by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
A lot could go wrong with this novel. I definitely fear someone will steal a creative march on me, if for no other reason, I’m just taking too long. But there’s not much I can do about it. Rome wasn’t built in a day and it’s just taking me a lot longer than I thought to get as far as I have.
But what’s interesting to me is the very thing that makes this novel a bit…edgy…could also be what makes it a success. I am WELL AWARE that because of marketing and human nature that this very interesting situation I’ve come up with will probably be boiled down to, “stripper solves a murder mystery.”
Ugh. That’s not at all what’s going on, but, lulz, what can you do.
But I do think that my heroine is beginning to approach Lisbeth Salander levels of interesting. She could very well be something of an icon if I play my cards right. And the thing that I keep being reminded about is how the interplay between my heroine’s “normal” life of owning an alternative weekly and her “alternative life” of owning a strip club / stripping to relax is something I need to lean into if I’m going to introduce the idea in the first place.
That’s what people — especially women willing to humor me by reading the damn novel in the first place — are going to want to see the most of.
The daydream issue of how Hollywood might address this novel occasionally gives me pause for thought. The obvious way to market the movie is something along the line of the old Pam Anderson movie “Barbwire.”
Double ugh.
The point of the story is not the T&A element of the story, but that by heroine is a woman who has sexual agency and self confidence enough that she is able to be a stripper to relax without giving it much thought.
It’s everyone else — especially horny men — who are the problem.
Anyway, I continue to work my way through the first act of the third draft AGAIN. Hopefully, this time, I will still have momentum enough to make my way through the second and third acts when the time comes.
