by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
After a number of years of hard work and general drifting towards my goal, I’m finally, finally pretty confident that I’m just about to wrap up a sold first draft of a novel that will be an Old Brown Shoe to any reader of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Series.
The homage isn’t perfect, of course. The focus of this first story is far more Mare of Easttown than anything else. At least, that’s the vibe I’m striving for. It has really helped that I know how this planned six novel project ends. All I’ve had to do is think, repeatedly, “So, what would this person have been doing 25 years ago?”
I’ve come up with a very American interpretation of the the Stieg Larsson vibe. It’s definitely all its own thing. It’s not fan fiction, that’s for sure. It’s just I really love that middle book in the Millennium series and that’s been my reference point, my “textbook,” if you will. In fact, I might read that novel over again to get some pointers as I begin to prepare for the task of writing the second draft.
One thing about working so hard on this novel series has done is made it very difficult to consume any creative media at all. I’m just obsessed with storytelling to the point that I grow very, very frustrated with any one else’s story if it doesn’t mean my own personal metrics as to how to tell one. But I have to force myself to consume media that is not my own because there’s no other way to gauge what I have to do to meet the expectations of the thriller-mystery audience.
So, once I give myself about a month after I finish the first draft, I’m going to plunge into the second draft process. I’m also going to really work on taking everything to the next level in the context of marketability. One thing I learned with my involvement with ROKon Magazine in Seoul is there are two elements to any publication — audience and market.
So, you can have an audience for something, but if you don’t also service the marketplace, well, you’re on a fool’s errand. I’ve been so delusional for so long that I’m it’s kind of jarring to now start to think about the cold, hard metrics of producing a novel that is both engaging and could potentially actually, like, uh, sell a lot of copies.
That’s the question of the moment — if I’m up to the task. But, obviously, some of all of this is out of my hands. A lot of getting an agent and writing a break out hit novel is luck — hitting the zeitgeist in just the right way.
