Tag: Millennium Series

Pondering The Potential Reception Of This Novel By Literary Agents

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Now that I’ve just about locked down the first two chapters of the third draft of this novel, I find myself pondering What Next. I still have a few more months of writing to finish the third draft, but I definitely am beginning to think about the querying process.

My big concern is, of course, that because I’m doing this in a vacuum that the somewhat provocative premise of the novel will make literary agents — who I imagine as being mostly liberal white women — either laugh or get angry. I have no idea if the “sex worker who solves a murder mystery” will be cool with literary agents or not because of that.

But “Barry” was popular, so, lulz, it’s at least *possible* that my similar type story might have broad appeal. And, yet, sexwork is so loaded in the minds of most people while being a hired assassin is a lulz that it’s possible it will just be too loaded for anyone to take seriously.

Yet the point is that I want a heroine is really, really interesting. Someone unexpected who you will want to hang out with for the time it takes to read ~140,000 words. I believe I have come up with just the type of evocative story that people will really find worth their time.

I hope.

The holiday season is now here, so that is an added complication. My fear is that because of the holiday season and other “known unknowns” that I’ll really be pushing it to wrap this novel up no later than April 2024. Then I will have to save up the money to get a professional manuscript consultant to read over the third draft.

THEN I have to start to query just as the “Perfect Storm” of The Fourth Turning and the AI generated Petite Singularity happens in late 2024, early 2025. But, if nothing else, I definitely am happy with this story. There are probably going to be a lot — A LOT — of structural changes to the third act in the transition from second to third draft.

But I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

‘Old Brown Shoe’ — Of ‘Mare of Easttown’ and Stieg Larsson’s ‘Millennium Series’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Things, at the moment, are going really well with this first draft of this first novel in a projected six novel project. The fact that I’m turning 50 soon is really weighing on my mind. I have to put up or shut up. There is still a lot I don’t know about how to write the best possible novel I can, but things feel like they’ve stabilized some.

These six novels are heavily influenced by both the TV show Mare of Easttown and Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Series. That’s the vibe I’m going for, at least. If you like those two creative works, then I hope to write six novels that you will feel are very similar, like an old brown shoe for your mind.

The influence of Mare of Easttown on these six novels is the protagonist for the first few novels is much like Mare, even if her job is totally different. The two women are about the same age and have similar things happening in their lives. Family is really important for both of them and they find themselves in very unusual circumstances because of issues out of their control.

My homage to Mare and her connection to my homage to Lisbeth Salander serves as the motional heart of these novels. I like the idea that we get to see over the course of a number of novels the events that lead up to why my American, POC homage to Salander ends up the way she does. All of this is happening, oddly enough, because Trump was a lazy idiot and wasn’t able to successfully steal the 2020 election.

It was in early 2021 that it occured to me that not only I had a massive backstory that I would like to actually show the audience, but that all the ranting I was trying to do about Trumplandia in two books set in late 2019 and early 2020 would be kind of quaint and out of date if Trump wasn’t president.

So, I not only started from the very beginning of the story — in early 1995 — I created a Mare of Easttown-type character to serve as the protagonist for the first three novels in a six novel project.

The plan is, over the course of six novels and 25 depicted years, you will get to see not just how a very strange situation occurred somewhere — the original allegory for Trumplandia that I thought up — but the ebb and flow of the lives of a series of characters during that timeframe.

So, in a sense, a lot of the development for this first novel was a lot easier because I had characters in 2019 – 2020 and simply thought about what they would be doing 25 years earlier. Despite this, it’s still be a real struggle to get to where I am now.

The learning curve for developing and writing just this first novel has been very, very significant. But I think I’m getting close, at least, to where I want to be. I just need to put up or shut up. I need to wrap the second draft of this first novel up by spring 2023 so I can try to query it as part of the fall 2023 querying season.

These Five Novels Will Have A Lot of Heart


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve been doing a lot of writing today and I’m very pleased with what I’ve managed to come up with. These first few novels, as I keep saying, will have a lot to owe to Mare of Easttown. Even I am taken aback by how female-friendly from an audience perspective these novels may be. Or not. What the fuck do I know. I’m a middle aged white CIS male who should be neither seen nor heard.

But here we are, with me being my usual bonkers crank self, pontificating on shit I shouldn’t.

I’m working on the assumption that if I should actually manage to write the “break out” novel — which, in itself would be a miracle — that I will be canceled at some point soon after because my well documented views don’t always follow the media narrative. I believe what I believe and if you don’t like it, then fuck you. Wink.

