And the Horse You Rode in On: Killing My Darlings (Again)

Tuesday, September 29, 2026 – Orlando, Florida

“The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising.” – Stephen King

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.” – William Faulkner

Well, folks, I hate to admit it, but I must rewrite the entire opening chapter of And the Horse You Rode in On.

Not because it’s poorly written. Not because the boys don’t behave like 10‑year‑olds or sound like pint‑size grownups. And certainly not because I fail to evoke the mid‑1970s in South Florida, the time and place where this new Jim Garraty story unfolds.

Nope. I have to rewrite it because, in my enthusiasm to get started on this fifth story about Jim’s life and times, I forgot to reread my own novel, Reunion: Coda—the one that briefly mentions how my “I‑guy” meets his best friend, Mark Prieto, in 1975.

In Reunion: Coda, I explicitly state that the future “Twins from Different Mothers” meet in Miss Nabutovsky’s fifth‑grade class at South Miami Elementary School sometime in 1975. I’m pretty sure I meant the 1975–76 school year, partly because it matches the timeline I established for Jim in Reunion: A Story, and mostly because I was a fifth‑grader at Tropical Elementary during the Bicentennial year that began in 1975 (the 200th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord) and culminated on July 4, 1976.

In the current rough draft of And the Horse You Rode in On, though, Jim meets Mark during the summer break between fourth and fifth grade—roughly mid‑June or early July of 1975. That’s not a trivial detail, because in this part of the story, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws is a big deal for the boys, especially for Jim.

I badly want to keep that element intact. But I also care about canonical consistency in the Jim Garraty Chronicles, so I’m going to rewrite the “How Jim and Mark Met” scene.

That’s going to be hard. I’m not going to claim the scene contains the best writing I’ve ever done, but it does have some great character beats that feel true to both Jim and Mark as readers know them from Reunion and Reunion: Coda. I like a lot of the dialogue and description, especially the parts where I imagine what it must have been like to live almost in the shadow of South Miami Senior High, which opened in November 1971 and wasn’t quite five years old at the time.

Still, the timeline is wrong. And once you see a crack in the foundation, you either fix it or watch the whole house tilt.

The good news is that I caught this discrepancy early in the drafting process rather than, say, halfway through the story. I found it last night while fixing a few formatting glitches in The Jim Garraty Chronicles omnibus, purely by accident. I wasn’t hunting for plot holes or more sections that needed rewriting—just typos and minor literary gremlins. But once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it, and I knew what I had to do to make the new story line up with the “facts” I’d already established.

So, as the saying goes: back to the drawing board.

This is where Stephen King’s “muscular imagination” and Faulkner’s “kill your darlings” meet in the real world. The imagination gives you the scene; discipline tells you when to let it go.