About the author

Maya Marroquin

A sixteen-year-old author, student, athlete, and accomplished scuba diver with a fascination for science, storytelling, and forms of intelligence unlike our own.

Author biography

Maya Marroquin is a sixteen-year-old author whose interests span biology, mathematics, aviation, literature, medicine, and the unanswered questions beyond our world.

She began writing The Secret of CROWN at fourteen. She did not announce that she was writing a novel or begin with a detailed publishing plan. She simply started writing — and continued until she had created a substantial manuscript, an extensive history, a cast of characters, and enough ideas for several interconnected stories.

When Maya finally shared the work with her parents, it became clear that the challenge was not finding enough material for a book. It was deciding where the first book should end.

A word processor makes it easy to count words, but much harder for a first-time novelist to see the shape of an entire book. Maya's original story contained multiple adventures, revelations, and potential endings. Developing The Secret of CROWN therefore became an exercise in discovering the boundaries of a first novel: choosing a satisfying conclusion, identifying what readers needed to understand, and preserving enough mystery for the adventures still to come.

Through that process, Maya learned that storytelling involves more than imagining events. It requires developing characters with recognizable voices, building a plot that changes them, bringing readers into an unfamiliar world without overwhelming them, and trusting the audience to interpret clues without being given every answer.

Many of the novel's friendships and adventures were influenced by Maya's experiences at first-aid and medical programs, military-style leadership camps, summer activities, athletic competitions, and other environments where young people live, train, solve problems, and become a team. She is also a Civil Air Patrol cadet, an experience that has strengthened her interests in aviation, service, leadership, and emergency preparedness.

Scuba diving gave Maya another way to think about exploration. While diving in Hawaii, she spent time observing an octopus — an animal capable of solving problems, manipulating its environment, and perceiving the world through a nervous system radically different from ours. That encounter helped inspire one of the larger questions behind The Secret of CROWN: if intelligence does not have to resemble human intelligence, how many minds might exist around us that we have not yet learned to recognize?

Maya lives with her parents and has an older sister whom she loves — and whose wardrobe is occasionally appropriated whenever the mission requires it.

The Secret of CROWN is Maya's first novel. It is also the beginning of a much larger world, with plenty of material remaining for Dani and her friends to explore.

Current author photograph

Maya's story

How The Secret of CROWN began

The book did not begin as an assignment or as part of a plan to become an author. Maya had characters, a world, and a question she could not put aside: if children were engineered to be exceptional, trained for a purpose, and told that obedience was necessary for humanity's survival, would they ever be free to decide who they wanted to become? The only way to answer that question was to begin writing.

Months of quiet work

Maya worked quietly for months before showing the manuscript to her parents. By then, she had created far more than the foundation of a single novel — histories, relationships, technologies, political conflicts, alien mysteries, and enough possible adventures to carry the characters well beyond the first book. The task was no longer to invent a story. It was to find its shape.

Finding the first ending

One of the most difficult lessons for any new novelist is understanding where a book should end. Maya's original manuscript kept moving because the characters' lives kept moving. Every discovery opened another mystery. Every answer suggested a larger question. Material that felt like one continuous story could, from a reader's perspective, contain the beginnings of several books.

A conclusion, not a resolution

The editorial challenge became finding a conclusion that felt meaningful without resolving the entire CROWN universe. The first book needed to complete an emotional journey, reward the reader, and still leave Dani and her friends standing at the edge of something much larger. That challenge became one of the project's greatest strengths: Maya has no shortage of places to take the characters next.

Learning to bring the reader along

Maya's first draft existed vividly in her imagination. Revision required her to see the story from the reader's perspective — asking whether the audience understands what the characters understand, whether the story has provided enough evidence for a discovery, whether every character sounds like an individual, and whether a mystery is intriguing or merely confusing.

Trusting the reader

She learned to ask whether the science is explained clearly without interrupting the adventure, whether a scene can reveal something through action instead of explanation, and whether the reader needs an answer now or can be trusted to remember the question. These lessons shaped the revised novel while keeping Maya's characters, central ideas, and original imagination at its heart.

Science and storytelling

Where the science ends

Beginning with real science

The Secret of CROWN begins with scientific ideas that Maya and other students encounter in school: chromosomes, DNA, protein folding, inheritance, cellular repair, energy, gravity, atmospheric flight, and the physical limits of the human body. From there, the story begins to extrapolate.

Three tiers of the possible

Some technologies in the novel represent plausible advances that might emerge from another century of human research. Others depend upon the mysterious substance known as Vitanium. The most advanced Servator technologies remain deliberately beyond human understanding. The goal is not to pretend every mystery has an easy explanation — it is to distinguish what humanity knows, what future scientists might reasonably discover, and what remains genuinely unknown.

