by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Someone randomly, out of the blue, contacted me on Tik-Tok and asked me something like, “Do you think your characters are interesting enough?” This really gave me pause for thought. I told the person that they must be, given that I’m willing to spend years working on them.
But with my heroine, specifically, I’ve decided to have her be obsessed with John Lennon. I’m reading his biography and…oh boy. While I still consider Lennon a personal hero of mine, he definitely was problematic in his personal life.
It’s not like I didn’t know any of this already, but reading about it again really hits home how cultural norms have changed over the last 60 years. And, maybe, that’s one of the reasons why rock music has died? The type of person who would be an over-the-top rocker just can’t reach the type of creative critical mass they could in the past because of the dark side of that personality type?
Anyway, the idea of having my heroine obsessed with Lennon is very intriguing to me and opens up a lot of different ways to pull in readers. At least, I hope so. I think having my heroine obsessed with Lennon could be just the type of “hook” I need on both the audience front and marketing front.
But I’m being delusional, still. The idea that I can actually querying this novel and it be a success is very, very delusional at the moment. But I need some sort of hope, you know?
