by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m yet AGAIN at the midpoint of an attempted first draft of my first novel. I’m feeling pretty good with this version, however, because barring something I can’t predict, I will be on track to wrap up the second draft in spring 2023. Then I use a few months to go through the beta reader process. Then, hopefully, I query during the fall 2023 querying season.
That, at least, is the plan at the moment.
A lot — and I mean A LOT — could go wrong. But I have hope, which is one of the key reasons why I started this project in the first place. I have something to look forward to and something to be actively delusional about.
But I’m now working on fleshing out the outline for the second half of the novel and things are getting “spicy.” But with that “spiciness” there comes a lot of risk, too. Just because most of the audience will probably dig the interesting turn of events I’ve come up with, doesn’t mean that somehow, some way the more “woke” part of the audience won’t pitch a fucking fit that a middle age CIS white male would be writing about such things. The horror!
And, yet, I think despite that danger, I’ve come up with a page turner. The second draft I’m going to focus on the following: improving characterizations, trimming word count and making the story darker and more serious.
Like I said, though, at the moment, things are going really well. My goal of writing an “old brown shoe” for someone who likes Stieg Larsson’s work is coming to fruition in a way I’m very pleased with. It’s just taken far, far, far longer to get to this point than I could have possibly have imagined when I began.
