by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
My need to one up the author of this thriller I’m reading is growing white hot. The reason is, he’s got me hooked — event though I find the whole thing rather meh — and I want to figure out how to achieve the same effect in my four novels.
One way I’m hooked is I want to know why his heroine acts the way she does. Given that by the time I get around to the two novels in the series that would be the most direct in their similarity to this novel I will have laid out exactly why my heroine acts the way she does, I now have to up my game.
This is the fun part of development — when I have a challenging problem to fix in an interesting, organic and innovative manner. I live for stuff like this. But even with the novels that are vaguely similar to this thriller, I’m coming at things in a dramatically different fashion.
My personality and vision are obviously very, very, very different from the author of this thriller. There are some gauzy similarities in our visions, but some of it is just coincidence and some of it is form follows function.
That, of course, doesn’t stop me from frantically trying to think up ways to make it clear that MY series is far more interesting and unique than this series I’m reading. I’m kind of OCD about such things.
