by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
While things are getting a lot better with the first act, I continue to feel like I’m spinning my wheels, treading water. Usually this happens when, after a great deal of thinking, I sit down to write and realize the sequence of events I laid out in the outline just doesn’t work.
So, I throw everything up in the air and start again.
But I’m hoping that this latest iteration is going to stick. I’m 13 days in and haven’t gotten out of the first act. But I’m hoping to buckle down this weekend and really do whatever it takes to get out of the first act. I have a lot of scenes from the first draft already written that I feel are stable enough to use in the second draft.
And, yet, I am sufficiently insecure about such things that I whenever slack I have in the process of writing the second draft I will use it to rewrite first draft scenes to make them strong enough to handle the Beta Reader process. That, at least, is the dream.
I continue to feel a lot of dread about not only the Beta Reader process, but the whole issue of querying an agent. My only way to square that particular circle is to really throw myself into a second and third creative track when the time comes.
Even if I stick the landing, the querying process as a first time novelist could be a long — A LOT — longer than I’d prefer at my age. But I started when I started and I can’t really change that. It just so happened that I was 25 years later than everyone else being in a position to not only have something to say but being willing to put in the hard work to make my dream a reality.
I don’t know what to tell you. At least I get my late bloomer nature honest — my paternal grandmother became a painter later in life. Her aspirations were not nearly as lofty as mine are, but the sentiment is similar.
But it’s really beginning to register that I’m in the put-up-or-shut-up stage of things. I can no longer just drift in the general direction of my goal of being a published author. I have to force myself outside of my comfort zone and have some hard metric that I expect of myself if I’m ever going to finish this second draft in the allotted time.
