by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m not getting any younger. If I’m destined to die of a widow maker heart attack like Stieg Larsson, I would at least like to have finished ONE novel. If I could manage to get four other novels done as well, that would be great.
Anyway, I at least now know how many scenes I need to write before I enter the second act of this novel. The novel continues to have too many overall scenes and everything past the mid point is quite muddled — I just don’t know how I’m going to adjust the structure of the novel now that I’ve not only shoehorned myself into it as a character but am going to kill myself off before the end of the novel.
But I have to kill myself off in the novel — I don’t want to do the cop-out route of killing the character off in between novels. I want the audience to see what happened to the character. They will see the emotional hand off to the real heart of the series — a Mare of Easttown like woman who looks a lot like Olivia Munn (at least in my imagination.)
I risk getting kind of cocky. There have been plenty — plenty! — of times over the last few years when I thought I was going to zoom through a version of my first novel, only to have everything collapse in a rather abrupt manner.
But you have to have hope. I refuse to simply drop dead and not have at least one decent novel under my belt. And once I finish my first novel, I’m hoping that the development and writing of the other four novels will go much, much quicker.
There is the issue of if I do sell this first novel that I’ll be known as a thriller writer when I see myself as much more of a scifi author. But that’s really worrying over stupid shit at this point. The issue is to just get something, anything done.
If I do manage to write five novels I will be ecstatic.
