The Internet Archive & A Value Free Novel From An Internet ‘Crank’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Someone, again, poked around this site using the Internet Archive. Whenever this happens, it feels like I’m on a date against my will. Someone was doing “due diligence” on me for some reason. I have a feeling I know who it is and I fear I may have, yet again, failed whatever test the person had for me.

No matter what, I always fail if there are metrics involved. I just don’t do well with metrics for various reasons. If you judge me on my merits, then I do fairly well. But if you have some sort of Twitter liberal metric that you’re judging me against — then I’m just an Internet crank.

So, I find myself worrying a great deal about the novel I’m developing. Will literary agents judge me strictly on what I write, or will they, too, do “due diligence” on me and dismiss me as a Internet crank no matter how good the actual copy is?

This is something that has begun to suck up a huge amount of mental energy because it would be so typical of me — I do really well at something, only to fail not because of what I wrote, but because I don’t fit the Twitter liberal narrative. I will, tragically, just be another Ken Bone. (Though, to be fair to myself, my politics fall well within the Twitter liberal spectrum and his did not.)

Anyway, things are going really well with the novel. Things are moving very, very quickly. I hope to wrap up a first draft early 2021. After that, we’ll just have to see exactly how things work out. But I’m really thrown myself into this novel and I’m finally, at last, feeling pleased at what I’ve managed to come up with.

A huge amount of things can still go wrong, from someone stealing a march on me to the coming Biden Era making the whole thing moot. But the point of writing a novel — proving to myself I can do it — will have been achieved, even if those things unexpectedly happen.

Author: Shelton Bumgarner

I am the Editor & Publisher of The Trumplandia Report

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