The Teen Beat

Indie Book Award finalist writes to relate

By Brian Truitt

‘The Day After Tomorrow’ was named a 2009 Next Generation Indie Book Award finalist. Courtesy of AC Publishing

Sandee Sgarlata wishes she had had a book like “The Day After Tomorrow” when she was a teenage girl. And that’s exactly why she wrote it.

The Ashburn resident and newly published writer was recently named a 2009 Next Generation Indie Book Award finalist, in the Young Adult Fiction category—a genre usually populated by lots of vampires and forbidden romances. Instead, this story follows Julia Monroe, a typical, boyfriend-infatuated high school freshman whose life changes with a series of unfortunate events that force her to navigate some treacherous waters of teenage trauma. It was those parts, Sgarlata says, that were the hardest to write. “The easy part was the second half when she meets her unlikely friend, who’s like her higher self. He’s connected to God. That came very naturally and just flowed without me even thinking about it. But the other parts, just to remember what it felt like when I was a teen, that was hard for me.”

Sgarlata was born in Portsmouth and moved to the Baltimore/Annapolis area when she was 1-and-a-half years old, after her father died. She had a rough go of it when she was growing up, too, and says her experience was much worse than what Julia goes through. “I have a lot to pull from,” the 43-year-old former figure-skating coach says. “For me, it wasn’t that I had a lot of bad stuff happen—it was more about how I felt about myself and how I viewed the world.”

But it was really a former skater she taught who inspired “The Day After Tomorrow.” The 15-year-old girl confided in Sgarlata about her own turmoil, and Sgarlata, in turn, confessed her own use of drugs and alcohol during her young adulthood and how she dealt with her life in recovery. “It was a huge risk because up until a couple months ago, it’s not something I openly talk[ed] about,” Sgarlata says.

When the girl graduated from high school, Sgarlata took the student with her family on vacation so she could watch her son Brandon, “and we became very close friends. I was kind of like her sister,” Sgarlata says. “She shared with me that it inspired her to take a completely different path in her life.”

On that day in 2003, Julia Monroe was born. Yet, Sgarlata didn’t want to write a self-help book. She wanted Julia to be a character that teens could relate to, someone who was vulnerable but wanted to better her life. “All of our actions are inspired by ways to find happiness and feel good,” Sgarlata says. “They’re no different, but it’s just that they have so much peer pressure and especially today with everything they have coming at them with the Internet and so many more conflicts and problems in the world.”

In the book, Julia finds peace through forgiveness, and that’s what Sgarlata promotes through her foundation 4Give4Peace, started two years ago with fellow Northern Virginia life coach Trish Kapinos. Sgarlata’s already finished the second in the Julia Monroe series, tentatively titled “Beginning to Remember,” and she does two podcasts on BlogTalk Radio: a weekly program on Wednesday evenings, “Teens 4 Peace,” all about reaching out to teens; and the monthly “Everything Mind, Body & Spirit” with Kapinos.

“I’m a philanthropist at heart, so what I do is a lot of life coaching and I don’t charge people. They don’t even know they’re being life coached,” Sgarlata says. “Most of the people out there who need it can’t afford it. That’s my big mission: to offer all of this stuff so that people can have access to this information and resources and help.”

(September 2009)