by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Because of how “racy” my mystery-thriller is, I’ve finally decided to work on a backup novel. The novel is a scifi novel with a pandemic element to it. As I’ve said before, it’s a pretty obvious way to talk about pandemics — at least in my opinion — so I keep expecting to wake up and read in Variety or The Hollywood Reporter that a movie with the exact same premise has started production.
But I really like the idea and it gives me a sense of insurance against my main novel being too “racy’ to ever get published. I have a few other novel ideas to pivot to if disaster strikes and even the scifi novel I’m working on is somehow co-oped by someone else.
One key thing that I’ve learned working on the mystery-thriller is you have to have a proactive protagonist. Too often in the past, I’ve had very passive protagonists, which has made for a dull story. So, now that I am very aware of how important having a proactive hero is, the scifi novel concept is moving a lot faster.
At the moment, I’m just at the treatment stage for the scifi novel. But things are moving a fairly nice clip. I’m beginning to struggle with the second half of the novel at the moment. And once the treatment is done, I think the next step is to do some rough character studies so I won’t be where I am now with the main novel where I have to reverse engineer character development in a story that is pretty much all plot.
I have developed a hero for the scifi novel that resembles me, which is bad because you’re not supposed to have a “proxy you” in the novel when you write one. And, yet, at the moment the elements that are similar to me work, so, lulz, why bother fixing them.
And I’m still pretty early in the process.
I continue to worry that all of this will be moot because of the looming possibility of a “perfect storm” involving the so-called political Fourth Turning and a technological Petite Singularity.
But while there’s life, there’s hope.
