by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
After spending the weekend in Cary, NC and chilling out, the first draft of the novel is now racing forward. I wrote probably five or six scenes today which equal roughly as much as 6,000 words.
That’s the thing that I’ve learned over the last three years — the reason why development is so important to me, personally, is I can write so fast once I know my vision. But the issue is I have to make sure I don’t wear myself out by writing shit I can’t use.
That has happened more than once over the last three years, even with all the struggle with development I’ve had to go through for no other reason than for much of the last three years I’ve had no idea what I was doing and because no one likes me and I have no friends I was doing it all in a vacuum.
More than once, if I had just had a wife or a girlfriend then things would have gone far, far faster. In fact, what I’m doing right now is a cherry picked subset of a far bigger story that I came up with over the course of one weekend.
But I’m trying to get into a groove where I do a lot of writing early in the day then turn around and do a lot of reading in the evening. It’s crucial that I read because right now some of my characters — most of them the villains — are just moods or ideas. I really need to flesh them out big time.
So, that’s the goal for the moment. I’ve got my note book and Sharpie and I’m going to go through a few books and find concepts that work in the context of the story. I’ll likely have a virtual bibliography in the Author’s Note of books I’ve read to punch up the text in this way or that.
