by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
The original idea for my first novel was using a very unusual small town in Virginia as the basis for an allegory about the Trump Era. After much, much, much reflection over the course of the last few years I find myself essentially in a position where I’m now writing a prequel to that planned two part story set 25 years ago.
The idea is now that this novel would be the first in a six novel project that would allow us to see the arc of history over the course of a generation starting around 1995. I like this new arrangement because there’s hope built in to the novel. If things work out well with this first novel, I have five more novels gamed out that are set in the same place that lead to a really, really cool situation.
Rather than springing a very odd situation on readers, the audience gets to see exactly how the allegory came to be.
Now, the downside to this very, very ambitious project is it’s obviously rather naive in the sense that even if I stick the landing on the first novel, by the time I write and publish the last novel in the project the problems that I wanted to address in the first place will be dated.
As such, it’s very possible that the context of the last two novels in the project will be totally different and the weird situation depicted will be not so much an allegory anymore as just a unique location.
Anyway, the point of all of that is — today was a day of reflection rather than one of actually getting any writing done. If had money, I would probably have gone somewhere for a personal Writer’s Retreat. But, alas, I’m very, very poor so all I did was just stare out into space.
I still, however, plan on doing a lot of reading before the day — weekend? — is over I don’t like running hot and I’ve found that just giving myself a pause for a day or so does wonders for how fast I write when I can look over the novel with fresh eyes.
It will be interesting to see if what happens if I actually live up to my “potential” and write a breakout pop thriller. Given my social media footprint could easily be discerned as that of a drunk crank, it’s possible no matter how strong the story itself is that I will ultimately not get published because of ME.
I try not to dwell too much on that, however.
