by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
My computer is going to kick the bucket at any moment it seems, but in the meantime I’m trying to write as much as I can on the third draft of my first novel. I continue to do all of this in a vacuum so I have no idea if this novel is anywhere near as good as I think it is.
I have come up with a very ‘Barry’-like dichotomy for my heroine. And, yet, I just don’t know. I don’t know if women — who read a lot of novels — will like the surreal situation I’ve come up with or if it will only lead them to throw the book across the room.
And that doesn’t even begin to address the issue of me being a male author frequently writing from a female POV. When I started working on this novel several years ago, I just decided, in general, to do what Stieg Larsson did, not knowing there had been a “woke cancel culture” shift in audience expectations.
Ugh. Sometimes, you just can’t win. I can’t help how old I am. I can’t help that I’m a CIS white male. Not everyone can be a undocumented transgendered woman.
I’m really feeling my mortality these days. I have a limited amount of time to put up or shut up on the novel front. It doesn’t help that I have a growing problem with one of my teeth just as my computer is just about to crash on me. It’s definitely interesting how everything seems to decide to fail at the same time after a long time of nothing changing.
So, we’ll see. It could be that I will spend all this time on my first novel, only to drop dead of a heart attack like Larsson did.
