by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Now that I’m back at it with the thriller passion project, I again find myself dwelling on the kook tax problem. In the past, whenever I’ve tried to get “serious” people to look at my novel, they inevitably roll their eyes and find some reason to beg off.
I’m just too big a kook in their opinion to be worth their time. And in the specific instance of this novel it’s not going to help that my heroine is a part-time sex worker. But the latest version of the novel tones that down a great deal and — I feel — the sex worker element isn’t nearly as gratuitous as it once was.
At least, I hope that comes across as the case.
My only hope, at the moment, is to lean into the use of AI to improve the novel instead of having to rely upon humans who think I’m a weirdo. But there is going to a come a point when I’m going to have to piviot to human eyes and things might get bumpy.
But I really do believe in this novel, even if I’m going to be old as fuck, even if I get the damn thing published. Unless the Singularity happens in the next few years and I can live to be 500, even if I get the success from this novel I so desperately hope for, the context will be a lot more different than when I started this project.
I won’t be able to run around with 24-year-old women like I had hoped, but rather, I will just be content that I actually proved the haters wrong and I hope I can start to work on other projects.
