by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
While I continue to try to read as much as possible — especially about John Lennon — the siren call of writing the third draft has proven too powerful. I’ve begun to write the third draft about a month sooner than I had planned. But this has more to do with the abject failure — to date — of the Beta Reader process than anything else.
I also know that I continue to be in something of a surreal situation where I have “all the time in the world” to work on a novel and I just don’t know how long that is going to last. All good things must come to an end, and all that. I really need to focus on writing a third draft so I can turn around and have a professional or semi-professional read it.
All that will take time, so, as such, I think I’m probably looking at about a year from now before I can really start to query in ernest. Which, of course, will be just about the time either AI takes over all entertainment and / or The Fourth Turning happens and changes the entire context of everything I’ve been working on.
But if we do just slip peacefully into autocracy as I suspect, then the audience for this project will increase significantly, given that I use subtext to rant about how much I hate MAGA and extremism.
Anyway. I really need to focus. I need to get my shit together so I can actually not just finish this first novel but also begin to work out the specifics of the other five novels in the project. My age is really beginning to sink in and I know that even if I stick the landing, the first novel in this series probably won’t hit bookshelves until I’m in my mid-50s.
This generates no end of existential angst.
