by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m kind of in a little bit of a period of reflection of late about the passion project novel I’ve been working on for a few years now. I know what I want to do and how I want to do it — but in a hazy, macro way. The specifics are really beginning to wear me down.
My heroine has a sleeve tattoo on her left arm like Megan Fox apparently does.
So, I’m doing what I always do in such situations — I’m doing a lot of daydreaming.
I hope to snap out of it sooner rather than later, but there is something else that is kind of causing me some problems — what happens after the 2024 election. It could be that I’m really, really over reacting and over thinking things. I do that a lot — that’s kind of my thing.
But, yet, even though I know that to be the case, I still find myself sort of locked up on a creative basis because I just don’t know what the state of the country will be in a few weeks. And, yet, just by writing about it in a blog post like this helps me a lot.
It is just going to take a little bit of time for me to figure out the specifics of how I’m going to improve the novel’s stakes. I’ve decided to use scifi to make the novel a lot more compelling. So, rather than just be a character study about a woman obsessed with owning a small town newspaper, a big chunk of the novel is going to be about some cool, timely scifi issues.
The aim is that doing so will really make the overall novel more compelling. While I really like what I’ve come up with already in regards to the novel, it seems possible the novel is a little TOO personal in nature. And that doesn’t even begin to address the most controversial element of the novel — the whole stripper issue.
I really like the stripper element to the novel, but whenever I mention that part of the novel to a prospective beta reader, they just blanch. But I believe if you actually read the novel and see that part of the novel in context that one won’t be turned off — too much.
But it’s because of things like that that I continue to be determined to work on a backup scifi novel as well, one that is pretty straightforward in its marketability. Yet, because of how different it is, it is taking me longer than I expected to get it off the ground.
The ultimate goal is to get something, anything finished to the point where I can query next fall. Wish me luck.
