by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Today was the first day I really sat down and began to sketch out some of the second thriller in this five novel series. I had already done this some when it was the second half of a twice-as-big novel, but this was the first time I’d done it seriously as it being its own thing.
I know, in general, what it’s about — the love of one woman for a dead woman’s very alive baby — but I have to figure out the details of the plot. I’m really, really REALLY digging deep into my own personal history to flesh out elements of the plot. I’m just bleeding all over the page, as it were.
It’s all very personal and a “deep cut” into a very specific moment in my life.
But things are going pretty well at the moment. It’s a lot of fun to see how far I can get before my self-imposed deadline of a few days from now is reached and I go back to working on the first novel. It’s very relaxing to leave the first novel, which I’ve been focusing on with white-hot attention for way too long now — and turn to the other novels in the series where I’ve not been so fixated.
That’s one of the upsides of working on such a huge project is I can work on all these different books and still stay in-universe. I have to admit, though, that I have several other really strong concepts rolling around in my mind — one about global climate change I love so much. But that global climate change story is going to be a movie if I ever get around to doing anything with it.
I still need to do a lot of reading. It’s so frustrating, though. I’m so consumed with reading, developing and writing my own stuff that to pull myself away from all that to read someone else’s work is really tough at times. Or maybe all the time.
