Since I couldn’t decide, Kitewell ended up on the back burner for years. It would end up in the incomplete/unpublished pile, joining other stories I had filed away.
There are different reasons why those projects remain incomplete/unpublished. Either I don’t know how to finish them, or I just moved on to something else that piqued my interest. Sometimes life happens and you get so busy that the momentum you had when you started a project gets lost. It’s hard to pick up where you left off when you’re not in the same frame of mind.
This could also apply to anything really, not just writing. Ideas are fragile. They need tending to and nurturing to grow. Without which, that window of time to cultivate the ideas might get lost.
In the time since I completed the first draft of Kitewell, I’ve had many false starts. I had attempted to rewrite it from scratch, and change the story—none of which really took off.
Then I returned to my original conundrum: how do I bridge the two halves of the novel: the magical first half, and the noir-mystery second half? I decided to ride the wave of the first. Why you might ask? It was a lot more fun to read, to be honest.
This decision led to many others that included revising major plot points to fit the tone and style of the fantasy elements. Everything else seemed to connect after that. Although the story needed a lot of changes and tweaks, it came together in the end.
It also helped that I had written Rogue Experiment and The Birnbaum Case prior to returning to Kitewell. Ironically, those novels began as short story ideas, but they evolved into novels (Is this a pattern of mine?).
I don’t think Kitewell would’ve worked without having written those novels. You see, they all fall into the same world. In the end, it all worked out.
Fallton Havenstonne
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fallton Havenstonne is the author of the novels Rogue Experiment and The Birnbaum Case. Please visit him at falltonhavenstonne.com for more information about his books.
Kitewell Page 18
