Marie Vibbert was 15 years old when she first drafted Galactic Hellcats. From an early age, she knew she wanted to be a writer. 

“I don’t know if there has been a minute since I was 11 that I haven’t been writing a novel,” Vibbert said. 

In 2012, she revisited that draft of Galactic Hellcats during a write-a-thon where she vowed to write 50 short stories over the course of six weeks. After running out of new ideas, she cracked open old childhood notebooks to discover some really creative ideas written in purple pen. When she flipped to the idea that is now Galactic Hellcats, it transformed into a 10,000 word story. 

After some push from her writing workshop to develop this story of a “girl biker gang in outer space” into a novel, Vibbert started expanding on the storylines of each character giving her 50,000 more words and a novel to start pushing to publishers.

The publishing process wasn’t an easy one, Vibbert admits. She sent the novels to multiple publishers, and when she received a “no” she’d made revisions and kept sending. During a period of revisions, Vibbert tweeted that she “couldn’t stop writing about the girl biker gang in outer space even though there were so many other writing projects” she should be working on.

After she sent that tweet, everything changed. She received a reply from J.M. McDermott, a publisher who was interested in learning more. 

Galactic Hellcats hits shelves on March 9 and can be pre-ordered at Mac’s Backs, a local bookstore.