A 25-YEAR-OLD has bagged the book deal of her dreams with a tale based on her own “awkward” teenage years in and around Wanstead.

Chloe Seager grew up with her mum in Nelson Road going to school around the corner at Snaresbrook Primary and later at Forest independent school.

As her mid-teens beckoned she and her friends discovered the world of social media and Facebook, MySpace and MSN Messenger started to take over large chunks of their spare time.

Now an English and drama graduate and literary agent, Miss Seager has used her own trials and tribulations with social media as the inspiration for her first published book, Editing Emma.

She started writing it when she was 18, but only got round to finishing it five years later at the age of 23.

The book tells the story of Emma Nash, a 16-year-old girl who gets “ghosted” by her boyfriend and spends the summer holidays locked away in her bedroom stalking him on Facebook.

But when he gets a new girlfriend she decides to pick herself back up by using blogging and her social networks to find happiness – but it does not go as well as she might have hoped.

Miss Seager said: “I’ve always been fascinated by social media and how it can bring people so close together but at the same time you can just delete them and make them disappear.

“It can be really hard to move on from things when you can still find ways of feeling really connected to them on the internet.

“The book is based on my teenage experiences – I was walking around Forest School in my mind as I was writing it.

“It’s a funny story, but there are definitely a few lessons to be learnt in there as well.”

With experience of the industry, Miss Seager feared it would be difficult to get published, but was pleasantly surprised when Harper Collins agreed to run with her idea.

Asked what made her choose young teenage fiction for her first literary endeavour, the 25-year-old said she wants young girls today to feel “okay about being awkward”, discussing "taboo" subjects like sex and menstruation, and struggling with their dating disasters.

She added: “School can be an amazing time in our lives, but it can also be confusing and terrifying.

“I want teenagers to realise it’s okay to be awkward, because that’s really what being a teenager is.”

Editing Emma is out now.