by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
As I often say, writing a novel as first time novel writer is a lot like being an explorer. At some point, you find yourself in the metaphorical middle of the Atlantic Ocean, having no reason to believe you’ll ever find land other than your gut telling you so.
So here I am.
I’m methodically making my way through my first serious attempt at a first draft and I have no idea if anything will come of all this hard work. There are many, many variables for me to weigh in my mind, least of which is what exactly the world is going to look like when I try to sell this thing.
The point of this novel is to give myself the opportunity to rant for about 165,000 words about how angry the Trump Era makes me. But, as I keep saying, the whole thing is so diffused that hopefully you won’t see it as preachy. If you do, then I’ve failed. I don’t want to preach at you, I want to tell you a great yarn and along the way maybe make you think.
And I go out of my way to rant about the stupid things I feel are happening within the center-Left as well as fucking insane things happening within the center-Right. In fact, in a way, the center-Left is far more frustrating because they are so busy scoring points on Twitter that they completely ignore how to engage the average person who is “too busy for politics” because they’re raising their kids and paying their mortgage.
But, like I said, I’m extremely delusional right now. The only way I’m going to get this novel done is to allow myself to be completely delusional to the extent that I actually think I have a shot at selling this novel.
One thing I really have to do is read, read, read. I’m basing much of my heroine’s personality on the late Annie Shapiro. Ms. Shapiro was, in short, something of a kook and it’s going to take some time for me to get beyond simply my romanticized version of her beliefs that I have in my mind (and heart.)
I am, however, in fact working on the first draft. It’s going pretty well. I’m giving myself a pretty tight deadline so I need to hurry up. The absolute latest I’m giving myself to finish the first draft is Thanksgiving 2020. But I hope to wrap things up a lot closer to maybe September.
