by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’ve finally finished a solid, stable first draft and, as such, I’m going to try — try — to pause writing for a month to prepare for the dive into the second draft. I hope to read a whole lot so when I sit down to write the second draft in early January 2023 I will have significantly expanded my author toolkit.
But reading — especially, ironically enough, reading fiction — is really tough for me. I like to produce content so much that reading someone else’s content is a real stretch for me. But I have to do it, I just have to. I can’t continue to be delusional and not know what other people in my genre are producing. I can only read The Girl With Played With Fire so many times.
And, yet, reading a lot of different types of things over the course of roughly the next month should be a lot of fun. It will really hit home how this is the farthest I’ve ever gotten with this project to date. And I think actually doing all this reading that I should have done some time ago will be a way to remind myself of that.
Of course, I probably am going to start gaming out the next novel in this six novel project over the course of the next month AND think seriously about a scifi novel I’ve been dwelling on for some time. I have three or four sold scifi novels rolling around in my mind and this particular one really appeals to me at the moment.
I wish I was younger, I would also be working seriously on overcoming the learning curve connected to screenwriting. But the only way I would write a screenplay at my age is if I became a big success really quickly as a novelist and that opportunity became viable.
Of course, in the back of my mind I have a lingering fear not only of a fucking civil war happening in the United States in 2024 – 2025, but the entire concept of being a human writer becoming moot once AGIs can spit out a movie, TV show or novel simply from an inputted logline.
But anyway, wish me luck. I wish I could stop myself from writing and about writing all the time but I’m 100% extroverted and whatever happens to be on my mind at any particular moment is going to somehow, someway pop out.
