This Fragile Life: From Idea
to Book
By Kate Hewitt
Thank you so much for having
me here! I’ve been writing romance for Harlequin Presents for seven years, but
have wanted to branch out into women’s fiction for awhile now, so I’m thrilled
that my first women’s fiction, This
Fragile Life, is out with CarinaUK now.
I first had the idea for This Fragile Life—wait for it—nineteen
years ago. I had newly moved to New York City, was fresh out of college and
eager to pursue a career in playwriting. As I was crossing Ninth Avenue on my
way to an unpaid and rather thankless internship at a playwriting guild, an
idea popped into my head of two friends, Alex and Marsha, and how their
relationship changed when Alex agreed to let Marsha, who had been struggling
with infertility, adopt her baby. The idea was originally going to be a play
called The Child Stealers, which is,
of course, a bit pejorative—but even back then I was interested in the balance
of power between women, especially when those women are good friends. I was
also inspired by a play I’d recently seen, a feminist retelling of Beauty and the Beast by Louise Page,
and, being young and full of myself, was eager to seem edgy and avant-garde.
Well. I wrote lots of notes
and exactly one scene and then flitted to something else. I thought of the idea
occasionally, and I think I might have wrote one more scene at some point, but
it was firmly on the back burner until a year ago, when I was struggling to
finish a different story for a prospective agent, and the idea dropped into my
mind as if someone had hijacked my subconscious, except this time I had an
added ‘what if…’ which I won’t share since I don’t want to spoil the story, but
it made the entire idea sharpen into focus, and this time it would be a novel
rather than a play—I gave up playwriting years ago.
I wrote the first third of
the manuscript in three days. The voices
of Alex and Martha (changed from the original Marsha!) came to me so clearly, I
felt as if I knew them and they were talking to me, telling me their stories,
spilling their secrets, their hope and their pain. I love when that happens—and
I’ll admit, it’s not as often as I’d like.
The working title of the
story was Simple Gifts, which I
changed to The Last Breath after a
few days, and eventually ended up, a year and four sets of revisions later, as This Fragile Life. Only nineteen years
in the making!
It’s amazing and incredibly
wonderful to me that this story is now out there, available to readers. It
makes me realize that no idea is wasted, and stories can sometimes takes years
to percolate—but like good wine, that just makes them richer and more complex.
Has anything in your life—a story, a relationship, an idea or a dream—taken a
long time to come to fruition?
Leave a comment and let me know your story, and
I’ll draw a random name to
win a copy of one of my Harlequin Presents, digital
or paper.
Giveaway ends Saturday, August 24 at 6 pm EST.
Giveaway ends Saturday, August 24 at 6 pm EST.
And if you’d like to read This Fragile Life, you can find it
at all these places:
Happy Reading,
Kate
Blurb for This Fragile Life:
You love your best
friend. You trust her with your life. But could you give her the most precious
gift of all? Alex’s life is a mess. She’s barely holding down a job, only just
affording her apartment, and can’t remember when she was last in a relationship.
An unexpected pregnancy is the last thing she needs. Martha’s life is on track.
She’s got the highflying career, the gorgeous home and the loving husband. But
one big thing is missing. Five rounds of IVF and still no baby. The solution
seems simple. Alex knows that Martha can give her child everything that she
can’t provide. But Martha’s world may not be as perfect as it seems, and
letting go isn’t as easy as Alex expected it to be. Now they face a decision
that could shatter their friendship forever.
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