by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I have several things I need to do today. I need to read up on querying. I need to read some comp books for my novel and I need to throw myself into development on my new novel.
While I’ve gotten some positive reactions to my novel, I’ve also gotten at least one person who said it sucked and I should start all over again because there were structural, fundimental issues with how I wrote it.
If I was 20 years younger, I would be open to that. But I’m not. The point of querying this particular novel is simply to understand how to query the novel to get some sense of what of how to do it. I’m well aware of the problems with it but I’m not getting any younger and I feel this novel is at least not so bad as to embarrass me.
Someone I respect has read the novel and is supposed to chat with me in person about it sometime soon. Before I got the “it sucks” note from someone I was thinking I might go into the meeting a conquering hero. But, now, oh boy. I think I need to be a bit more humble.
I have no idea what the person is going to say to me about the novel and it could be that he says, “Look, it’s an ok read but I just don’t think you can query it.” It’s going be a gut punch. But I’m going to query it anyway because, like I said, I want to test out the waters for the next novel.
I had a dream that prompted the premise for my new novel. I’m leaning into AI a lot to speed up development. But one thing I’m definitely not going to do is use AI to write any copy. I just see it as a manuscript consultant that will help me speed up structural development stuff.
