by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
A number of things have come together that give me renewed confidence with the third draft of the novel I’m working on. The last few days, since an editor I was hoping to work with begged off after they read this blog, I have been feeling a great deal of existential angst.
But things have changed for the better.
I feel a lot better. One thing that happened is a random woman I gave the first three chapters of the novel to read it and didn’t say she hated it. In fact, she said, “keep writing.” That makes me feel a lot better. I was really sweating it there for a little while because I gave it to her and she had not emailed me back any reaction.
Another is, I was reminded yet again that just because ONE person thinks I’m too much of a freaky weirdo to work with, doesn’t mean that it’s totally impossible for me to find someone, somewhere who will find my kookiness endearing.
Or something. Something like that. I just can hinge everything on rejection from one person — even if I fear she does give me some sense of what “liberal white women” might think of the premise of the novel. As I’ve said before, I got no beef with liberal white women, I just see it as something of a running gag.
Anyway. With all that in mind, I’m going to throw myself back into writing the novel. *I* really like the story I’ve come up with, even if some members of the woke cancel culture mob (wink) might be aghast that my heroine is a part-time stripper. Ok, I get it. But I do think that if you give the story a chance — which I know is, unto itself, a big ask — that you will enjoy it.
Having said all that, I am really going to work hard to use some of my spare time to develop the backup scifi novel that I have been working on some. It’s really cool and I just don’t feel comfortable putting ALL my creative eggs in the lone basket of the main novel.
I’m not getting any younger.
But the key thing remains — I have to prepare myself for rejection –a lot of it — as I get closer to the querying process.
