Giveaway ends May 30, 2020.
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My newest novel, Kitewell, will be released on May 30th on Amazon. The giveaway on Goodreads will run from May 11th – May 30th. A print copy of the novel is forthcoming.
My newest novel, Kitewell, is about magic, courage, and hope. It takes place in a town called Kitewell where two girls meet their mysterious neighbor, Mrs. Kantor, who tells them a ghost story about the town’s dark past.
Mrs. Kantor also tells them about an evil wizard, Malik, who wants to take over Kitewell and the world. The girls must use the magic they’ve learned to defeat Malik, but will face many trials along the way.
The story is a fun adventure filled with magic and mystery. There are twists and turns along the way with a lot at stake.
At the end of the novel, I’ve included an Afterword about my journey in writing the novel.
I’m working on a collection of short stories right now. I’ve completed 3 of them so far, and my goal is to finish 10. They’ve been a lot of fun to write. The approach to writing short stories is a lot different than novels.
With writing novels, I’m eager to expand the world, to create layers of intrigue and suspense. It’s exciting to build the sequence of events, to add twists and turns in the narrative. There’s so much to explore in a novel, so many things that could happen.
With short stories, the approach is more like exploring an idea through a limited number of scenes. The twists and turns arrive much quicker, but one must be careful not to let them happen too fast or else it’ll spoil the surprise.
Instead of including a plethora of details as I would in a novel, I’m capturing the essence of the scenes, of the characters. When everything comes together, it feels as if it needn’t be long at all.
I’ve completed editing my newest novel, which I plan to release either in May or June of this year. It is a YA novel with plenty of magic in it. It was a 3 year journey to complete, and in the book, I have included an afterword that explains the process.
I’ve started another project which will be a collection of short stories. It’s more in the vein of The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone–stories about the bizarre, with strange twists and turns. I’ve started one story already and am wrapping it up.
I’ve been wanting to write a collection of short stories for awhile. But instead of having distinct stories with no relation to each other, these stories will interconnect, though they will only be related because of a worldly event that has occurred.
When I write a story, I try to have a certain number of chapters in it. I like even numbers such as 10, 20, etc., but if I had 17 or 19 chapters, it doesn’t seem right to me. If there are 19 chapters, it seems like there should be 20 chapters. Or if the last chapter is on 31, it should end at chapter 32.
But certain numbers like 7 or 11, etc., seem right to me. A lot of associations can be tied to those numbers. Perhaps this is just a feeling I have and it doesn’t really matter how many chapters a book has as long as it’s a great story.
But the one benefit I found to this approach is that I’ll write a new chapter (i.e. if it ends on chapter 19) just to make it fit a certain amount of chapters, and sometimes it ends up being really great.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis, is a fun and engaging ride through the world of Narnia as seen through the eyes of its characters. The story is about four kids: Lucy, Edmund, Susan, and Peter, who are staying in a house of a professor in England during the air raids of WWII.
While playing hide and seek, Lucy hides in a wardrobe. As she reaches into the recesses of the wardrobe, she discovers a world of snow and forest. She meets a faun, Tumnus, who takes her to his place for some rest. But later, Tumnus admits that he kept there so that the white witch could find her. He also tells her that the witch has made it winter in Narnia, but Christmas never arrives.
Tumnus decides to help Lucy escape before the witch finds her. When Lucy returns to her world, she realizes that hardly any time has elapsed since she was gone. When she tells the other kids what she saw, no one believes her.
Later in the story, she and Edmund enter Narnia separately. He encounters the white witch, and she offers him Turkish Delights to win him to her side. He has aspirations of becoming a king there, but only if he brings the other kids to the witch.
After they leave Narnia, Edmund tells the other kids that Lucy made all of this up. But they end up going to Narnia altogether, meeting Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, Father Christmas, Aslan, and other characters.
The story is a fun and fast read. There is lots of adventure with gripping tension as we discover how the witch is using Edmund. Like The Magician’s Nephew, the story is humorous and has great illustrations by Pauline Baynes.
The Magician’s Nephew, by C.S. Lewis, is a fun story about two kids (Digory and Polly) that find magical rings in Digory’s uncle’s study (Uncle Andrew). The rings allow the two kids to teleport between worlds.
They first end up in a wood area with pools where they can choose which worlds they decide to teleport to. The rings have an order to them as well (yellow to enter, green to leave).
They decide to take a chance and explore a random world. Upon entering, they discover the ruins of a kingdom. They run into the witch Jadis, after Digory rings a bell which awakens her. They learn of a war that had transpired in her world, and her plans to escape to rule another world using her magic.
The kids must stop her, and in the process, they bring people from their world along to Narnia incidentally. There, we’re introduced to Aslan, the lion, and he awakens other animals that can speak. There is a biblical reference to the forbidden fruit. Digory must make a choice whether to bring the apple back to save his mother despite Aslan’s warning.
The story is easy to read and has funny humor in it as well. The end of the book is a precursor to the next book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It also establishes a quality about the wardrobe in the next book.
I also enjoyed the illustrations in the book by Pauline Baynes. They’re colorful and complement the book’s magical storyline.
I’ve been working hard on a new novel that’s coming out soon. It’s a YA/urban fantasy novel with magic and lots of mystery.
I made it a goal this year to complete 4 novels, and I’m getting close to finishing number 3. The 4th novel is still up in the air, but I know I’d like to take a break after novel number 3 and complete number 4 later on this year. If you haven’t checked out Rogue Experiment or The Birnbaum Case, please check those out. They’re out on Amazon as well as iBooks.
When I write a story, I start with an idea that develops into a scene. From that scene, more ideas flow, and those ideas develop into more scenes. As this process continues, the scenes and ideas bounce off of each other into something more specific and refined.
It’s kind like essay writing. I start with a premise that I build into scenes that are like arguments for that premise. Then I pick it apart and see where the idea goes. That’s how I go about building the universe for the story–from that starting idea.
Sometimes I am just interested in so many books that it’s hard to focus on one. I might try to read a little a bit of each book, but one book usually ends up winning my attention. Especially with longer books, it’s a commitment to follow through and get to the end. I feel that if I slip away into another story while I’m in the middle of one book, I’ll start forgetting the details of the last book, and it would be harder to return to it later.
One analogy is movies. It would be like watching a movie, pausing it a quarter of a way through, watching another movie, pausing it a quarter of the way through, then switching to the first. The momentum is gone. It’s not the same experience. The focus has been disrupted.
I end up reading one book at a time anyway. It’s one of those things where you have to make a wishlist and prioritize what you want to read first.
Fallton Havenstonne 