by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Things are going reasonably well with the first draft of the novel right now. My goal is to finish a first draft by Election Day. This is so encase all hell breaks loose, at least I’ll have a finished first draft under my belt.
I really need to map out, in real terms, how may chapters I’m going to finish each week. If I don’t do that, I could simply continue my current practice of moving in a general direction without any hard set metrics to gauge my progress on.
But I definitely am moving forward now. Because of the way I’m developing and writing, I honestly don’t know my word count right now. In a way, however, that’s rather liberating. This is just a first draft and the point is to get something, anything, down so I can turn around and rewrite the whole thing with a far clearer eye as to what the story’s strengths and weaknesses are.
I continue to have a linger uneasy as to what the world will look like when I try to query it. My fear is that I’m writing something that, in hindsight, will be like writing a mystery thriller set in late 1930s America. By 1942, of course, it will be seen as rather quaint.
I think that’s more about a general sense of uneasy about the nation’s future, however. It’s far more likely that Trump is going to “win” and continue to consolidate power in fits and starts. That should give me something of a window of opportunity to finish this first book in the series and try to sell it.
At least, that’s the dream right now.
One issue that I continue to struggle with is the actual investigation show in teh story. I’m not exactly the world’s greatest investigative journalist and so it’s a real struggle to think about how my characters might do such a thing. But I’ve made great strides in just the last few days, so there’s hope I can figure something, anything out on that front.
If anything, I now know I need to leave a lot more clues in the first act so I can draw upon them in the first part of the second act.
You can’t edit a blank page, as they say.
