by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I started writing a novel several years ago because I was enraged over the rise of Trumplandia. After a lot of fits and starts and I finally figured what I wanted to do, only for ding-dong Trump to be so lazy and so stupid that he couldn’t even do something as basic as steal the 2020 election.
As such, I realized I needed to rethink things.
What I came up with was to tell the genesis of the universe I planned to use for a two book story that would serve as something of an allegory for our fucked up, modern Trumplandia world. As such, I’ve been working on a story that takes place in late 1994, early 1995. What’s more, given what I’ve come up with, I now have not one, not two, but SIX novels in this project that I want to write. The last novel will be open-ended so I could theoretically just keep writing novels with a particular heroine for the foreseeable future.
This has come to the forefront of my mind of late because I’m on the cusp of entering the beta reader process and, as such, I’m going to need to a new novel to work on as all of that progresses. So, it seems logical that once I finish this first novel that I can start to seriously work on the SECOND novel in the projected six novel project.
Anyway, my first novel is actually more of an homage to Mare of Easttown than it is to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Series. It’s not an exact one-to-one, but it’s sort of a journalistic Mare of Easttown. Sorta. Kinda.
If nothing else, the novel is very accessible. It’s a fast easy read that you could probably read in one sitting if you had the time. It might take you most of the day, but you could do it.
Actually selling this novel is going to involve a huge amount of fucking luck. I’m not changing who I am and, as such, it’s very possible that my drunk crank persona on social media may be a huge obstacle to seeing my dream of being a published novelist coming true.
