by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
If I don’t start to be more proactive with this novel, it’s going to be a year from now and I’m still, STILL be drifting towards my destination. It could be fall 2024, the United States may be about to descend into fucking political violence and chaos and I STILL will not have begun the querying process for my first novel.
So, I’m going to try — TRY — to be a lot more self-conscious about such things starting today. I may try to set some specific metrics for how many scenes I write so I can get past the first few chapters where I’ve been spinning my wheels for way too long. I hoped to start the third draft on September 1st and here I am October 1st not even in the second act.
I got some feed back on the second draft. He pretty much said he didn’t find the novel very believable. As such, I’ve added some more scenes to an already overstuffed first act in an effort to connect the novel closer to reality. To give the audience some more context as to how this unusual situation might have occurred in such a small town.
But he’s the only person who has mentioned that problem. But he is a “normal” person, so I give his comments a lot more credence to some extent because it gives me some sense of what a casual reader of the mystery-thriller genre might think of the novel.
I have also added a number of scenes to the first act of the novel in hopes of slowly seducing the audience into the world I’ve created while also making them fall in love with the cast of characters I’ve come up with. I believe the additional scenes — and there are a number of them — will really hook the reader so they are willing to finish the novel when The Big Event happens.
The novel is structured — to a certain extent — much like Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire. It’s not a one-to-one, but he definitely gave me some guidance as to one way I could plot things out.
