Sarah Ockler will introduce her new young adult novel on Dec. 10, a well-crafted addition to an increasingly popular fiction category. “Fixing Delilah” was completed in about two years, she says, focused on a character who “came into my head fully formed.” Readers can meet Ockler and her creation, Delilah Hannaford, at 7 p.m. Dec. 10 at Tattered Cover Highlands Ranch, where she will read from her book, play with some trivia and talk about writing it.

During the time Delilah’s story was taking shape, Ockler and her husband made two cross-country moves and are now happily settled in Littleton. She grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., and after college, moved to New York City, where she met her husband Alex. She had been writing and journaling, but found the New York literary scene intimidating. The couple decided they wanted a complete change and moved to Colorado in 2003, where she found Denver’s active Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop and enrolled. The workshop’s founder suggested that she has a unique young adult voice and might try a novel in that genre.

Her first novel, “Twenty Boy Summer” grew during sessions of the workshop, which also is supportive in finding an agent when the time arrives. She was offered a two-book contract with Little Brown, a respected longtime publisher and “Fixing Delilah” fills the second part of that contract.

By 2008, the couple was missing east coast family and friends and moved back there. But the appeal of a Colorado lifestyle brought them back to the West in summer 2010, she says and she is now teaching about writing for young adults at the Lighthouse workshop — and finalizing a third book.

“Each book has its special challenge,” she says. There’s no one way to create. This latest one is fully outlined from start to finish, while Delilah arrived and took over her story about an unhappy teen who is slipping in school, has a less-than-great boy in her life and is falling out with her friends. Her single mom works all the time and seems unable to fully engage with her only child. What secrets trouble her?

When Delilah’s estranged grandmother dies, she and her mother must join an interesting aunt Rachel to sort out the estate, hold several sales and ready the house for the market.

She spends the summer trying to find out what caused the estrangement — and getting reacquainted with the boy next door who had been her best summer buddy eight years ago and has become a musician.

Ockler’s characters seem well developed and engaging and Delilah grows in her ability to address adult issues, presented in a way that should draw 12 and up young women into several parallel stories the book develops — and to some surprising resolutions.