by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
At this specific moment, I’m editing and reworking the first act of the second draft of my first novel. Things are going pretty well other than the fact that I fear the novel is going to be too fucking long.
My fear about this is so strong that it’s really encouraging me to also work on one of the other, scifi, novel concepts I have rolling around in my head. The idea is, the more novels I have to query when the time comes, the more likely one of them will get published.
But it’s going to be really tough to pry my attention away from this novel I’ve been working on for so long. Things are going really well with it and the moment it seems like what I may find myself doing is simply editing a lot of writing I’ve already done so it is a cohesive whole that beta readers can read without me embarrassing myself in the process.
Actually going through and reading the novel now is really helping me to plug holes and to see logical inconsistencies that would otherwise make beta readers chuckle if they saw them. So, in a sense, things are movie really fast.
I still believe I can wrap up the second draft by the spring so I can begin the beta reader process no later than, say June 2023. I continue to be in a very unique situation that I know just can’t last forever.
Something, one way or another, is going to change and when that change happens, I might get thrown off my feet for a little while as I adjust to the new conditions. To that extent, I sort of feel like I have a deadline of, well, NOW.
As my 50th birthday approaches, I definitely feel a lot of existential angst. I need to just shut up and write. But, alas, I’m 100% extroverted so that’s not really an option.
