by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
All systems are go with either a real first draft or only-a-second-draft-because-of-my-huge-ego. I spend a few hours last night restructuring things and now I know what to do.
The story has a lot tighter chorology than I ever expected, but I came across some constraints within the logic of the story that I could never expected. But, the point is, this is going to be a very, very fast paced novel for no other reason than the reader is going to realize we’re talking events that take place over barely two weeks, if that.
Events are going to be so tight with this novel, that I’ve thought maybe have a time stamp on each scene might be helpful. But I’ve not decided to do that yet. But it definitely would remind readers that a lot of stuff is going on in just one day.
Anyway, I now am going to do two things. One, a lot of reading. Two, I’m going to try to try to go through the scenes of the first few chapters and do some development stuff with them so I can start writing at full speed in the next few days. But I want to really be prepared since I’m hoping this is going to be so good as to be a second draft that can have beta readers.
Meanwhile, I’m going to also begin to bounce around the other four novels in the series to see about moving them forward as well. I’m going to continue to study Stieg Larsson’s first two books to get some sense of how he did some things in a general way. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo handles some time issues that I need to know how to handle in future books.
I would prefer all my future novels not take place within roughly two week span. I need to figure out how Larsson was able to have books that took place over a longer period of time.
So that’s where things stand. Let’s rock.
