Freeflight is a project long in the making. Its true beginnings were rooted in a friendship I had in high school, with the very first draft (which was terrible, I might add) dating around September 2008. I finished the first draft several months later, in February 2009. The fact that it only took me six months to write it testifies either to how inspired I was, or how bad it was...but let's not talk about that.
After writing a sequel (which is of questionable quality, so let's not talk about that either...), I returned to Freeflight and, naturally, despised it to the very core of my soul. In true amateur-author fashion, I thought it would be a good idea to rewrite the entire thing. This was in 2011. I got about sixteen chapters in before I decided it was still terrible.
But did I stop there? Psh, of course not.
The second version had merely been a major edit of the same plot and scenes from the first, and I realized that I was more unhappy with the story itself than with the way I wrote it. If I wanted to be satisfied with the story of Matthew and Amber, I would have to write an entirely new novel.
So I buckled down and started fresh. Except not really - I used the same first scene that was in the original 2008 draft with only a few edits. Hopefully that's not obvious. Anyway, the third version of Freeflight was a huge undertaking that involved many mini-rewrites and backward steps. It's still not close to being finished in the sense of shipping it off to publishers, but it's getting there.
The version you can read here on the website is probably not the most up-to-date version, but I update it every so often with the edits I've done, especially if they're major ones.
My goal with Freeflight was to write a novel that was interesting and realistic while having a theme of Christian redemption. There are a lot of Christian fiction novels out there that don't cut it for me when it comes to interacting with our world - showing the full depravity of it and responding to that depravity with Christian answers - and there are a lot of non-Christian novels out there that don't give me satisfying answers and endings. I used Freeflight to search for a balance between the two, and I hope it appeals to Christians and non-Christians alike.
After writing a sequel (which is of questionable quality, so let's not talk about that either...), I returned to Freeflight and, naturally, despised it to the very core of my soul. In true amateur-author fashion, I thought it would be a good idea to rewrite the entire thing. This was in 2011. I got about sixteen chapters in before I decided it was still terrible.
But did I stop there? Psh, of course not.
The second version had merely been a major edit of the same plot and scenes from the first, and I realized that I was more unhappy with the story itself than with the way I wrote it. If I wanted to be satisfied with the story of Matthew and Amber, I would have to write an entirely new novel.
So I buckled down and started fresh. Except not really - I used the same first scene that was in the original 2008 draft with only a few edits. Hopefully that's not obvious. Anyway, the third version of Freeflight was a huge undertaking that involved many mini-rewrites and backward steps. It's still not close to being finished in the sense of shipping it off to publishers, but it's getting there.
The version you can read here on the website is probably not the most up-to-date version, but I update it every so often with the edits I've done, especially if they're major ones.
My goal with Freeflight was to write a novel that was interesting and realistic while having a theme of Christian redemption. There are a lot of Christian fiction novels out there that don't cut it for me when it comes to interacting with our world - showing the full depravity of it and responding to that depravity with Christian answers - and there are a lot of non-Christian novels out there that don't give me satisfying answers and endings. I used Freeflight to search for a balance between the two, and I hope it appeals to Christians and non-Christians alike.
Update: Freeflight is currently taken down due to me messing with it a lot and doing a lot of changes and edits. Don't worry, it won't be gone forever! If you really want to read/reread any of it, just contact me.