by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
While I continue to drift towards my goal like always, I definitely feel pretty good about the current state of the third draft of my first novel. I’ve come up with a unique, interesting protagonist that I feel readers will want to spend 100,000 words worth of time with.
The more I think about it, the more I see my heroine as looking something like a mixture of Olivia Munn and Nicole Scherzinger, only in her early 30s. I am trying so fucking hard to be as empathetic as possible to the female experience to the point that I, in a very self-conscious manner, try to find every opportunity to pass the fucking Bechdel Test — a test I fucking hate.
My dream is that the women in the audience of this novel will be taken aback that a smelly boy of all people managed to write from a female point of view without making a fool out of himself. This is an issue that I really weighs a great deal on me.
And, yet, I know that, by definition, there will be Tik-Tok influencers who will get the “ick” from my novel simply because I’m a man writing from a female POV — no matter how well I may ultimately show my understanding of the concerns of women.
We can’t all be transgender undocumented Mexicans, you know. Some of us are just white CIS men who want to tell a good story to an audience, regardless of what your gender might be. But that’s not how the woke cancel culture mob sees thing.
They seem me as a white CIS-gendered male who drinks too much and occasionally doesn’t follow the media narrative. Excuse me, I’m tipsy and a little annoyed.
Anyway, things are going really well. I *think* I may have figured out the structure of the first chapter of the third draft after about two weeks of struggle.
