I have a lingering concern about the name of woman who will be the center of this six novel project when the last novel is finished. I think a lot about what a great name “Lisbeth Salander” is because her first name is a variation on a pretty traditional name and her last name evokes the image of a small creature that’s quick on its feet: a salamander.
Lisbeth Salander
With that in mind, I have toyed with coming up with a slightly different name for my eventual heroine. That, combined with a minor risk of there being a perceived conflict with someone else’s IP, makes me think again and again if I can do better with a different name.
And, yet, the name I’ve come up inhabits a murky gray zone of IP because there is more than one way to look at it. I really like the name I’ve come up with, really grown very fond of it and I’m going to keep using it until something happens that makes it clear I have to go with something else.
My fear, of course, is everything will be great…then the IP problem will surface because the novel is a success and that will make continuing the rest of the series far more problemlatic.
But, for the moment, I think I’m overthinking things. There just is no reason for me to change the name at the moment and I think if I get anywhere near selling the first novel the issue of kinda sorta getting close to someone else’s IP will be addressed and decided one way or another.
Even though I love the character’s name, I’ll change it at the drop of a hat if it becomes an obstacle. I just hope I’m not too late in the process to easily change it.
The core issue with Lisbeth Salander is, well, she’s not very nice or endearing. And to have her done right, she needs to really alienate the audience — the definitive anti-heroine. Then there is James Bond, who is, as a character, in something of a transitional phase.
Alicia Vikander
So, work with me here, why not have a three picture cross-over between Lisbeth Salander and James Bond? Have, for three pictures, Bond and Salander do some sort of twisted cat and mouse thing, where they both go after SPECTER for some reason.
Something that would cause them to hate each other but ultimately have sex in some cool way. Or something. Something that would make the audience go ooo and ahhh as the story progressed. As for who to play Salander in such a hypothetical three picture cross over, I think Alicia Vikander would be the perfect new version of Salander.
My favorite James Bond.
Now, some context.
If you REALLY wanted to get edgy, you still make Bond’s foe a woman, but you make her an Indian woman name Raj who hates Bond and all things British because of the legacy of colonialism.
Anyway, I think it would be cool to pit Salander against the new Bond for three movies. I think it would be a way to sort of ender a very interesting, but unlikeable character — Salander — to a new generation of audiences.
I’m re-writing this first novel AGAIN, and I’m being really, really careful with this scene I’m working on where I describe my female protagonist. It’s so hard. I don’t want to look like either a leering, dirty old man or someone who is so clueless about how women might think about their bodies that female audience members throw the book across the room.
It’s tough. Really tough.
But I have decided to try to read other examples of men describing women — specifically, of course, Stieg Larsson depicting Lisbeth Salander describing herself from her own POV. It is helping, even if I keep being reminded at how much more talented Larsson obviously was than me.
And, yet, I can feel my storytelling and writing ability getting better. Larsson was, after all, a successful Swedish journalist when he wrote the Millennium series. As such, I can only be so hard on myself.
Things are getting so much better with this story overall. Each time I start a new iteration of this first novel, it gets just a little bit better. And there have been many, many versions of this story so far. An embarrassing number.
I just have to keep believing in myself. I have to stay focused.
I’m feeling just about ready to start writing again on this first novel. The plot now has a nice symmetry to it and the ending both wraps up the story and gives a nice lead-in to the beginning of the next novel.
While I continue my pause in writing, I’m going to try to sketch out the plots of the other four novels as best I can. At the moment, most of the novels have a beginning and an end, but not much in the middle. The last two novels are the most thought out, but they also have way too much plot and i have to figure out a way to pare all that plot back some.
But I’m feeling a lot of hope because of how well the first novel’s plot is beginning to shape up. I have it in me to flesh out the other novels’ plots, I just have to be patient and believe in myself.
As I keep saying, the emotional core of these novels is one woman’s love for a young woman who grows up to be my personal interpolation of the Lisbeth Salander trope. You get to see, over the course of a series of novels, the major events that lead up to the motives of the young woman in the last two novels. I find the whole project very compelling.
At the moment, the woman at the heart of this project looks a lot like Olivia Munn in my imagination, while the young woman who grows up to be my personal hot take on the Lisbeth Salander trope looks a lot like Zendaya. But I’m really just daydreaming at this point. I’m a very visual person and if the learning curve for screenwriting wasn’t so difficult, I probably would have gone into screenwriting instead of novel writing.
Yet, of course, I’m not going to live forever. I really need to get something done. I can’t just keep daydreaming about finishing these five novels, I’m going to have to actually do it soon enough. Otherwise, I’ll just be a dude who died of a broken heart over a failed magazine for expats in Seoul.
And I simply refuse for that to be what people think of me, if I have it within my power to do so.
I really need to get back to work writing .And, yet, I also want to use this pause in my writing to psyche myself up and do some of the reading I’ve neglected to do over the course of this project’s existance.
At the moment, I have a lot of hope. But the clock is ticking.
