by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Very soon — no later than tomorrow afternoon — I’m going to sit down and start to flesh out the second half of the alpha release of the third draft of my first novel. Things *should* move pretty fast now. I hope. I know this story really well now — it’s about a part-time stripper’s obsession with owning a small town community newspaper.
Corrie Yee is the basic phenotype of the heroine of my first novel.
Now, obviously, this is…an unusual concept for a novel. But, lulz, I’m weird, too, so fuck you. (wink.) I get the sense that it’s possible that all my very conspicuous talking about the status of this novel is generating a teeny-tiny amount of attention / buzz somewhere deep in the bowels of the infotainment-industrial complex.
Nothing serious, but someone in Greece — obviously someone on vacation — made a very pointed Google search that found some old copy of the novel that I posted here on this blog. Also, there was a picture of the phenotype of my heroine — Corrie Yee.
My heroine has a sleeve tattoo similar to this one that Megan Fox now sports, even though I came up with the idea first.
I have no idea what any of this means. It could be good — maybe some VIP finds my novel idea intriguing — and it could be bad — a movie producer is going to “steal” my concept and then next thing you know, A24 is coming out with a movie that is pretty much the same story as the one I’ve been working on for so long.
That latter idea is extremely paranoid on my part — I mean, lulz, no one cares about anything I have to say. And I don’t know, while I suppose it’s *possible* my idea is good enough to hang a screenplay on without all the fleshing out I’ve done for the novel….I don’t know. I just don’t know.
I hope to write a heroine as intriguing as Lisbeth Salander.
It could go either way.
All I know is I’m going to keep working on this fucking novel until something absolutely, on a concrete basis, blocks me so it’s impossible and I have to piviot to something else.
Even if someone was going to write a screenplay based on what little I’ve posted about the actual premise of this novel online, it would take them time to write and produce the movie. That would give me some wiggle room, I suppose. But I vacillate widely between thinking obviously I’m doomed and thinking there’s no downside to what’s going on.
Here is my angry rant about what happened to me in Seoul in staring in late 2006, which inspires a lot of the novel I’m writing.
So.
Having said all that, I hope to zoom through the second half of the novel in the coming days. Once I finish the alpha release of the third draft, I’m going to take a HUGE FUCKING BREATH and game out canon and character development. The beta release of the third draft will be the one that I either give to an editor or just using to start querying. (After I let some people read it, of course.)
But things should move really fast now. Really, really fast. So fast that there is still a pretty good chance that I might even finish a SECOND novel in the series this year.
