by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Oh boy. This is an instance where being a smelly CIS white male isn’t exactly the most helpful. I have come up with a really interesting plot point for this novel — a woman who doesn’t see herself as gay having a torrid relationship with a young woman who is a free spirit — and every once in a while I do a gut check and worry the “woke cancel culture mob” will freak the fuck out that I’ve done such a thing.
I hope to write a novel as interesting as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
This particular element of the story is fun and provides a lot of comic relief to the story and also keeps the story going at a fast clip. And, yet, I’m not a 20something undocumented transgender woman writing about such things, but a smelly middle-aged MAN.
But, lulz, I never what I’m supposed to do and this is where the Muse has taken me for this novel and I guess I’m stuck with it.
At least I’m really, really self-conscious about what I’ve gotten myself into. I understand why me writing about lesbian stuff from a female POV as a smelly CIS white male might be….a problem. The way some young women talk on Tik-Tok, I have no right to exist as a human being, much less as an aspiring male author who occasionally writes from a female POV.
I wish I had a wife or a girlfriend to be my Reader. Then, at least, I would have woman to tell me when maybe I have taken things too far, even if you give me the benefit of the doubt. And, yet, Stieg Larsson wrote some pretty crazy shit in his novels and they were a success.
