by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
A lot can still go wrong with this novel. Any number of things both within my control — and not — could happen to derail this novel in unexpected ways. But, for the time being, I’m allowing myself to be content.
I’m well aware that, in a sense, my personality is unusual for a novelist. Or, at least, it’s a bit rare. I have more of a Truman Capote or Tom Wolfe larger-than-life personality than the typical lone wolf introvert personality that most novelists have.
The point is, I have a story to tell — and something to say — and I’ve finally figured how I want to tell it. It’s just taken me a lot longer to figure that out than expected. And, honestly, I never thought I would write a thriller as my first novel — given how much I love scifi, I always expected any first novel I wrote would be of that genre. But this novel does have a lot of speculative fiction in it, so I guess in a sense I was right.
Anyway, writing a novel — at least the way I expect myself to — has turned out to be far, far more work than I ever imagined. And I haven’t even gotten to the extensive reading I feel I need to do to flesh out my characters.
But that should come. At least, I hope it does.
I’m kind of embarrassed with how obsessed with this novel I’ve become and I only rarely feel like showing any of what I’ve written to anybody. The next step is to finish a first draft of the first book in this two book story. Then turn around and work on the second book for maybe a month before writing a first book second draft.
The point is — I still have a huge amount of work to do. But at least things have stabilized significantly.
