Darin Kennedy, “Doctor by Day/Novelist by Night,” cheered his rapt listeners in Jody Lynn Nye’s Writers’ Two-Day Intensive Workshop on Friday, 2:30PM, Hyatt Kennesaw, with tales of his own finished novels and publication adventures. Following pre-med and med school, Kennedy fulfilled his ROTC commitment as a family physician for the U.S. Army until 2003, when he was sent to Iraq. 

He had read a lot before his deployment but didn’t have much time to write. During his stint in a war zone, he faced the usual combat dynamics, “long periods of boredom punctuated by short bursts of terror.” He wrote the first draft of a magical chess story on a dentist’s borrowed Panasonic Toughbook, the only computer available with internet access. Kennedy saved his drafts on a thumb drive. A physician’s assistant filled in as first reader. 

Writing only fifty to seventy thousand words, he was unsure of what to do next and wrote another 125,000 words just introducing his first character. He lamented, however, that “I don’t get to be Brandon Sanderson.” 

He decided to go with three books and joined a writers’ group. Kennedy wrote another story based on a piece of classical music, “Pictures at an Exhibition,” by Modest Mussorgsky. During 2012-13, he wrote a young-adult version of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol with a gender flip. 

After a false start, he engaged an agent and sold his music-inspired novel. However, the small press that published it failed to pay royalties, so Kennedy acted to have the rights revert to him. 

John Hartness, the publisher of Falstaff books and a good friend of Kennedy’s, published both The Pawn Stratagem and Fugue and Fable trilogies.  

Read more about Darin Kennedy and his books, now available at www.darinkennedy.com.