by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
For a long, long time, I dreamed of writing six novels in the same universe, set in the same small town. But just recently I’ve managed to cut that down to four. But I’ve changed the first novel in the series so much that it’s going to be interesting to see what happens to the other three.
Naomi Scott would be perfect to play Union Pang, the heroine of my first novel in any movie adaptation.
I finally — finally? — have some sense of what happens in the first novel to the point that I can begin to game out the rest of the novels. I have the beginning of the second novel fleshed out in outline form, but for one thing — the hero, the son of Union Pang now grown up — is too passive.
But the premise of the novel — we see the daughter of the murder victim in the first novel try to escape a cult — is really fun and cool. I can do a lot with it. I imagine this young woman to be a Zendaya-type woman.
By the time I actually finish everything and it sells, however, I’m afraid Zendaya herself will have aged out. It’s going to be awhile before I get to the point where I can really take working on the other three novels in the series seriously. But it is fun to daydream, I suppose.
The last two novels in the project are the closest to being a direct homage to Stieg Larsson’s work. I worked and worked and worked on the two novels (which are one big story connected by a cliffhanger) for ages and then Trump lost the first time and I realized I had all this backstory I wanted to write about.
While Zendaya would be perfect to play my version of Lisbeth Salander, she’ll probably be too old by the time I actually finish and sell the novel.
That’s how I ended up writing a my first novel being set in the mid-90s. It otherwise would be a prequel, but I wanted to start at the very beginning of the life of my Lisbeth Salander-type figure. She’s meant to be an American Lisbeth Salander and the way I’m going about it, you, the reader, will get to see first hand what the weird life of the character was like.
Because the four novels are set over the course of 25 years, I can do some really interesting things with the characters on a macro basis.
