On Writing Gray Heart Blog Post #4: The Hardest Part about Writing This Book

I know I didn’t post another update to this series last week, but I do hope you enjoyed the book review I posted along with the other scene from Gray Heart uploaded on April 1st. If you haven’t read them already, you can click here for the review and here for the book scene.

Alright, so I know in an earlier post, I wrote about how Gray Heart was hands-down the absolute easiest book to write in the trilogy. Even though it was the easiest to write, there was something difficult about it. As with the rest of my books, it was the ending.

Well, getting to the ending anyway. I knew how I wanted my book to end, but running the home stretch to cross the finish line? That was the hard part.

And while getting to the ending was the most challenging part about writing this book, seeing the entire trilogy end was even harder. Dark Irregular was the first novel-length work I had ever written, which meant that its characters were the very first original characters I’d ever created, and they were the characters I grew up with and helped shape me as a writer and as a person. Seeing the story come to a close was both really satisfying but also really sad. There would be no more stories with my first characters and no more adventures. I had to say goodbye to all of them.

I know, I could write a standalone book in the future about the current lives of all of these characters, or at least Kanna’s, but after the closure I’d given her at the end of Gray Heart? It’s unlikely, and I don’t want to mess with it. If anything, I’d write a stand-alone centered around Kenneth as opposed to Kanna, because I don’t think bespectacled black-haired boy got enough love in the trilogy, and (SPOILER ALERT) there’s an entire three years I could play around with that weren’t mentioned at all within the last book. And yes, to be honest, I am considering writing a standalone about some segment of that untouched time period.

But if I do, it’ll be like returning to a cast of characters I don’t even know anymore because it’s been so long since I’ve made them come to life. Plus, at that point in time, so much about the characters and the world they live in has changed, and I don’t know if I want to mess with that.

Yet.

In the meantime, I’ll keep on writing and keep this standalone in the back of my mind for a potential future project

I hope you enjoyed this short little blog post. What do you think about the possibility of a standalone centered around Kenneth? Leave your thoughts in the comments below along with any questions you may have. You can also reach me on Instagram or Facebook @kaitlyn_b_legaspi or @kaitlynblegaspi. Also, if you enjoyed this post, subscribe for blog notifications every week! If you do, you’ll get a shareable link to the sneak-peek of Gray Heart, which is available up until May 1st!