by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
The novel I’m developing right now — I say “developing” because I haven’t actually started writing it yet — is going to be summer beach read that you split into your purse Thursday night and finish up on your way home Sunday evening. At least, that’s the goal. I want it to be scifi, but not so nerdy and testosterone laden in its scifi that your average middle age suburban New Yorker reader will be turned off.
So, in a sense, my vision for this novel is it will have a lot more in common with The Martian than, say, The Matrix. I want a rip roaring yarn that is innovative and creative and ambitious. As I keep saying, I can talk big all I want, but it really boils down to how good a writer I am.
If the past reviews of my attempts to write fiction are any indication — this is probably going to be a disaster on more than one level. That doesn’t even begin to address that some hack might write a very bad screenplay from the original first act scene summary I foolishly published. But that was inevitable and there’s no much I can do about it at this point.
But, regardless, I have a lot ambition and I keep reworking this concept in a way that I feel is making the novel better. The latest reason why I threw everything in the air and started again is I got to the midpoint of the latest version of the scene summary and realized it just didn’t feel as though it was going to be as fun and action-adventure or, maybe thrilling, as I had hoped.
So, while I’m going to keep huge chunks of what I’ve developed so far, I’m also going to try to make this story something you would actually want to read and, hell, maybe even see on the silver screen if it became popular enough. This is something I really didn’t expect — that I would accidentally find myself working towards writing something akin to a thriller in the tradition of the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo…if you threw Under The Dome and Network along the way.
I hope to get a lot of development done today so I can at least go back to working on the scene summary, if nothing else. This is where working on a novel is far less fun than what I imagine writing a screenplay would be like for no other reason than in real terms I have no one to talk to in detail about what it is that’s bothering me. So, instead, I write posts like this that were me vaguely rambling about what’s troubling me.
