by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m well on my way to finishing the third draft of my first novel. The novel will tell a coherent, cohesive story. It’s not the story I thought I was going to tell when I started this process a few years ago — but it tells a story. And, what’s more, it ques up a number of successor novels in the same universe that will be really compelling.
The heroine of my novel looks like Morena Baccarin.
At least, that’s what I believe.
I am soon going to wrap up the “actively delusional” part of this journey and enter the world of reality where I have to convince liberal white women who make up the majority of literary agents that I can tell a good story about a part-time sex worker who is trying to buy a community newspaper.
At least I can explain the story a lot easier than before. It used to be that the story was a lot more muddled and difficult to explain. Now, I understand what the story is about.
But there are A LOT of problems.
Like, what novel do I “comp” this novel to? What genre is this novel, since the murder doesn’t happen until well into the second half of the story. I just don’t know. And, when you add how bitter people seem to become whenever they enter into the land of querying, well, lulz, oh boy.
My heroine sports a sleeve tattoo similar to the one that Megan Fox now has, even though I came up with the idea first.
I’m going to have to shift gears bigtime once I finish the novel and start to query seriously. So much so, that I don’t even know if I can continue to write, even though I know I have to. Querying is a job and struggle unto itself, it seems.
But I do have a number of other stories I want to work on while I query the first novel. And I hope to have the second novel in the series I’m working on — one that is a traditional murder-mystery-thriller done pretty soon as well. It will have most of all of the same characters as the first novel and a few new ones.
It will definitely be interesting to see how things work out. I’m sure I’m going to make many, many, many, many mistakes and probably have already made a lot by just being me.