I’m just daydreaming here, but I often find myself thinking about the marketing of these five novels and how that should change the novels themselves. One issue is, as it stands, the Olivia Munn-type character is the protagonist of only two of the novels. Then her son is the protagonist for two novels and then my Lisbeth Salander-type person is the hero of the last book.
This works, at least from a creative standpoint because I see the first three novels as a trilogy and the last two novels as the beginning a new series based around my personal interpolation of the Lisbeth Salander trope.
And, yet, at the heart of these five novels is the relationship between the Olivia Munn-type character and my Lisbeth Salander type character. But I sometimes find myself struggling with how all of this would be marketed. People want a character they know they’re going to come back to once they grow familiar with it and I wonder how marketing would deal with the shift in focus over the course of the series.
I personally think I’m overthinking things. The point is to tell a series of great stories that have an overall theme to them. I can’t get too worked up about the marketing of the stories if I do a good to great job telling the individual stories. And it’s not like people’s favorite character — if she becomes one — will be missing. She’ll still be there, it’s just the focus will be on her son, and, then, later a fucked up woman about Lisbeth Salander’s age in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
Imagine Olivia Munn playing this type of character (to some extent) and that would be the protagonist two novels in this series and the series’ overall heart.
And, I want to be clear, my interpolation of the Lisbeth Salander trope is a variation on a theme. The two characters are dramatically different, to the point that, again, only for marketing purposes might their similarities be enough to highlight.
Anyway, I have a long ways to go before I have to worry about such things in real terms. I have to fucking finish an actual first draft, for Christ’s sake. But every time I get closer to a serious first draft, I get closer to not embarrassing myself.
It’s just taken much, much, much longer than I expected because apparently my storying telling ability sucked a lot more than I realized when I began this process a few years ago.
I’ve reached something of a milestone — I’ve completed something akin to a pretty decent first act of a first draft of an actual, honest-to-God thriller novel in the tradition of Stieg Larsson.
This is the point where I sheepishly admit that I have about 50 scenes for this first act, which is way too long if each scene is about 1,000 words. Your novel is supposed to be 25% first act 50% second act and 25% third act. If I held to that, I would now be looking at a novel with around 200,000 words.
There are a few solutions, given that the sweetspot for someone in my situation is 80,000 to 120,000 words. One is, the individual scenes aren’t all 1,000 words, but only average 1,000 words. The other is, the rest of the novel isn’t strictly setup the way it’s “supposed” to be and so it’s more like 40%, 40%, 20%. That’s not too bad. But right now, I’m looking at just about 80 scenes for the Second Act so…I got a problem.
Another way to look at this is, I’m just working on a first draft. I can always hack away at things when I work on the second draft. I’d rather have too much than too little copy going into the second draft so, lulz.
As I keep saying, this is the first novel in what is planned to be a five novel (3 + 2) series, with the last two novels hopefully starting an open ended series with my own interpolation of the Lisbeth Salander trope.
At least, that’s the dream.
But I still have a huge amount of work to do. As such, I’ve decided to switch gears for about a week and concentrate on doing a lot of the reading that I’ve not done since I started this project. The second act is where the police procedural element of the novel comes to the fore and I have to figure out how to at least not to embarrass myself.
So, throwing myself into reading it is. There is so much reading I have neglected. Giving myself a sold week of just reading should not only inform things going forward but also refresh me so when I throw myself back into the novel I’ll see things with clear eyes again.
It sure would help if I had a muse, or a girlfriend or a wife.
According to Star Wars lore, Obi Wan Kenobi was killed off in the original Star Wars movie because, lulz, George Lucas had nothing left for him to do. I find myself in a similar situation.
I have — out of desperation — shoehorned myself as a character into the first novel in what is meant to be a five novel series. Things are going really, really, well.
But for one thing — after the first book, I have nothing for my proxy me to do. So, I’m killing the character off before the end of the first book. In short — I plan on killing off the protagonist of my first novel off in mid-story. Or, not really mid-story — his murder will be about as strategic as I can get — but he won’t make it to the end of the novel’s plot.
Now, in the context of five novels it makes total sense — if you read all five novels then, obviously, his death is the emotional hand off to the real “heart” of the story, the woman who loves my interpolation of the Lisbeth Salander trope. But if you were to just read the first novel you might be taken aback that I killed off the hero of the story.
So, yes, it’s risky. But I hope that given that it is obvious that there are TWO heroes to the story that if I kill off one of them, people will be upset…and interested in where the story goes after that point.
Anyway. I’m sure I’m breaking like three or four fundimental rules of novel storytelling by doing such a thing, but fuck you. There is no revealed truth as to how to write a novel or a screenplay or TV — the point is to tell a great story and to entertain the audience.
I don’t know what else will happen, but that’s my goal.
So, through Twitter, I got something of a tip about a thriller series much like Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Series. I was shocked once I started reading the first book in the series — the author, while obviously influenced greatly by Larsson, has a totally different interpretation of his work.
