by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
So, I aim to wrap up this solid first draft of a novel I’ve been working on the last few months at some point in early December. Then I’m going to give myself a month to chill out. Then, I’m going to turn around and re-write the whole thing. That, at least in the goal.
I’ve learned that it’s actually easier to re-write something that to edit it. At least, in the context of what I’m doing. I’m going to do a lot of tinkering with the text of the second draft before I enter it into the Beta Reader process, of course.
But what’s at the forefront of my mind at the moment is how I get a real literary agent with a career and money to take my little dream seriously. I’m older than most people in my situation. Any due diligence they do on me would only lead to them believing I’m some sort of drunk Internet crank. So, my fear is, no matter how good the actual copy of the novel is, those things will be what any literary agent is more interested in when the time comes.
And, yet, that was kind of the whole point of this process from the beginning — I wanted go through the whole thing, to see how far I might get before it became clear that it just wasn’t going to work out. But, surprise, I’ve come up with at least the framework of a really, really good novel that would be the cornerstone of a series of novels that would be opened ended and potentially establish a new American (POC) Lisbeth Salander-type action-adventure heroine on the scene.
That’s the dream, at least.
But I have A LOT of work to get to that point — I really need to start reading more, no matter how difficult it may be for me at this point because my personal metrics are so strict.
It’s going to be interesting what happens with this novel in 2023. If I’m EXTREMELY luck, then I might sell the novel by the end of the year, or early in 2024. If that happened, then, of course, I’d have to wait A YEAR for post-production and by that point the country could be either an autocracy or have collapsed into civil war.
Oh boy.
