by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
After years of my heroine being a fluid “idea” or “mood’ I’ve finally begun to get a handle on who she is. She a little younger than I thought she would be and she’s also a lot more colorful and interesting. She definitely is no longer just an female, Amerasian version of me, but rather her whole different thing.
A lot of this has come from reading a biography of John Lennon. I should have done a lot of this research some time ago, lulz. Anyway, I still think having her obsessed with Lennon will really be a useful hook for not just audiences, but any eventual marketing of the novel.
I’m really leaning into every possible element of John Lennon I can when it comes to the nature of my heroine’s personality and worldview. Given that the more I read about Lennon, the more I’m reminded of how problematic he is, my heroine’s obsession with him definitely provides some much-needed distance between her personality and mine.
The additional ~20,000 words I’m adding to the novel are dealing a lot with onboarding, world building and character development. I’m trying my hardest to actually show things on the page to the reader so they can center themselves and actually care about the characters when shit goes down later in the story. That’s the vision, at least .
Anyway. Because I’m writing the third draft from scratch, I have a lot of opportunities to flesh out the heroine’s personality in ways I did not before. And I continue to find the idea that she is obsessed with Lennon very intriguing and a way to make her really unique in a way that the audience will find appealing.
