When I first began writing Darkness Comes to Kingswell six years ago, I had recently watched the approach of an ominous thunderstorm which left me with gloomy inspiration to write something.  Perhaps a day or two after the storm I sat down and reread Stephen King’s novella “The Mist” (actually, I reread the entirety of Skeleton Crew in which “The Mist” is the first story).  Thoughts of the thunderstorm quickly mixed with his work and pushed me to act.

At no time did I want to duplicate “The Mist.”  That is to say, my inspiration didn’t include thoughts of monsters hidden in the murk, but rather I considered an all-encompassing lightless tempest which itself would be the monster.  Yet even that fails to describe the idea as proved by the story.

Darkness Comes to Kingswell was to be threatening by way of the darkness itself.  But how to make that work was a question for which I had no answer.  That’s because my creative writing doesn’t come from outlines and notes and a fully formed story idea.  Instead it comes from ideas and inspirations that hint at stories untold.

So as I said of the story’s original publication, the digital novella was to be “an experiment … an online draft of a fictional short story” written specifically for my blog.  I intended to post it as I drafted it, a stream-of-consciousness tale shared live as it were, shared as it spilled from my mind.

Thus it was rough around the edges (to say the least), but it was also a mystery to me, though not as much as to those reading it.  As I already said, I had the inspiration and the basic idea, but I didn’t have all the answers.  I start a story then I let it grow, let the characters define themselves, let the drama unfold without adhering to predefined notions.  Sure, it’s not unusual to have certain events and truths that I want to include, but ultimately I take the overarching notion and let it become.

Since it was a draft—experimental at that—I restrained myself from editing the pieces after they were posted (aside from redacting story mistakes that would have derailed the novella if left unchanged).  Some name changes and other modifications likewise were made, yet in the end I did what I set out to do: write a creative bit of fiction and post it on my blog as it developed, sharing the first draft as I wrote it.  That meant I was left feeling unhappy about the final result because, as any writer will tell you, a first draft demands review and updates.

Near the end of my little experiment, however, I had already realized that Darkness Comes to Kingswell could be much more than it was, and I don’t just mean with regards to editing and make-ready work.  What started as a bit of fun had truly become, for the digital novella in hand no longer resembled the story in mind.  So I decided to turn it into a novel—my first novel.

Yet over the years during which I rewrote the story, turning ninety pages of text into more than three hundred pages, it remained true to its origins, in the end becoming nothing more complicated than a longer version of the same story.  Driven with more dialogue and better narration, punctuated with more characters and their related development, in the end the novel form didn’t impress me because, as I said, it was simply a longer version of the novella.  And while not sharpened and finished, the shorter version stood on its own already.  Thus I was left wondering what made the novel version better.  If in fact it was better.

In 2010 I finally stopped tinkering with the manuscript and called it finished.  I didn’t like it, mind you, but I was tired of messing with it.  More complex, better written, realistic and compelling, it nevertheless remained nothing more than a long version of Darkness Comes to Kingswell.  Despite that, I sent query letters to potential agents based on the manuscript as it stood.  And in the background where no one could see, the tale vexed me—continued to vex me.

More and more I wanted the blog version—cleaned up and improved, yes, but still that version—to live as it was born, to be what it became.  I want to include it in an anthology of my shorter works, but how could I do that if a longer version of it already existed in novel form?  What would be the point, especially if I thought the shorter version was inherently better than the longer version?

Diverting myself, I delved into an invigorating visit with old friends in the form of Greek mythology, from Cicero to Hesiod to Homer to Plato.  All the while my mind wandered back to the story I had abandoned.

Let me stop there and reiterate what I said in April of this year: “no one ever completes a work of poetry or prose, but rather they abandon it, for to do otherwise is to spend eternity on a single piece.  At some point a writer must walk away from it lest they tweak and edit and modify and redact until death.”  I point that out because when I say “the story I had abandoned,” I don’t mean abandoned in a good way because I never felt it had truly become.

So for a few months I enjoyed the company of ancient gods and heroes, tales of drama and tales of tragedy, stories of triumph and stories of loss.  Not once did I revisit the manuscript, though I heard from a few agents and considered it in that context.

Then it hit me.  What hit me? you ask.

When I decided to create Dreamdarkers from Darkness Comes to Kingswell, already I had decided it would be the first in a series of books centered on my little East Texas town (then called Kingswell, now called King’s Hope).  What the series entailed and how the first novel would kick it off are of little concern because those ideas are shelved.  (No matter the medium, an artist never truly kills an idea but instead sets it aside, even if permanently, for one can never predict whether or not a random inspiration later in life—even decades later—will revive an idea once thought dead.)

How did the original rewrite and its related series wind up on a mental shelf?  By the hands of Greek mythology.  And therein lies the answer to what hit me.  The explosive force of the idea was so overwhelming and so marvelous that I jumped back into the manuscript with visceral force.  The results, shall we say, will speak for themselves.  Not only did the answer give me all the ways to fix Dreamdarkers and thereby leave Darkness Comes to Kingswell to stand on its own, but it also gave me the entire series of books, now called The Breaking of Worlds.

From more than three hundred pages to more than 450 pages, from a long rewrite of a novella to the mysterious and ominous beginning of a dark fantasy series, from a fun blog experiment to my first novel, the answer to my unspoken question had all along been nothing more complicated than Greek mythology.  Thankfully I’ve always been a fan of such writs, ancient poetry and prose and beliefs beguiling me and, in this case, inspiring me, guiding me even.

And that, poppets, brings me to the novel, my first novel, a book called The Breaking of Worlds I: Dreamdarkers.  The solution to my quandary and the foundation for the manuscript’s rewrite and the series it kicks off came from nothing more complicated than the enjoyment of Greek mythology.  For as I realized whilst reading the likes of the Homeric Hymns and Prometheus Bound and the Odyssey and Iliad, if Greek mythology teaches a single unflinching truth, it is that mortals and gods never live peacefully together.

[Introduction | Part 17]