Writing Update: Not Every Idea Deserves a Novel

It has been almost three years since I’ve been without a writing project.

In 2024, there was WHALERS, released in February of 2025.

Later that same year, I started writing MEDUSA, which released earlier this year.

When I was editing Whalers, I was writing Medusa. When I was editing Medusa, I was writing something new: a road-trip novel about four brothers driving from Florida to Massachusetts to attend their mother’s estate hearing.

I loved the characters I created.

Gus. Derek. Craig. Will.

They were four of the most interesting people I’d built in prose.

I wrote about their mother’s death. I wrote about Gus picking Will up from college and driving north. I wrote about their strange, messy, tense journey toward North Carolina, where they would scoop up the twins, Derek and Craig, and continue on together toward Massachusetts.

I wrote about 13,000 words, about fifty pages.

And the deeper I got into the draft, the more I started to feel the truth pressing against the back of my mind:

Maybe this wasn’t a novel.

Maybe it was actually a novella.

Maybe it was a flawed premise.

Maybe it just wasn’t working.

I had a clear path to the ending, but every time I sat down to write toward it, the inspiration wasn’t there. The words didn’t move through me the way they moved when I was writing Whalers or Medusa. Every sentence felt like a grind. Every page felt heavier than the one before it.

For a month or so, I tried to power through out of sheer stubborn determinism.

Then, yesterday, inspiration struck.

A new premise.

A different book.

An idea that has me fired up in the same way I was fired up when I first uncovered Meddy and the Students for Fundamental Change.

But then came the inevitable questions:

What does that mean for the brothers?

What about the 13,000 words?

Was all that time wasted?

I’ve come here to write this blog and to tell you that I don’t think it was.

In fact, I think part of being a good author is knowing when to pivot. Knowing when something isn’t working. Knowing when to stop forcing a story to become something it doesn’t want to be.

The good news is that the time I spent with the brothers wasn’t wasted at all. During those fifty pages, I learned who they were. I learned their voices, their wounds, their wants, their fears, and their contradictions.

And I’m taking them with me.

That’s right. The brothers from the road-trip novel (at least Gus and Will) are going to become two figures in this new idea. They may not be brothers and they may not be exactly the same, but I know who they are, and that’s what’s most important.

The road-trip novel wasn’t a failure.

It was a character sketch. It was a rehearsal.

It was the long way into the story I was actually supposed to write.

So those 13,000 words were far from a waste.

Love you guys.

-KF

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My second novel, Medusa; Or, Men Entombed in Winter, is available on Amazon. You can purchase a copy of your own here or check it out on Goodreads, here.