by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
While people have repeatedly attempted to peg me as someone with an “addictive” personality, in reality I have an OBSESSIVE personality. And, as such, I am completely consumed by this novel.
It’s all I think about.
Morning, noon and night, I obsess over every aspect of the novel from structure, to theme to character development to you name it. It’s all I think about. And now, after two years, my obsession is finally beginning to bear fruit. It appears as though within a few days I will lock down “Part One” of the novel and head into the actual story itself.
Part One is pretty much everything from the beginning of the novel to the inciting incident, though a lot goes in these pages as well. It’s not like people are just staring at each other on a smoke break. But anyway. I still hope to wrap the first draft up by my birthday.
In fact, if the first draft is as good as I hope it is, I can show it to people the way I might show a second draft. I might be able to skip a step in that regard. Again, this novel was born out of my absolute, white hot rage at the Trump Administration.
It will be interesting to see what the context of all of that will be once Trump is actually out of office. Hopefully that happens peacefully and we don’t, like, have a fucking civil war. The novel I’m developing and — finally — writing is really, really good.
I look at the outline and then the first three chapters and I’m shocked that at what I’ve managed to pull off. I feel bad that it’s taken me two years to get this point, but at least I’m here.
