WESTVILLE FAQ #2: How long did it take you to write 'Welcome To Westville?'
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This is a question with two answers!
Answer #1
From first glimmer of story and character concepts to published novel:
Roughly a year and a half.
I sat down in a coffee shop in the fall of 2023 with all good intentions to sit down and do my work, send out weekly emails, etc.
And plot twist…. I actually did!
Trouble was I’d just done it ‘too quickly’.
It had gotten to the point in my then position that there just wasn’t a lot left to challenge me. I knew if I was going to draw any energy to inspire my working life, that sometimes you had to go to your creative life.
(For what it’s worth, there’s a synergy there, one feeding the other. Next time you feel stuck in one or the other, shift gears and see if it doesn’t shake something loose)
So, I sat down and began to brain dump the beginnings of a mystery / horror story that had begun to sprout in both my sleeping and waking dreams.
As you may read or heard me talk about before, months prior I had gone for a run well before dawn at 5am, past King Milling, the local mill in town. A new silo was under construction, and to protect the interior materials from bitter cold overnight temperatures, plastic sheeting was hung around the sides like a veil, illuminated from within by white and red lighting.
It looked ghostly. It looked clandestine. It looked like a story.
Also, I’d just finished rewatching a Season of Stranger Things. All of the sudden, I was thinking of Lowell MI as another Hawkins IN.
What if there was something hidden beneath the industry of small town Michigan?
What if that something was leading to dimensional incursions, open the door to bring a nightmare to life?
Flash forward back to that fall in the coffee shop, where I was synergizing that early inspiration with stories and lore from a cryptid podcast I’d been listening to religiously, native american lore (little known fact: I’m about 1/8 Cherokee on my Mom’s side) and my interest in the weirder supernatural elements that appear in the Old and New Testaments.
Of course, all of this was frosting and cream filling in the layer cake that was the setting for the story, the fictional town based upon Lowell I would come to dub ‘Westville’.
Through the next several months, I actually set the project aside. I was still in the thick of a coupel drafts of stories from my fantasy universe, ‘Remnant Divine’.
Then, things in my personal and family life took a bit of a turn.
We hit a cataclysmic financial pothole or two, just as my dad was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. All of my writing took a but of a backseat.
When I did pick things back up with the fantasy books, I kept feeling stuck. Something just wasn’t clicking, wasn’t working.
Through the emotional roller of year that was 2024 (a sabbatical from work, which led to wondering about my future, my dad’s remission and then ferocious return of cancer) I struggled to retain traction with my writing.
In August of 2024, I returned to the idea for this paranormal mystery story set in facsimile of Lowell. Originally, I workshopped the title ‘To The Marrow’.
It wasn’t until I decided to release it as a serialized story on Substack that I named Westville, simply derived from ‘West Michigan’. Having grown up in Lowell it seems to me the quintessential Michigan and midwestern town.
I worked hard to release an ‘episode’ every week starting in October of 2024. Two weeks later my Dad steeply declined and passed of cancer. I remember sitting by his bedside, sitting up late into the night. He was in the last days then, just breathing deep and snoring. But I could have sworn I heard him say ‘Keep going, Ryd. It’s going to be great.’
So I did. My Dad’s love for shows I grew up on like The X-Files informed my narrative drive and the mood of the story. I kept pressing on, through one of the hardest seasons of my life.
By the time the new year came, I had completed an entire ‘season’ of Westville. Enough words for a full novel. But I knew it needed to be expanded, refined, edited, revised. And so that too is what I did, in partnership with a local editor who came alongside the project as well as other early readers.
That led into the Kickstarter campaign, the launch push, and eventually to a May 13th 2025 release.
That’s answer #1.
Answer number #2?
I’ve been writing ‘Westville’ my whole life.
It was guided and informed not my me writing what I know, but ‘where I know’, that it flowed at times (not nearly all the time mind you) effortlessly and seamlessly.
I didn’t have to think too hard about setting description (other than to dress the real-life town of Lowell I remembered in lo-fi melancholy fall weather drenched sensibilities, laced with 90s nostalgia) nor did I have to bleed myself creatively to draw in order to realize believable characters. They were amalgams of people and small town archetypes I grew up around.
It’s part love letter to Lowell and part tribute to The X-Files, Twin Peaks, and every great 90s mystery and thriller.
So there you have it!
Stay tuned for WESTVILLE FAQ #3:
Is WESTVILLE becoming a TV series??