by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m just about to enter the third act of the first draft of the first novel in what is projected to be a five novel project. And occasionally, I will stop myself with the realization that I’ve come up with a damn good concept.
And at the core of this concept is an American interpretation of the Lisbeth Salander trope. In my imagination, as I write these five novels, the person who would play my take on the Lisbeth Salander trope would be Zendaya.
But it’s not a one-to-one comparison for various structural reasons. Yet my dream is each one of the books will build your interest in a character that looks a lot like Zendaya and invokes the same type of affinity as Lisbeth Salander. At least, that’s my goal.
I want these five novel project to be an old brown shoe for the existing audience of Stieg Larsson. But I have to note that I’m, by nature, not nearly as dark as he is in his writing. Yet I am really working hard to flesh out the characters and to make them people who are, if nothing else, interesting enough that you want to spend enough time with them to finish five ~100,000 word novels.
Because these novels deal with decades of events, you get to see on the page as it happens why my heroine in the later novels — the one I imagine looks like Zendaya — is so fucked up. That’s what makes these project so different than Larsson’s stuff — the backstory isn’t back story.
But, I have to admit, that this is a massive, massive project.
A lot could go wrong. And as I keep saying, I have no idea what I’m doing. So, it could be that I’m writing such crap that no matter amount of re-writing will get me close to being good enough to sell any of this.
But, in the end, all I got is my dream. Just getting a positive reception from anyone that might read the second draft of the first book. The idea that I would not only sell these novels, but they would be popular enough that Zendaya would play the central character would be beyond a life long dream come true.
And, what’s more, there is another character in the series that I imagine being played by Olivia Munn as an AmeriAsian version of the Mare of Easttown trope. In fact, that’s the core of the project — the relationship between an Olivia Munn type person and a Zendaya type person.
Anyway. I have a huge amount of work to do. The key thing is for me is to simply get the first book in the project done.
