Tag: writing about writing

Hollywood Renaissance: Will The Russo-Ukrainian War Cause A Vibe Shift In Audience Appetites?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The way we’ll know if things are changing with movies is a war movie — or just a more serious movie in general — will suddenly blow up into blockbuster status out of the blue.

If the last time there was a major war in Europe is any indication, there’s a chance that we’re in for not just a War Movie Renaissance, but a Hollywood Renaissance. A portion of the Hollywood Gold Age — as I understand it — was right around 1937 – 1946.

Or, put another way, it’s possible that we’re in the middle of an entertainment vibe shift and we just don’t know it yet. Come to think of it, there were a lot of serious movies that became popular around the time of the height of the Vietnam War.

Of course, there is the risk that the exact opposite will happen — people, seeing how horrible reality is, run away into silliness and comedy. But even that would be better than the now overwrought and self-indulgent superhero movies.

And there are some caveats — because of the changes in showbiz, it could very well be the big streamers that reap the rewards of whatever vibe shift we may be about to undergo. It won’t be like the good olde days — it’s not like we’re going to leave home to go see a very good God Father 4 in the theatres.

Please give us movies that aren’t superhero movies.

The industry has changed so much that there might be a significant lag time between when it becomes clear that audience want something different than superhero movies and when Hollywood actually does anything about it. So, it could be just about when the “Great Reset” or “Fourth Turning” of 2024 – 2025 happens that we get to have a series of great movies to watch again.

All of this is very speculative. But one of my favorite quotes about Hollywood is, “Nobody knows nothing.”

Things Keep Getting Better With This First Thriller In A 5 Novel Project



by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

My pause in writing continues to provide benefits. Things are getting a lot better with the latter part of the first novel in this planned five novel project. There’s going to come a point when I’m going to use this pause to work again on developing the other novels.

I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed by this project, but that’s what I wanted. And, yet, I have to manage my expectations. There are so many things that could still go wrong. And I have to be realistic — I can’t very well will five novels into existence, and sell them, if I can’t even finish a first draft of the first novel.

I’m hoping this is my third hat trick. My first hat trick was at the VPA. My second was while I was in Seoul. I figure I can manage a third. I just have to buckle down and actually do the work.

And “doing the work” involves doing a lot of reading and re-reading. I’ve done some reading already, but I have to keep at it. I hate how fast time goes when you’re 39 and holding.

Undead Gawker & The Dog That Hasn’t Barked



by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

What a curious state of affairs. Not only is rock dead, but it seems as though snark is, too. I occasionally look at Undead Gawker and am taken aback. That’s it? Undead Gawker is extremely boring. It doesn’t have any of the spunk (or punk) of the living Gawker.

Oh well.

It makes me wonder if This Is It. No matter how many vibe shifts we may have, because of modern sensibilities — and technology — we’re just never going to have what I thought we would always have — a snarky publication of some sort that comments on the day’s events.

It could be that if it happens, it will happen in the Metaverse. Now isn’t that going to be something. I have a feeling us Poors don’t appreciate how much Silicon Valley is sitting on its hands when it comes to investments as it waits for the kinks to get out of the Metaverse.

So, here we are.

No new Late Night With David Letterman. No new Spy magazine. And no new Gawker. We just have to wait until, maybe, until we’re all being snarking virtually with no legs.

It’s all very disheartening. Even more so when I know that I have the vision to pull off a new, real reboot of Gawker, but for, well, waves hand. Everything else in my life besides vision.

Anyway. I have five novels to develop and write.

Raising The Stakes


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m taking a little bit of a pause in writing — a few days — and I’m already beginning to see results. It reminds me of how I was inspired all the time when I was in Seoul. But, then, of course, I was pretty unstable because of the pressure from being A Public Figure in the minds of my fellow expats.

The late Annie Shapiro and me back when I was a man on fire in Seoul.

But, anyway, it has occured to me that I have not really thought out the latter half of this first novel very well. It’s just not very dramatic. Things just…kind of happen. Things are wrapped up way too easily. There isn’t the necessary sturm and drang that a thriller climax deserves.

So, lulz, back to the drawing board.

I think I may have come up with a solution. It’s such a great solution, too. It not only raises the stakes, but makes the story’s climax far, far more dramatic. And, in a sense, things make a lot more sense. As it stands, the reader goes through the trouble of buying the first novel, reads all these words and then…meh? Everything is just wrapped up with no boom or bang.

Develop, develop, write, write, write

Now, at least, I have something to work with. The ending now potentially not only is far more climatic, it sets the stage for the opening scene of the next novel in the series.

I’m really going to have to stretch my writing ability, though. I will note that I’ve always wanted to be a popular writer, not a good writer. Wink.

Of Marketing These Five Thrillers


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

Olivia Munn, Call Your Agent (Maybe, Eventually?)



by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Feeling rather sheepish about this. Rather than talking about this change, I should keep it to myself. But, alas, I have no friends and no one likes me — and I’m 100% extroverted! — so, lulz, here we are.

