by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I continue to grow more and more nervous about this novel the better it becomes and the more serious I grow about getting it published in a traditional manner. My overarching fear from the start of this endeavor was to not embarrass myself.
My fear is that for all my reverse engineering of stripper life that I just won’t get some elements of it right and people will laugh at me. But, despite this fear, I have something going for me — “suspension of disbelief” and post-production.
The whole heroine-is-part-time-stripper element of the story is more about character development than it is trying to be realistic. It’s something weird and unusual about the character that — hopefully — will catch people’s attention and make them want to wade through a lot of not a lot going on in the first act before we get a murder.
Also, all I have to do is just get within shouting distance of being right — there is a good chance that if I get an agent and the novel sells that any really egregious errors in the stripper part of the story will be fixed. At least, I hope.
Anyway, things are going well — so far — with my latest attempt to lock down the first three chapters of the first act. I’m hoping that once that happens, I can zoom through a big chunk of the novel — at least until around the midpoint — and I can feel some satisfaction that things are actually working well again.
My dream is to have an heroine as interesting and compelling as Lisbeth Salander.
I continue to feel an urge to start development on a few scifi concepts I have rolling around in my head. Now that I know how to write a novel — or at least the way I do — I want to have a few backup stories to use in case something happens and I can’t use the mystery-thriller.
