by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
After this weekend’s personal writer’s retreat in DC, all systems are go with the allegorical thriller about the Trump Era I’m working on. I should be wrapping up development on the first act very, very soon. I should be able to dive into writing again in full force within a matter of days (if my gut check is right.)
This a really breezy, plump novel that hopefully will go down like a cool drink of water. You’ll check your watch and it’ll be 4:30 a.m. and you won’t know where the time went on a weekday night. That, at least, is my goal.
I still, as always, have a huge amount of reading to do. My heroine’s personality is an homage to the late Annie Shapiro and she was such a kook that it’s going to take me a little while to bone up on some of her kooky ideas. But I’m taking one specific aspect of her personality that I know to have been true then exaggerating it to an absurd level for the purposes of her character and that of the plot.
But she was, in general, such a unique person that basising my heroine’s personality on her helps speed things up a great deal. Whenever I have a problem thinking about what my heroine might do or say, I just lean back and think, “Well, what would Annie do?”
Anyway, I’m going to chill out a little bit then throw myself into using a lot of the development I did this weekend in DC. Very soon after that stage is complete, I’ll actually start writing again. I am constantly reminded that writing a novel is a marathon, not a sprint.
I refuse, however, to be on of those guys who spends 10 years on a novel and never actually finishes anything. Snap. Snap. Publish or perish.
