by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Oh boy.
I feel really sad, like a cute girl I was interested in told me to “scram.”
My nightmare about this novel has happened — someone did due diligence on me by reading this blog and didn’t like what they saw. This has really rattled my cage because it’s exactly a fear I’ve had for some time.
I called it.
I called what might be a problem when I start to talk to people outside of my delusional bubble — the moment they look into who I am, they will get turned off.
This event has focused my mind. I am going to keep going with the novel, but my expectations have been adjusted considerably. AND it hits home that I need to start working on a backup plan. The scifi novel I have rolling around in my head seems a lot more important now.
I need a novel that is a lot more marketable and fits modern reading conventions as opposed to one that is modeled after what Stieg Larsson did. Hopefully, I can juggle the two different projects without too much trouble.
But the key take away from this debacle is the issue of expectation. It’s clear I’ve shot my self in the foot making jokes about liberal white women. When actual liberal white women read this blog and see my silliness they take it a lot more seriously than it was intended and are repelled.
As such, I have to go into the next step of this novel writing journey with my eyes wide open. There is a very good chance that I am going to fail in an astonishing, catastrophic manner — because of who I am.
I don’t quite know what to make of this. The thing I’ve assumed would happen — that my freaky weirdo personality would turn off people who read this blog — has actually happened. This is a very alarming development because just like my age, I can’t help who I am.
I wear my heart on my sleeve and am 100% extroverted. So, generally, if I’m thinking about it, I write about it — somewhere — in a public manner. This unsettling development is a ping from what I should expect when I try to query this novel.
As I keep saying, the fact that I’m too weird for some people — and my novel may be too “racy” for liberal white women because it has a heroine who is a part-time stripper…is very unsettling.
And it’s not just that. Come to think of it, I realize I’ve also waded into the trans right movement controversy and there’s such a strict orthodox about that that I probably violated some really important ideological point at some point and didn’t even realize it. Ugh.
So. The take away is I have to adjust my expectations going forward about what may happen when I query this novel. ALSO, I really, really need to use some of my time on my scifi novel. The scifi novel doesn’t have any strippers and is just a pretty basic scifi novel that will adhere to the conventions
