by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
My goal is to wrap up the first act of the first draft of this scifi dramedy by the end of the month. My life is on the precipitous of changing in a rather dramatic fashion — I don’t want to talk about it — but it’s something I have to accept as going to happen soon enough.
So, I’m hoping to wrap up the first draft of this novel within a few months. If I could finish the second draft of the novel no later than, say, about a year from now, that would be pretty cool. Then I would start to query in the fall of 2026 and go from there.
I will be grieving over how we didn’t have a free and fair Federal midterm election around the same time, so maybe if I have a successful querying season in 2026 that will cheer me up some.
But, if nothing else, the premise of the novel is really, really strong. But as I keep saying the premise is kind of a “duh.” It’s kind of a fusion of Annie Hall with Ex Machina and Her.
Sorta. In its own way.
I still don’t really know what happens in it, even though I have a finished outline. I say that in the context of I got AI to finish the outline for me and I haven’t taken the time to see what it wrote. So, it could be that once I read the midpoint of actually writing the first draft I will really hate what AI came up with and I’ll totally change everything.
But one thing I really have sworn to myself is I’m not going to use any AI for the second draft, even if that means things slow down a great deal. I don’t want to have any success wit this novel if there’s always going to be a fucking asterisk associated with it.
I figure if I write the second draft without any AI then, in a sense, I’ve done it fair and square because the actual end-product will be totally written by my own hand.
I see myself, in a sense, as a “AI First” novelist in the context of using it like how a novelist in an earlier era might have used a word processor.
Anyway. It will be interesting to see how long it takes me to actually finish the first draft of the novel.