But, like I said, I am pleased with how much heart these novels have. How much they at least try to accommodate the needs of the female audience. One thing I’m taken aback by is how this first novel is far, far more Mare of Easttown than the book that started all of this, The Girl Who Played With Fire.

At the moment, it really won’t be until the last two novels I’m working on, when we start what will hopefully be an open-ended thriller series, that the direct homage to Stieg Larsson’s work becomes obvious. But I have to make clear — I’m simply not as dark a write, by nature, as Larsson. I have used The Girl Who Played With Fire as my “textbook,” but it’s a real struggle for me to be as dark and serious as Larsson in, say, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Anyway. I’m going to throw myself into writing, reading and development this weekend. That, at least, is the plan.

Fuck this fucking storytelling “test.”

Bruh, Did We Read The Same Series?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

So, through Twitter, I got something of a tip about a thriller series much like Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Series. I was shocked once I started reading the first book in the series — the author, while obviously influenced greatly by Larsson, has a totally different interpretation of his work.

Lisbeth Salander

While I focus on the character aspects of Lisbeth Salander et al, this other author really honed in on the action-thriller part of what he wrote. He’s far more better educated than me and relative to the metrics of normal people, the type of guy who gets invited highfalutin cocktail parties. The closest I would get to such a thing with my current background, is a street urchin with my nose smudging the restaurant’s outside window.

So, I’m taken aback at what a poor artistic interpretation this other author has — in my opinion — of what made the Millennium series a success. Or maybe “poor” is too harsh. Maybe “dramatically different” is a better sentiment. To me, the story of Lisbeth Salander is of a woman who probably would have been pretty normal but for a very surreal and tragic upbringing.

At least, that’s how I see things.

But, I can dig that someone else would look at what I read and see that it’s the action-thriller aspect of the series that kept people reading. The three books in the original series are really action packed (after you get past the first 135 pages of the first book which are dull as dirt.)

Anyway. I wish my “rival” the best. I also want to crush him creatively by being far, far more successful than he is currently. I’m a loser nobody at the moment, yes, but I have a lot of drive and think Ii can pull another rabbit out of a hat before I drop dead.

‘If You Have Time To Write, You Have Time To Read’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve picked up a thriller that’s very much in the milieu of the four novels I’m developing and writing. It’s obviously, just like my project, very influenced by Stieg Larsson’s original Millennium series. What’s interesting is how different people take different things away from the series.

This book’s author obviously is leaning into the vigilante aspect of Lisbeth Salander’s personality. The novel is very well written, and, yet, it’s sufficiently different from what I’m working on that I don’t feel that threatened. The novel is, so far, pretty much a generic thriller that wants to create an American Lisbeth Salander.

The Icon.

I want to do that, too, but my interpretation of the Salander trope is dramatically — and I mean dramatically — different. In fact, now that I’m writing four novels, for the time being Mare Of Easttown is a bigger influence than Larsson.

And, I will note, that if you study The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Salander isn’t really the hero of the story — that’s Mikael Blomkvist. The author of this book I’m reading wants to get straight into the story of his Salander-type character. And, what’s more he definitely seems to want to appeal to Jack Reacher fans, to the point that he has a quote from Lee Child in support of the book.

But a key element of Salander is she had a very weird upbringing that we gradually get to learn more about over the course of two books. With the book I’m reading now, we’re just plunged straight into the character’s vigilantism. One of the rules of thumb about writing a successful novel is, “Tell a old story in a new way or an new story in an old way.”

And, of course, there is the very real notion of “There’s nothing new under the sun.”

As such, I have to get over myself. If I was to come up with something that was completely and totally unique, a publisher wouldn’t know what to do with it marketing wise and it would turn readers off because they wouldn’t have anything to compare it to.

So, I need to chill.

It’s ok if someone has written something vaguely in the same vein as what I’m working on. It’s inevitable that someone would want to create an American Salander. For the time being, at least, it definitely seems I’m safe in continuing to develop and write these four novels. Each of the four novels is a very compelling story, enough so that I’m willing to throw my entire life into finishing them.

What’s more, the novels I’m working on are far more character driven than what I’ve read so far of this novel. From the first two chapters, it definitely seems as though the author is more concerned with the action adventure thriller elements of the Millennium series as opposed to the character elements that I find interesting.

Another thing — the thing that got me writing a novel — now novels — in the first place was my white hot rage against Trumplandia. That rage was always the thing that generated the energy necessary for me to write a novel. That need to address the bullshit of the Trump Era is another thing that definitely makes what I’m working on different than this book.

I’m obviously working against the headwinds of being older, not being formally educated in creative writing and not having gone to an Ivy League school, but lulz, fuck the haters.