by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Now, let me be clear — all of this is just a dream. And I’m so old that it’s highly unlikely that what I want to have happen, will happen. As it’s going I’ll be very lucky to get *one* novel written and published before I croak, much less six novels that begin a series about an “American Lisbeth Salander.”
Lisbeth Salander.
It just takes a lot of time and six novels is a lot of work and words.
But the dream I have is — I want to show the audience why my “American Lisbeth Salander” is fucked up by showing in a series of books that depict about 25 years of her personal history the events that lead up to what would otherwise be the first two books in the series about her.
This happened in large part because Trump managed to lose in 2020. I had two novels (joined together by a cliffhanger) that I wanted to use as an allegory for the Trump era (Trumplandia, if you will) but he lost and so…I felt a bit forlorn.
Then I realized I had so much backstory about this character I loved that I might as well go backwards in time and show, exactly why she is so fucked up like Salander.
The heroine of many of the novels in the six novel series I plan is older than Lisbeth Salander and has a sleeve tattoo like Megan Fox does here.
I have a vague idea of making sure that my heroine is in the same universe as Lisbeth Salander so, I don’t know, maybe if things went great there might be a crossover at some point? That would be pretty sweet.
My heroine is, if I have the ages in my head right, a bit younger than Salander is supposed to be. But she’s a very, very, very different person other than how fucked up she is for reasons that the reader will be intimately acquainted with by the time she really appears and becomes front and center in the series.
I think, ultimately, my “American Lisbeth Salander” will kinda sorta look like Corrie Yee in my mind. Maybe. Not a perfect 1-to-1. But sorta.
I think what I need to do is start to work on the other novels in the series, too, so that might speed things up some. There is one book that if had any resoruces at all I would write but, alas, I just don’t think it’s going to be possible. So, I think it’s going to be six ~100,000 word novels in the same universe that I will have an open ending so we can expect more from my heroine.
It’s all a lot of fun.
And I would be about to query at this point, but for the fact that the third draft was a lot more “spicy” than it should have been and my readers balked flat out reading it after a point. So, back to the drawing board. Now, I think I won’t query this novel until the spring — that’s the goal, at least.
