by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
The thing I’ve learned over the last few years of working on this novel is readers are acutely aware of anything you point out to them on the page. As such, I’ve had some alpha readers take note of how much fashion there is in what I’ve written to date.
I really like fashion as an art form. There was a point when I wanted to be a fashion photographer until it dawned on me how impractical that was given where I was in my life. But I still have a dream that maybe someday, someway, I’ll get an opportunity to prove my photographic chops by taking pictures of models. I have an eye for beauty.
Since the character at the center of this novel is a young woman, I feel what she wears is really important at times in driving the plot along. I struggle to make my heroine as dark and interesting as Lisbeth Salander while also making her more accessible — what she wears at any particular moment helps a lot with that.
Some of this comes from the inspiration for the heroine. The late Annie Shapiro in Seoul was a kook and was a hipster before I even knew what a hipster was. Though, I have to note, some of what she wore at any particular moment while we were working on ROKon Magazine was her reflecting my own wardrobe. But all that was so long ago. So very long ago. A totally different era in my life.
But I’ve been working so hard — and so long — on this novel at this point that I’m kind of tired of being too conspicuous about talking about it. I’m kind of embarrassed, in fact. I need to just throw myself into this thing and get it done, knowing that once I finish this novel, I have another in the series to finish.
I no longer think about who will play any particular character in the film adaptation. All I can about is just finishing the damn thing so I can move on to the next book. B
