by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Well, I’ve finally gotten further with this novel’s development than I’ve ever gotten in two years. I have a development booklet for “Part I” of the novel done and now plan to sit down in the next 24 hours or so and “just write.”
I still haven’t finished the entire outline yet (which would be turned into a complete scene summary) but, lulz, what am I going to do about it. I am hoping that simply by writing a Part I that is really good, that, in itself, will be enough to get me through some pretty uncertain parts of the novel going forward.
There’s a whole FBI portion of the novel I have no idea how to proceed with. I have several books I’m reading and an FBI PR person I talk to, but I’m worried that having to throw a lot of attention into that part of the story is going to slow me down.
Now, the thing you have to remember is, the energy to develop and write this novel comes from my white hot rage against the Trump Administration. Now that impeachment has failed, my rage against the Trump Administration is hotter than the center of the sun (on a good day.) Since I’m a man of peace and a man of ideas, I feel I have no other recourse than to write a novel that is DL a fucking H-Bomb of an indictment against the Trump Era.
So, whenever Trump does something that enrages me, I use the emotional energy generated by that to read another book, or do some more development before I got to bed.
The key point is that this novel be a fast, easy read. Very breezy. Something not preachy, something you read so fast you are late to work because you didn’t get much sleep reading it. That’s the way I felt reading Stieg Larsson’s stuff and that’s the way I want people to feel with this novel. I want my rage against the Trump Administration to be so diffused that even conservatives can read this novel and not feel like I’m attacking them. (MAGA conservatives, however, might have something of a problem with this novel, given some of the plot points.)
Anyway, all systems are go to “just write” very, very soon.
