Month: April 2020

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I am not, by nature, a dark person. I’m, in fact, rather silly. Or, put another way, I like a good laugh. If I was a party promoter, I would be the guy who ran around the venue, making sure everyone, all type of people, had a good time.

So, here I am, trying to write an American answer to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, and well, it’s tough. Given the origin of my characters — pretty much the expat kooks (including me!) who I hung out with while I was in South Korea in the 2006-2008 time-frame, it’s going to be tough to cram them into a dark thriller.

Not that I’m not going to try, mind you.

But I may come to a type of compromise with myself. I may let myself in the first draft simply be my usual fun-loving self and then turn things darker in the second draft. To lean it what I remember of the larger-than-life characters of Seoul’s expat scene definitely would make the characters really, really interesting. Dark, no. Interesting, yes.

Take my hero, for instance.

I’ve decided for the purposes of actually finishing a professional first draft to simply use my ranging craziness of 2007 as the basis of my hero. He’s a man of intense passions who is prone to pretty surreal behavior, especially when it comes to women. (I was a wild man back in the day when it came to wooing lovely young expat women with my eccentric charms.)

Today, of course, I’m a singularity of dull middle-age dudeness.

I guess on a movie level, the story will for the time being be what would happen if you smashed The Girl Who Played With Fire with The Big Lebowski with a ham-handed attempt to sprinkle in some of Network and All The President’s Men. I really want this story to be dark and serious, but, well, that will be work given my personality.

So, I’m going to leave that issue of tone for the second draft.

This draft, my characters are going to be eccentric and fun and have dark things happen to them. But we’ll see, I guess. I just have to finish something.

Some thoughts.