by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m beginning to sense a trend with prospective editors of my first novel — they’re just not interested.
This is curious because my little group of friends and relatives who are reading the latest iteration of the novel don’t, at least, hate it. They’re at least willing to humor me enough to keep reading, hopefully to its conclusion.
Now, this difference is beginning to fill me with a lot of navel gazing and angst. What is going on?
Well, one theory I have is the story is, in fact, “racy” and the liberal white women that I keep talking to about editing the novel can’t stand how “racy” it is, especially in the context of me being a smelly CISgendered white male. I suppose it doesn’t help anything that I am drawn to cute young women to work with as my editor. Maybe a dude wouldn’t be so touchy about a lot of sex in a novel?
For me, the key issue is that I have, at last, finished a novel that tells a coherent story. So, in that sense, I have succeeded in what I set out to do a number of years ago. What’s more, I now know how *I* develop and write a novel.
So, one idea I have is to keep searching for someone to edit the novel but with the understanding that this novel could very well never be published. As such, I am feeling a lot of pressure to throw myself into the scifi novel I’ve come up with.
It’s built from the ground up to be as marketable as possible and in my mind, at least, has a minimal amount of sex in it. With that in mind, I’ve begun to recalculate in my mind the chronology of events going forward. I have to prepare myself for the possibility that it won’t be until about a year from now before I begin to query the scifi novel because, well, lulz, cute, young liberal white women don’t like all the “racy” sex in my first novel.
And, of course, all of this is happening in the context of the potential collapse of Western Civilization starting in late 2024, early 2025 because of fucking Donald Trump. But I can just stare at the ceiling for months and months to see what is going to happen on that front.
I have to press forward.
