by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Since I can’t do what I want to do — which is go to NYC for NYE — I splurged on Amazon. Now that I understand the characters, plot and vision of the novel, I can start to do some basic research that a lot of people would have done a lot earlier in the process. The biggest addition is to my growing pile of books is, well, how to write a police procedural.
I started this process being lazy and not wanting to go outside my comfort zone of my personal journalistic investigation knowledge. But I now realize that was dumb. I need at least a subplot where I see what the cops (or cop) are doing. Given how high the stakes are in all of this,however, I may have to talk to the FBI’s PR guy / gal. They must have someone you can talk to to simply get some sense of what they might do in to investigate a fictional crime. This is a side of the story I’m so completely clueless about that I’m going to have to be kind to myself creatively — more so than I am usually — and allow myself to make dumb mistakes without feeling existential angst.
This novel’s conceit is improving significantly. The question, of course, is will my native writing ability be up to it? I honestly can’t answer that question right now. At this point, I really just don’t want to embarrassment myself. To date, everyone — including my own brother! — is obviously barely even humoring me.
Every once in a while, I re-calibrate this novel and the last few days has been once of those times. I now realize that while the whole thing is getting much, much better, it is also going to take a lot longer that I had hoped for a number of reasons. Several issues are slowing me down. One, I have no friends and this is all happening in a vacuum. Two, the original concept was so poorly thought out that it’s taken me a year to sort things out in large part because of one.
But I definitely know the general plot of the novel. I’m giving myself no later than my birthday in late February to start actively writing again. I’m hoping that it will happen a lot soon than that.