by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
As I keep saying, I want the novels in this projected six novel project to be an old brown shoe for the audience of Stieg Larsson’s work. In other words, I want people who enjoyed the Millennium series to “get” these novels from the moment they read the first page.
That’s been the goal of all of this from the very beginning. The biggest problem has been I’m very reluctant to “just write” if I don’t believe in the product. I have very high standards for myself and I don’t want to fucking embarrass myself.
So time and again, the whole thing has collapsed and I’ve started all over again. Then there has been significant mission creep, with this starting off as just a novel, then two, then three, then four then five and now six. This has happened after a series of major turning points, the biggest among them being Trump being so stupid and lazy that the he actually manage to do what I thought was impossible — lose the 2020 election.
Trump losing the 2020 election was a huge turning point in this project because suddenly I was freed from the original goal of using this project to rant, directly about Trumplandia. I realized I had all these stories to tell in the same universe. But to tell them, I would have to go back in time.
And that’s how I found myself writing about events that kicked off the whole series, set 25 years ago. So, in a sense, I’m consciously writing prequels in a sly way. Or, had Trump not lost, I probably would have keep pounding away at a two-novel story set in the modern era.
But as it stands, I’m doing all this work to explain, to show, to the reader, the origins of a very fucked up situation that happens somewhere later down the the line. I like this idea because, well, it’s weird and I’m weird and also, most importantly, there’s a lot of slack in it.
I have a lot of room to grow. I have a huge universe of pretty well fleshed out stories I can now grow into should I somehow manage to sell this first novel. That, unto itself, will be a miracle. I know that. I get it. But it’s not a crime to dream.
