by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I have an event on April 19th that I would like to have a version of the manuscript of the novel good enough to hand to people in person. As such, that’s my new hard deadline — April 19th.
I hope to write a heroine as interesting as Lisbeth Salander.
Now, the version that I want to hand to people is still going to be pretty rough relative to, say, a literary agent, but it’s going to be good enough, coherent enough, that I won’t embarrass myself by physically handing a copy of the novel to people.
As such, I have a lot of work to do in a short amount of time. Things are kind of falling apart in the second half of this novel at the moment because I’m reusing a lot of copy from previous versions that don’t quite make any sense unless you’re, well, me.
My heroine has a sleeve tattoo same same, but different to the one that Megan Fox now sports — even though I thought of the idea first!
So the first step is for me to finish SOMETHING. That is going to require me to sprint in the next few days. Once I finish A Draft, I can use what time I have left to go through and rewrite scenes to give the story some consistency. Having such a tight deadline forces me to not only focus but to make some decisions that maybe I wouldn’t have made otherwise.
After the April 19th draft is handed out, I can go back to work improving the novel with a lot more time to sort out nit-picky shit that I might have ignored simply to get something into people’s hands.