Lisbeth Salander
While I focus on the character aspects of Lisbeth Salander et al, this other author really honed in on the action-thriller part of what he wrote. He’s far more better educated than me and relative to the metrics of normal people, the type of guy who gets invited highfalutin cocktail parties. The closest I would get to such a thing with my current background, is a street urchin with my nose smudging the restaurant’s outside window.
So, I’m taken aback at what a poor artistic interpretation this other author has — in my opinion — of what made the Millennium series a success. Or maybe “poor” is too harsh. Maybe “dramatically different” is a better sentiment. To me, the story of Lisbeth Salander is of a woman who probably would have been pretty normal but for a very surreal and tragic upbringing.
At least, that’s how I see things.
But, I can dig that someone else would look at what I read and see that it’s the action-thriller aspect of the series that kept people reading. The three books in the original series are really action packed (after you get past the first 135 pages of the first book which are dull as dirt.)
Anyway. I wish my “rival” the best. I also want to crush him creatively by being far, far more successful than he is currently. I’m a loser nobody at the moment, yes, but I have a lot of drive and think Ii can pull another rabbit out of a hat before I drop dead.
As I continue to read this thriller, I feel my sense of competitiveness kicking in. I have a fucking huge chip on my shoulder as it is when it comes to this project, to see someone else’s interpretation of Lisbeth Salander on the page is enough to get my juices flowing.
I’m beginning to get the sense that the author is really trying hard to appeal to the overlap of Lisbeth Salander and Jack Reacher fans. There’s something less-than-organic about this. To me, the point is to tell a great story with a clear vision and then, to figure out how to fit that vision within the general conventions of the genre you’re trying to fit within.
For the moment, at least, I find this novel…meh.
Something about it grates on my nerves and I have yet to pin it down. It all seems very by-the-numbers. The author is screaming on the page, “PLEASE LOVE HER, SHE’S JUST LIKE WHAT YOU REMEMBER OF LISBETH SALANDER.”
We love you, babe.
Ugh.
There are two things about Salander that make her iconic — one, she’s not very likeable, and, two, her character was fleshed out before the whole kicking ass and taking names part started. Now, obviously Larsson was gratuitous in the amount of backstory and exposition he wrote to get to that point, but the fact remains that we gradually got to know Salander.
But there is one thing I realize now — I need to make it more clear what kind of novel readers are getting into from the get-go. I just don’t have any wiggle room. I have to throw everything I have at the audience from the beginning to hook them.
I’ve picked up a thriller that’s very much in the milieu of the four novels I’m developing and writing. It’s obviously, just like my project, very influenced by Stieg Larsson’s original Millennium series. What’s interesting is how different people take different things away from the series.
This book’s author obviously is leaning into the vigilante aspect of Lisbeth Salander’s personality. The novel is very well written, and, yet, it’s sufficiently different from what I’m working on that I don’t feel that threatened. The novel is, so far, pretty much a generic thriller that wants to create an American Lisbeth Salander.
The Icon.
I want to do that, too, but my interpretation of the Salander trope is dramatically — and I mean dramatically — different. In fact, now that I’m writing four novels, for the time being Mare Of Easttown is a bigger influence than Larsson.
And, I will note, that if you study The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Salander isn’t really the hero of the story — that’s Mikael Blomkvist. The author of this book I’m reading wants to get straight into the story of his Salander-type character. And, what’s more he definitely seems to want to appeal to Jack Reacher fans, to the point that he has a quote from Lee Child in support of the book.
But a key element of Salander is she had a very weird upbringing that we gradually get to learn more about over the course of two books. With the book I’m reading now, we’re just plunged straight into the character’s vigilantism. One of the rules of thumb about writing a successful novel is, “Tell a old story in a new way or an new story in an old way.”
And, of course, there is the very real notion of “There’s nothing new under the sun.”
As such, I have to get over myself. If I was to come up with something that was completely and totally unique, a publisher wouldn’t know what to do with it marketing wise and it would turn readers off because they wouldn’t have anything to compare it to.
So, I need to chill.
It’s ok if someone has written something vaguely in the same vein as what I’m working on. It’s inevitable that someone would want to create an American Salander. For the time being, at least, it definitely seems I’m safe in continuing to develop and write these four novels. Each of the four novels is a very compelling story, enough so that I’m willing to throw my entire life into finishing them.
What’s more, the novels I’m working on are far more character driven than what I’ve read so far of this novel. From the first two chapters, it definitely seems as though the author is more concerned with the action adventure thriller elements of the Millennium series as opposed to the character elements that I find interesting.
Another thing — the thing that got me writing a novel — now novels — in the first place was my white hot rage against Trumplandia. That rage was always the thing that generated the energy necessary for me to write a novel. That need to address the bullshit of the Trump Era is another thing that definitely makes what I’m working on different than this book.
I’m obviously working against the headwinds of being older, not being formally educated in creative writing and not having gone to an Ivy League school, but lulz, fuck the haters.
You must be logged in to post a comment.