by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Age wise, I’m just about to enter the sweet spot of getting querying and getting this first novel in a projected six novel project published. I’m a few months away from turning 50 and it’s kind of put up or shut up time.
The key issue is soon my little dream, my little creative baby is going to have to take its first steps, as it were, in the guise of finding someone willing to actually spend money not just on me, but the novel itself. Given that generally I live in oblivion and no one takes me seriously — way too many people think I’m nothing more than a drunk crank, apparently — if I can stick the landing on this novel and actually get a literary agent….WOW.
Add to this that I’m definitely not getting any younger and I need to gird my loins creatively. I need to take this whole thing a lot more seriously and try to sprint — to some extent — over the course of the next few months so I can wrap up a solid second draft by sometime in spring 2023.
That will give me a few months to have beta readers look over the manuscript and maybe — just maybe — save up the money necessary to find an editor of some sort.
Then I reach the even more perilous stage of things in which I try to querying a literary agent. Then if I can get past that gatekeeper, they try to sell the novel to a publishing house. Then if get past THAT gatekeeper I have to cool my heels for as much as a year while post-production happens.
I could die of a heart attack or we could all be running around in a panic, trying to avoid bombs as part of a Second American Civil War by the time all those miracles manage to happen.
Of course, we’re past the event horizon for autocracy, civil war or miliary junta. All I can do is hurry up and try to get at lease one novel published before the “Fourth Turning” of late 2024 – early 2025.
But, in the end, you just have to believe. That’s all I’ve got.
Keep the faith.
