Kit West - When Night Comes

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I wrote WHEN NIGHT COMES, A Christmas Carol Revisited while living in San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico.  I was running my bookstore with my husband and had no thought to writing another novel.  I had already written LION TAMER, my first sci-fi novel and was exhausted and just wanted to run the store and read!  Nevertheless, one day, while breakfasting at my favorite restaurant, I got into a conversation with the owner who claimed that I should keep writing, and that my new book should be about all the dead authors of the best books in the bookstore. He grew very excited with his idea and went on to say that the authors' ghosts should gather at night and trade stories about writing and their books and their ideas about the world, past and present!  I told him he was crazy and that was the end of it.  Or so I thought.

Several nights later I woke up in the wee hours with a new book in my head, damn it!  No rest, no blissful, relaxed reading lifestyle for me!  Another novel.  It appeared fully formed like Athena, and fully armed.  I was not allowed to resist.   I was captured, captivated and already writing the first lines in my head.  It included my friend's dead authors but not in the way he thought.  I would insert them into a sci-fi version of Dickens' A CHRISTMAS CAROL; they would be the spirits of Christmas past, present and future.  The authors would try to save the soul, not of an old miser, but an old bookstore owner who just wasn't making ends meet in a time when people were reading less and less.  I would change Ebenezer to Esmeralda, but I would keep the social justice issues Dickens was so famous for.  This time with the issues of the homeless and high tech addiction and isolation.  Sooo...Tiny Tim became street children who love stories about...themselves!  Orphans.  And then...how to connect them to the main story...?  They must, I finally figured out, like so many homeless, hang out in the warm bookstore...and read!  And fall in love, not only with stories about orphans like themselves, but also the lovable bookstore owner herself.  So, of course,  they try to save her when she gets too depressed by the modern nonreading world and considers suicide, something with which they are all too familiar.  

So I started going on my breaks to the nearest, quietest cafe I could find and pounded out the story in a few months.  Edited it for more than a year.  Searched for a publisher for another year.  And, finding Breaking Rules Publishing, finally found this last orphan a home.

The link to Kit's book has been placed below. 

​https://www.breakingrulespublishing.com/store/p349/When_Night_Comes_-_A_Christmas_Carol_Revisited_by_Kit_West.html

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