Intelligence is not a ladder

An octopus can manipulate objects with extraordinary precision, but it cannot build a fire underwater. Dolphins communicate across long distances and navigate a three-dimensional ocean, but they have no hands with which to manufacture tools. Artificial intelligence can identify patterns across enormous amounts of information, yet experience the world very differently from a biological mind.

What does “best” mean?

These are not necessarily lesser versions of human intelligence. They may be different solutions to different environments. That idea becomes central to the larger mystery of The Secret of CROWN: when the probe asks humanity to present its best representatives, what does “best” actually mean?

Experiences that informed the novel

What she brought to the page

Summer programs and shared quarters

First-aid programs, medical training, military-style leadership camps, and other structured summer activities taught Maya how quickly young people form friendships when they train, work, eat, and live together. Shared exhaustion can turn strangers into a team. It can also produce jokes, disagreements, rule-breaking, late-night conversations, and the particular kind of poor judgment that remains possible even among exceptionally capable teenagers. Those experiences helped inspire the relationships among the Kings.

Aviation and aerospace

Maya's interest in general aviation helped shape the novel's attention to flight, weather, navigation, and the physical realities of moving through an atmosphere. Flight is scientifically explainable, mathematically predictable, and still astonishing. That combination — understanding how something works without losing a sense of wonder — lies at the center of the book's approach to science.

Medicine and biology

Medical and first-aid training influenced the way the characters respond under pressure. Biology supplied even larger questions. What makes something alive? How does DNA preserve and alter information? How do cells repair damage? Could an artificial chromosome safely interact with the rest of the human genome? If technology could redesign a child before birth, who would have the moral authority to decide what that child should become?

Athletics

Athletics taught Maya that ability alone does not create a team. Trust is built through repetition, fatigue, failure, discipline, and the willingness to keep working when talent is no longer enough. The Kings may be engineered to perform beyond ordinary human limits, but they still have to learn how to depend upon one another.

Underwater exploration

Scuba diving is one of the closest experiences on Earth to entering another world. A diver is surrounded by an environment in which movement, sound, light, breathing, and even the perception of distance behave differently. While diving in Hawaii, Maya observed an octopus in its natural environment — an encounter that contributed to the novel's interest in minds that may be intelligent without thinking, communicating, or building civilizations as humans do.

Her sister's strategically accessible wardrobe

Every successful operation depends upon logistics, forward staging, and a reliable supply line. Some supply lines have not formally consented.

What Maya learned

Imagination starts it, revision finishes it

Writing The Secret of CROWN taught Maya that beginning a story requires imagination, but completing one requires revision, patience, and the willingness to reconsider even a favorite scene. Perhaps the most important lesson was that a first draft does not have to contain all the answers. It has to contain the possibility of a finished story.

— Plot structure and narrative momentum
— Character development and distinct character voices
— Building suspense without creating unnecessary confusion
— Introducing a fictional world gradually
— Explaining science without turning dialogue into a lecture
— Choosing what to reveal and what to preserve for later
— Accepting editorial feedback without surrendering the heart of the story
— Trusting readers to recognize clues and draw conclusions
— Finding an ending within a story that is still growing

Inspiration and influences

What fed the book

Science fiction and dystopian fiction

Stories about societies that are broken in specific, understandable ways — and populated by people who often believe they are making necessary and reasonable choices.

Biology and genetics

Chromosomes, protein folding, cellular repair, inheritance, and the molecular machinery that makes life resemble an extraordinarily complex form of engineering.

Aviation and aerospace

Lift, weather, navigation, gravity, atmospheric flight, and the realization that something can be completely explainable while remaining wondrous.

Medicine and emergency preparedness

The discipline of making decisions with incomplete information when time, safety, and human judgment all matter.

Underwater exploration

Weightlessness, limited air, unfamiliar creatures, and an environment governed by rules that cannot be negotiated.

Questions about intelligence and alien life

If intelligence is not a ladder with humanity standing at the top, then first contact may not begin as a conversation. It may begin as a problem of recognition and translation.

Teenagers being teenagers

Exceptional abilities do not eliminate friendship, loyalty, humor, uncertainty, rule-breaking, or terrible ideas undertaken with complete confidence.

Media kit

For press and educators

A downloadable press sheet is being prepared for the October 15, 2026 release of The Secret of CROWN. Until then, the following materials are available through Maya's parent-managed author address.

— Short and extended author biographies
— High-resolution civilian author photographs
— Cover artwork
— Book description and jacket copy
— Suggested interview topics
— Educational and classroom discussion topics