by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I hope to sprint my way through the last 40,000 odd words that will make up the third act of this first draft of my first novel. That’s way too many words, given that I’m at just about the ~100,000 word mark right now. But this is the first draft and, as such, I’m giving myself a lot more leeway than I might otherwise do.
I have a massive amount of work to do between the first and second drafts, as well. But for me the issue is I’m in a pretty good position to make the second draft of this novel sufficiently professional in quality that when the beta readers are finally given it, I feel confident I won’t embarrass myself too much.
The beta reader process is going to be a whole different mindset for me to be in once I get that far. It’s going to be a real struggle to get anyone — and I mean ANYONE — to actually be willing to read the whole thing and give me the type of input I need. I may be forced to save up the money necessary to get an editor to do a run through of the beta draft to get it up to snuff.
If nothing else, this first draft is interesting, intriguing. It’s a real easy read with no literary aspirations at all. It’s meant, as I keep saying, an Old Brown Shoe for anyone who has read the original Stieg Larsson trilogy.
I really need to do a lot of reading, that’s for sure. That’s the only way I’m going to flesh out the second draft so it has an air of professionalism to it, the type your average reader of a pop novel will expect. I’ve come up with a very extensive universe and the issue is to put more of what I have in my mind about what’s going on on the page.
Anyway, I think it’s going to be really funny if, after talking about and writing about this first novel for a few years I actually to manage to produce something good enough that it gets published. But I still have a ways for that to happen. But I am still on track to query during the fall 2023 querying season.