So, the newest version of this first novel in what I hope will be a five novel series has me go back to what I had before — a female protagonist who in my imagination looks a lot like Olivia Munn. I really need to stop doing this. I really need to, like, finish the first novel so I can, if nothing else, try to get to the next step in the process — have beta readers.

But here I am, starting all over again.

And, yet, at least I’m starting from scratch for a reason. I hope to do some reading — and development — before I start writing again so when I do I’m going to knock what I do write out of the park.

That, at least is the vision.

And, yada, yada, yada, I sell the novel or novels, the series a huge success and Olivia Munn plays the heroine of these first few novels in the series. You gotta dream, man. Dreaming is free.

Vibe Shift: A New Gawker For Generation Tik-Tok



by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The Tik-Tok generation doesn’t really have a blog of its own. I’m old enough to see the progression from Late Night With David Letterman to Spy Magazine to Gawker to….uh…..nothing? And I use Tik-Tok a lot even though I’m an Old and it seem pretty obvious that Tik-Tok is Ground Zero for modern pop culture.

Julia Fox — Tik-Tok icon.

If you believe we’re in the midst of a “vibe shift” then it makes a lot of sense that the new vibe would have its own publication. It’s kind of sad that Gawker is now an undead husk of itself — even though the original version was fucking hateful and nasty before its demise.

Anyway, here’s what I would do. I would start a site that was ostensibly obsessed with Tik-Tok and the pop culture it flings off at an astonishing rate each day. But, I would also produce a lot of really interesting, serious commentary about other topics — politics, what have you. You get The Youngs hooked on this new blog by taking Tik-Tok deadly seriously, then prepare them for the Adult World by presenting them with hot takes on what’s going on in the broader world.

And, if I was involved, I would occasionally throw curve balls involving doing something silly with Julia Fox around New York City or whatever. Or maybe the occasional sexxy snap of this or that celebrity simply to be ornery. The issue is — do anything not to be meh. Not to be boring. The whole reason the blog would exist would be to provoke a response of some sort.

As best I can tell, Generation Tik-Tok doesn’t have its own Gawker at the moment. Of course, there is a risk that, lulz, by definition Generation Tik-Tok doesn’t want it’s own Gawker-like blog and fuck you.

But it is something to think about.

Generation Tik-Tok & A Vision For A New Gawker-Like Blog



By Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Now, I’m not saying that I would be involved in this in any way, but just doing a back-of-the-envelope study of what I see in my Webstats and here’s my suggestion for how to start a successful new blog.

The first thing you would have to do is realize to manage your expectations. Blogs are dead. Apps are dead. We’re all in a holding pattern while we wait for the kinks to get worked out of the Metaverse.

And, yet, I think if you flipped the script some on your traditional blog that maybe, maybe you could pull it off. But you would need a wealthy patron to help you with the backend and marketing. Here goes, though.

My magazine in Seoul.

If you were actually going to try to start a new Gawker-like blog now, you would really have to focus on celebrity news. But here’s the catch — you would need two or three people on staff who would simply use Tik-Tok all day and then turn around and write stories about what trends they saw. Tik-Tok would set the blog’s editorial agenda.

As such, right now, such a blog would be doing profiles of Julia Fox — or, hell, even turn her into the blog’s de facto mascot like Julia Allison was with the original Gawker way back when.

The point is — the reason why the undead Gawker is so meh right now is it has no spunk, no snark and it’s not laser focused on what Generation Tik-Tok is interested in. That’s the thing I’ve noticed about the new, undead Gawker. It just seems kind of indifferent to what’s really going on with pop culture.

If you want to be a pop culture media outlet, you have to be on the cutting edge of what people are talking about, and by definition, that means you have to be obsessed with Tik-Tok.

Anyway, the point is — you use the pop culture element of the blog to hang all the rest of the blog’s content on it. Come for the Tik-Tok meme talk, stay for a snarky feminist polemic or maybe a sexxxy snap of Julia Fox doing whatever it is that Julia Fox is doing at any particular moment.

This is just me mentally masturbating on a Sunday morning. I have no money and, hell, I don’t have any friends. I guess I occasionally get frustrated because I know, given the opportunity — and resources — I could probably bring back the spirit of the old Gawker with a new blog.

Time To Do Some Reading


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

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.

Known Unknowns of Post-Production


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Things are humming along with this first novel in what I hope will be a five novel series. But I’m beginning to grow alarmed at the idea that I’m not taking into account something — even if I sell this series (or just the first book) — there would be a six month to a year delay before the book was actually published.

This is beginning to cause me a great deal of angst.

But I have to press on. At this point, selling any of these novels would be literally the literary equivalent of winning the fucking publishing lottery. However, I see this project as existential for no other reason if I wasn’t working on it, I really wouldn’t doing much of anything else creatively. I would continue do what I did for years and years after leaving Seoul — drift — and I would be in a dark and miserable place.

So, working on five novels it is.

Let’s rock.