by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m just about to finish fleshing out an outline for yet another version of my first novel. It’s dramatically different than what I originally came up with for this novel to the point that it’s pretty much — on a specific basis — a totally different book.
The structure is significantly different — I am no longer using the structure of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire as a crutch. I use a much more traditional structure with an inciting incident that happens just about when you might expect. In other words, I get to the point of this story a lot sooner than I did before.
Anyway, now that I’m on the cusp of actually writing a new version of this novel, I find myself gaming out the next few steps. And that would be, after finishing wrapping up the second draft of this novel, finding someone to be a beta reader.
At the moment, I’m at a loss as to with whom or how this will happen. I have no friends and no one likes me and I’m very, very poor. I’m flat broke and paying anyone to read a novel that may approach ~120,000 words is going to be a real chore, if not nearly impossible.
And, yet, as I learned with my time as the publisher of ROKon Magazine in Seoul many, many moons ago, sometimes, things can break your way when you least expect it. But, of course, it goes without saying that one shouldn’t simply “hope” that things will work out.
Sometimes, you have to work hard to make luck happen.
