by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Things are beginning to move really fast with the second half of the first draft of this novel. I have repeatedly gotten to this point over the years, only for everything to fall apart. But I have enough confidence about how things are going that I’m thinking seriously about the next book in the project.
What’s making my creative juices flow is how…spicy this portion of the novel is. I can see how one might think I’m really putting a lot of words into a subplot to get to something interesting, but because it deals with spicy events, I think people won’t even notice that how hard I have struggled to interweave the overall plot into it.
There are two things that have come to the forefront of my mind at this point in the novel.
One is — I’m dealing with spicy things from a female point of view (third person intimate) so there will likely be members of the “woke cancel culture mob” who pop a gasket that a middle age “CIS white male” would have the gall to do such a thing. But, I must note, Stieg Larsson did something similar and it wasn’t considered the fucking end of the world, in fact, he did a whole hell of a lot worse than I plan to do.
Another thing is, I have a lot of “representation” in these novels and I am growing concerned that I’ll get shit from by the Left and the Right. The Left will be mad because I’m a white dude writing from the POV of people who are neither and the Right will get angry because they’ll automatically assume I’m “woke” or some shit.
But you can’t please everyone. As long as I write a great story that entertains a sizable chunk of the prospective audience, I am simply not going to dwell on the possible slings and arrows I might otherwise have to put up with.
I do wish, however, that I can force some people who think I’m just a drunk Internet crank to take me seriously. It will be interesting to see if can pull that particular hat trick off or not.
