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.

CROWN CORE-1 patch — Operational Reconnaissance Element — CROWN CORE-1

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.

For Maya, completing a novel carries special significance. As a young child, she struggled with dyslexia and had to work diligently to develop the reading and writing skills that others often take for granted. Through years of persistence, practice, and determination, she learned not only to work through those challenges but also to find confidence in the written word. Writing a full-length novel is therefore more than a creative accomplishment. It represents how far she has come and how much she refused to let an early difficulty define what she could achieve.

Maya 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 large 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 it is much harder for a first-time novelist to see the shape of an entire story. Maya's original manuscript contained multiple adventures, revelations, and possible conclusions. Developing The Secret of CROWN became an exercise in discovering the boundaries of a first novel: choosing a satisfying ending, deciding 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 exciting events. It requires creating characters with recognizable voices, constructing a plot that changes them, introducing readers to 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 in first-aid and medical programs, military-style leadership camps, summer activities, athletic competitions, and other environments in which young people live, train, solve problems, make mistakes, and become a team. She is also a Civil Air Patrol cadet, an experience that has strengthened her interests in aviation, service, leadership, medicine, 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 our own. 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 the product of imagination, curiosity, persistence, and a young writer's determination to turn challenges into possibilities. It is also the beginning of a much larger world, with plenty of adventures still waiting for Dani and her friends.

Current author photograph

Maya's story

Building the CROWN Universe

We Write What We Know. The Secret of CROWN did not begin as an assignment or as part of a plan to become an author. It grew from Maya’s experiences, interests, and questions. She knew what it was like for young people to train together, live in shared quarters, test boundaries, make mistakes, and form unusually strong friendships. She was interested in biology, medicine, aviation, leadership, and the possibility that intelligence might exist in forms very different from our own. From those familiar foundations, she began imagining something entirely new. What if children were engineered to be exceptional, trained for a purpose, and taught that obedience was necessary for humanity’s survival? Would they accept the lives designed for them—or insist upon deciding who they wanted to become? The only way to find out was to begin writing.

An Expansive First Draft

Maya worked quietly for months before showing the manuscript to her parents. By then, she had created far more than the beginnings of a single novel. Her first draft contained multiple adventures, political conflicts, scientific discoveries, hidden histories, alien mysteries, and revelations large enough to reshape the story repeatedly. The characters’ lives continued because Maya could already see what might happen to them next. The challenge was not finding enough material for a book. It was discovering how many books might already be hiding inside the manuscript.

The CROWN Universe

The world surrounding the characters was surprisingly complete. Maya had developed the history of CROWN, the arrival of the Servator Probe, the discovery of Vitanium, the rise of the Kings program, and the political divisions of a civilization rebuilding after nuclear war. She had even drafted the world map and timeline that would later be refined for the novel and this website. Many of those details never needed to appear directly in the first book, but they shaped everything within it. Governments had histories. Institutions had competing agendas. Technologies had consequences. Mysteries had answers—even when the reader was not yet supposed to know them. The CROWN universe did not have to be invented during revision. It had to be organized, examined, and carefully revealed.

Character Building

Maya’s characters were equally developed. Dani, C.C., Soren, Xander, Sero, and the other Kings were not interchangeable “superkids.” They had distinct personalities, abilities, histories, loyalties, insecurities, and ways of responding to pressure. Their friendships gave the story its center. Whatever larger plans CROWN or the Servators might have for them, the young characters still joke, argue, break rules, stay awake when they should be sleeping, and refuse to leave one another behind. Revision therefore was not about replacing Maya’s characters. It was about making certain that readers could recognize the individuality and history she already saw in each of them.

Finding CORE-1’s First Adventure

Because Maya’s original story kept expanding, one of the most important editorial decisions was determining where the first novel should begin and end. Every discovery opened another mystery. Every answer suggested a larger question. What felt like one continuous story inside the author’s imagination contained several possible adventures from a reader’s perspective. The task became finding the first complete journey for CORE-1: an adventure with its own danger, choices, consequences, and conclusion, while leaving the characters standing at the edge of a much larger universe. The first book did not need to explain everything. It needed to take the first meaningful step.

Bringing the Reader Along

An author knows everything that exists behind a scene. The reader knows only what has reached the page. Maya’s first draft existed vividly in her imagination, supported by histories, relationships, and explanations that she already understood. Revision required her to experience the story from outside that universe—to ask whether readers possessed the evidence necessary to understand a discovery, whether each character sounded like an individual, and whether an unanswered question felt intriguing or merely confusing. Bringing readers along does not mean telling them everything. It means giving them the right details at the right moment so they can make the journey themselves.

Trusting the Reader

Some questions should be answered immediately. Others become more powerful when readers are allowed to carry them. Maya learned to consider whether the science could be explained without interrupting the adventure, whether action could reveal what exposition did not need to say, and whether a clue would remain in the reader’s mind until its importance became clear. That balance—between explanation and mystery, revelation and restraint—helped shape the revised novel while preserving Maya’s characters, her original ideas, and the expansive CROWN universe still waiting beyond the final page.

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