by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
The more I think about it, the more it makes sense to use what happened between me and the late Annie Shapiro in Seoul as the “heart” of the scifi novel I’m writing. It’s where I’m going to pull my character development from, if nothing else. But I’m no Charlie Kaufman, so I don’t really expect to pull off a Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind. But I honestly don’t know where else to look.
My hope is that this novel will be nice fusion of scifi and love story just like Kaufman’s movie. But that really is a long shot given I’m a novice and I’m just writing this novel because I feel compelled to. But we’ll see, I guess. I really need to just keep going.
Honing in on the events of ROKon Magazine as inspiration definitely will help in writing the novel moving forward. It gives me an emotional core that I can cling to when I don’t know what else to do. But that comes with some dangers. If I don’t watch out, the whole story could devolve into a mish-mash of genres and goals that leaves everyone scratching their head. But I don’t know. I just don’t know.
I’m really enjoying writing this novel — I’m really just developing it at this point — and they say you’re supposed to give yourself permission to write crap the first draft, if nothing else. I’m going to do just that, I guess. I just have to finally reach a point where I feel comfortable with a scene summary to use as a guide to write the first draft. This is taking much, much longer than I ever expected.
