by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Today is has been a good day for the novel. The beginning is a lot stronger than it has been since I started this third draft. It is becoming more and more clear that this novel is very, very ambitious relative to my actual storytelling ability. There was just too much going on at first.
But now I’ve fixed that problem by staggering major developments in the story to the point that things slowly come to a boil at the end of the first act. I’m very pleased. I’ve also realized that I can’t just keep using my ad hoc, arbitrary rules derived from attempting to reverse engineer Stieg Larsson. I have to be willing to do what serves the purposes of telling a good story.
So, things are going pretty well. The story still has some pretty risky elements to it, given that I’m a smelly CIS white male who some people within the “woke cancel culture mob” believe doesn’t have the right to tell any story, much less a story about a “sex worker who solves a mystery.”
But, you know, lulz, slings and arrows and all that.
I hope to methodically write a few thousand words during the course of the day. I can’t keep spinning my wheels forever. Once I establish the first few chapters, things should move really, really, fast.
