Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Going back over early notes for this novel, I realized that this project has been rattling around in my head for over a decade.

The first outline I wrote up has a note on the top: Tabled Jan 2004.

Initially, this was very depressing.

It makes sense that I would have tabled this project at that time. I was fighting to keep The Fallen Cloud Saga alive, had another speculative fiction project in the works, and it really wasn’t a good time to switch genres, but . . . damn. Have I really been toying with this project for fourteen years? Obviously, I have.

Looking more closely at those notes, I also realized that I simply wasn’t ready to write this novel back then. I’ve matured since that first outline—as a writer, and as a person—and I certainly have a lot more experiential knowledge to bring to the party. To be honest, if I’d written this book back in aught-four, I don’t think it would have been very good, or at least the book I’ll write today will be better.

The basic plot and setting haven’t changed since that first outline, but almost everything else has, most especially the tone of the book and what I want to explore within its pages. There wasn’t a whole lot of depth to that first iteration—it was just a story about a couple in crisis—but since then I’ve woven other threads into the idea. Some I’ve taken back out, but most have remained, forming a more complex tapestry for me to play with.

And this week, pen actually hit paper.

It still haven’t started the novel proper. I was writing character sketches—background, description, history, motivation, relationships, etc.—mostly because, after percolating on this for over a decade, the various incarnations of my characters had grown muddy and indistinct in my mind. I’ve tried out and rejected so many names, so many back-stories, that I really needed to bring them back into focus. This isn’t my usual process, but then again, I usually don’t take fourteen years to start a first draft.

So I’m taking some time to get to know Zander, Petra, Eleanor, and Solomon, along with their parents, siblings, friends, and coworkers. As I write their back-stories and craft family trees, they are beginning to assert their personalities. Childhood experiences shape their personalities. Early passions become lifelong interests. Their every action, decision, and response is colored by their past, informed by their own personal context.

I’m going to put them through hell, after all.

k