by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Since I started working on these six novels, I’m kind of gotten into something of a rut. I just kind of drift towards my goal, not really having any sort of focus or structure.
Well, as I enter my 50th year, I need to put on my big boy pants and summon up the energy to change all that. I need to start consuming media, not just struggle to produce it. I need to read and watch TV shows and movies in an effort to stir up some creativity.
The first novel in this series is going really well. I wish I could call it “Happiness is a Warm Gun” after The Beatles song, but, alas, I have my doubts that a nobody like me could get a publisher to get permission to use it from Apple Records. I know technically you can’t copyright a title of a creative work, but that wouldn’t stop Apple from suing me or my publisher if they felt slighted.
I only keep mentioning that possible title because, I don’t know, maybe I hope I can use The Secret to make it happen. And telling you what the ideal title of the first novel is gives you, gentle reader, some oblique insight into what’s going on with the novel.
I have another working title in mind for the first novel, but “Happiness is a Warm Gun” is perfect, just like “Glass Onion” was perfect for the most recent Knives Out movie. I have to note that I saw someone really upset on Twitter recently about how they had to throw out the plot of two novels because their plots were used in TV show.
Now, I’m very paranoid about someone stealing a march on me with these six novels — extremely so — and, yet, these novels are, in a way, so specific and personal to me that it would be very difficult for an identical plot to be used. Something similar, yes, but not identical.
Of course, I am really paranoid that the old fleshed out outline I sent someone is now bouncing around Hollywood to be cherrypicked for a script. But you have to make decisions on what you do know, not on what you don’t know.
I need to shut up and write. But I can’t help myself. I’m going to blog about whatever is on my mind at any particular moment and right now, I have writing a novel a the very forefront of my mind most of the time.
