habit to the extreme ends of the day to accomodate everything.

Now she’s seeing her hard work pay off with the release of her first young adult novel, “The Body Finder.” It’s the first in her two-book deal with HarperCollins publishing house, and the first of a series that will likely last for at least four books.

“The idea came from my husband while we were riding in the car,” she said. “Out of nowhere he said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if you had a story about a kid that could sense dead bodies?’ As soon as we got home, I raced inside and started making story notes.

“Of course, he envisioned the main character as a 12-year-old boy. But being a girl, I made the character a teenage girl and added an entire romance story.”

That was the origin of Derting’s story about a teen who can sense murdered bodies and who killed them. The setting of the novel should be familiar to anyone who lives on or near the Plateau. Derting used places like Buckley, Bonney Lake and the South Hill Mall as locations in the story. Local colloquialisms, such as “the mountain appeared” when referring to Rainier coming out of hiding from behind the clouds, appear frequently.

Derting has dreamt of being a published writer for more than 20 years. An interest in journalism began early in high school, but after taking a creative writing class she was hooked on writing down the stories in her head.

She managed to obtain an agent in her early 20s on the strength of her proposal for a straight horror book in the vein of Stephen King or John Carpenter. But she spent years tweaking and massaging the story, an amount of time she now thinks was far too long to spend on one story, she said.

“That book will probably never see the light of day,” she said with a laugh. “But looking back, it was the perfect story to use as a practice manuscript. I learned a lot early on from spending so much time and effort on that book.”

Now she works at a much faster pace – she estimated it took about six months to complete the manuscript for “The Body Finder.”

Derting didn’t seem to spend much energy dwelling on her mistakes as a writer. Her mistakes have actually worked out well for her. She pitched “The Body Finder” to her top choice agent right off the bat, at the Book Expo of America in Los Angeles.

“In hindsight, that’s the last thing I should have done,” she said. “I think most people would recommend practicing on a few lower-ranked choices first.”

That hubris resulted in a call back and her current two-book deal. Earlier this month, she had her first book signing, attended by dozens of Sky Island friends and neighbors wearing T-shirts with the book art.

Derting is also able to work on her writing full time. Instead of relegating her writing to the scant free hours, she now spends most of the day locked in her office with a mug of tea and a bowl of Skittles, occasionally coming downstairs to eat or reload on caffeine. She thanked her supportive husband for helping out with their kids so that she could have the time to write.

She is currently working on rewrites on the second “Body Finder” book before sending the manuscript to her editor, as well as synopses of her third and fourth books.

She also has a side project, a dystopic fantasy novel taking place in an entirely fabricated world. Derting wrote pages of information on details as mundane as the currency of her world. Much of which didn’t make it in, but were necessary to her process, she said.

“With The Body Finder the setting was so familiar that I rarely had to think about it, it was like second nature to imagine (characters) Violet and Jay moving in and around the Buckley area,” she said. “With the dystopic fantasy, the world was constantly in my forethoughts. I would question everything my characters did by asking myself: ‘Is this something that might actually happen in this world?’”

Derting acknowledged that writing and re-writing full-time isolates her social life, and at times she misses being able to work outside of contract at her own pace. But she also acknowledged that she has been given a rare opportunity: to make a living doing what she loves.