by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Things, at the moment, are going really well with this first draft of this first novel in a projected six novel project. The fact that I’m turning 50 soon is really weighing on my mind. I have to put up or shut up. There is still a lot I don’t know about how to write the best possible novel I can, but things feel like they’ve stabilized some.
These six novels are heavily influenced by both the TV show Mare of Easttown and Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Series. That’s the vibe I’m going for, at least. If you like those two creative works, then I hope to write six novels that you will feel are very similar, like an old brown shoe for your mind.
The influence of Mare of Easttown on these six novels is the protagonist for the first few novels is much like Mare, even if her job is totally different. The two women are about the same age and have similar things happening in their lives. Family is really important for both of them and they find themselves in very unusual circumstances because of issues out of their control.
My homage to Mare and her connection to my homage to Lisbeth Salander serves as the motional heart of these novels. I like the idea that we get to see over the course of a number of novels the events that lead up to why my American, POC homage to Salander ends up the way she does. All of this is happening, oddly enough, because Trump was a lazy idiot and wasn’t able to successfully steal the 2020 election.
It was in early 2021 that it occured to me that not only I had a massive backstory that I would like to actually show the audience, but that all the ranting I was trying to do about Trumplandia in two books set in late 2019 and early 2020 would be kind of quaint and out of date if Trump wasn’t president.
So, I not only started from the very beginning of the story — in early 1995 — I created a Mare of Easttown-type character to serve as the protagonist for the first three novels in a six novel project.
The plan is, over the course of six novels and 25 depicted years, you will get to see not just how a very strange situation occurred somewhere — the original allegory for Trumplandia that I thought up — but the ebb and flow of the lives of a series of characters during that timeframe.
So, in a sense, a lot of the development for this first novel was a lot easier because I had characters in 2019 – 2020 and simply thought about what they would be doing 25 years earlier. Despite this, it’s still be a real struggle to get to where I am now.
The learning curve for developing and writing just this first novel has been very, very significant. But I think I’m getting close, at least, to where I want to be. I just need to put up or shut up. I need to wrap the second draft of this first novel up by spring 2023 so I can try to query it as part of the fall 2023 querying season.
