Tag: Hollywood

Well, If Nothing Else, I’ve Created A Massive Creative Universe For The Novel Series I’m Developing


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I started the process of writing a novel several years ago. I had a general idea that I wanted to write a scifi novel. Things went well until my natural creative ambition and huge ego got the best of me: that attempt at a novel collapsed when I realized what I wanted to do was going to take me a decade and would encompass six or seven books — at least.

Flashforward a few years and I, again, realize I have not one book I’m working on, but four. But there is a big difference between what happened a few years ago and now. One, the universe I’m working on is pretty much a very gauzy, garbled autobiography. My writing and storytelling ability has gotten significantly better, as well, so when I took a hard right turn and decided to add two books to what had been a two books one story situation, it’s not like I was going beyond my ability.

In fact, things are going pretty well with these two books set some time before the events of the modern thriller I’ve been working on for years. But I have extremely high expectations for myself and so if I’m going to every finish any of this, I’m going to have to throw myself into a lot of reading.

I also need to recalibrate things. As I understand it, the late Stieg Larsson sold three books at one time — then promptly died of a heart attack — so I just need to accept that I have a lot — A LOT — more work ahead of me than I ever imagined.

But I’ve managed to come up with a cogent four books set in the same place and I’m still really excited to lay them out to an audience. I just have to finish sometime sooner rather than later. I want to at least be close to being a publish author by the time I hit 50 and that birthday is a lot closer than I day think about.

I’m doing all of this alone and in a vacuum, but I’ve made great strides in my storytelling ability, to the point where I can actually pull this rabbit out of my hat.

I just have to believe.

A Modest Proposal: End The Superhero & Woke Hollywood Movie Era


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Movies are a reflection of our collective fears and hopes. As such, the last 20 years — a whole generation — of movies has been dominated by the superhero trope. The general consensus, it seems, is the rise of superhero movies is a response to the tragic events of 9/11: as part of the grieving process we all want to believe that 9/11 could have been prevented if superheroes were real.

But it’s been 20 years, guys, give it a rest.

It’s time for us to move on. We need to stop having two options when we go to the movie theatre: a big budget superhero movie or a “woke” movie that preaches to us.

We need to start thinking about telling human stories like we did between say, Midnight Cowboy to about The Shawshank Redemption. We need to turn the page on superhero movies and start telling stories that don’t involve people running around in capes.

Now, it’s possible this is just not possible anymore because of issues with the marketplace and not the audience — all the types of stories I want to see are now on a streamer. Or, more ominously, it could be that just like rock and pop music are no longer one and the same, audience tastes have changed for whatever reason and this is The New Normal.

We’re never going to have another God Father, or Dear Hunter or Deliverance or whatever. From here on out, we’re stuck with Woke Hollywood that alienates audiences with strained efforts to cram a liberal-progressive agenda down our throats.

It could be possible that audiences from here on out will be subjected to movies like Book Smart where unattractive people screech about lesbian sex positions and that will be that. Once traditional Hollywood stars like Tom Cruise shuffle off this mortal coil, we’ll just have Woke Hollywood producing preachy movies that only serve to alienate us into Blue and Red echo chambers.

Do I have any hope that I’m wrong? Nope. Rock is dead and, so, too, it could be that, in a sense, Hollywood is dead too.

Stieg Larsson & My Decision To Write Four Novels At Once


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Just in the last few days, the novel project I’ve been working on for years now took a hard left turn. For some time now, I’ve been struggling with how to give myself the occasional opportunity to switch gears whenever I feel the novels I’m currently developing and writing have begun to wear me down some.

I’ve figured out how to do it, and it’s greatly expanded the task before me, but in a great way. I’ve decided to develop and write four novels all at once. This allows me to switch gears like I want, but to also stay in-universe. As such, I don’t have to re invent the wheel when it comes to basic universe building things like names and locations.

One key thing is all this new work is flowing really easily, so I don’t have to struggle with that kind of stuff.

All this gets me thinking about Stieg Larsson and how he wrote a trilogy, sold it and then dropped dead days after doing so. This is almost taking on the air of a Twilight Zone episode — I’m well on my way to writing FOUR novels, potentially selling them…then dropping dead soon after I do so. But, “they shoot writers, don’t they” as they old saying goes, so I guess I need stop complaining and accept that the life of a writer is often tragic and unexpectedly cut short.

And, yet, no fate but what we make. So, it’s at least possible that if I should miraculously sell four novels that I will live to fight another day. An issue writing four novels at once brings up is now I have to defuse my creative energies over four novels and think about how important the first book is. The first book is supposed to set the tone of any series and I’ve come up with a great concept.

It’s pretty much totally different than what I expected to write when I started all of this about three years ago, but that’s good because if I ever get restless working on one of the four books, I can always switch gears and start development and writing on another one — all while staying in-universe.

I figure that while this new approach may slow me down some simply because I have two more books to work on, it will actually make it more likely that I finish the entire project because even when I “take a break” from one book, I will still be within the universe I’ve come up with.

That, at least, is the plan.

May Develop 2 Prequels As I Write These 2 Novels


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

There’s a chance that I will at least map out in a lot of detail two prequels to the two novels set in the modern era that I’m working on. I would do this because the plots are flowing pretty easily and it would also help a lot when it came to fleshing out the characters in these two novels that are connected via a cliffhanger.

The first of the two prequels would be kind of the Ur text of how this whole situation began. The second book happens seven years before the beginning of the current “first” book. There are a few problems with both these books that would have to be dealt with in a creative fashion…but nothing impossible to fix.

Also, it might be a way to distract myself from these two novels one story while still staying in-universe. I haven’t totally decided to do this yet, but on the weekends, at least, I find myself creatively restless and the idea of switching gears while still being in-universe is quite appealing.

But I’m kind of just drifting in that direction for the time being. I need to do something, anything distract myself now and again to keep my forward momentum fresh and creative.

Things Apparently Have Finally Clicked With This Novel


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

A lot can still go wrong with this novel. Any number of things both within my control — and not — could happen to derail this novel in unexpected ways. But, for the time being, I’m allowing myself to be content.

I’m well aware that, in a sense, my personality is unusual for a novelist. Or, at least, it’s a bit rare. I have more of a Truman Capote or Tom Wolfe larger-than-life personality than the typical lone wolf introvert personality that most novelists have.

The point is, I have a story to tell — and something to say — and I’ve finally figured how I want to tell it. It’s just taken me a lot longer to figure that out than expected. And, honestly, I never thought I would write a thriller as my first novel — given how much I love scifi, I always expected any first novel I wrote would be of that genre. But this novel does have a lot of speculative fiction in it, so I guess in a sense I was right.

Anyway, writing a novel — at least the way I expect myself to — has turned out to be far, far more work than I ever imagined. And I haven’t even gotten to the extensive reading I feel I need to do to flesh out my characters.

But that should come. At least, I hope it does.

I’m kind of embarrassed with how obsessed with this novel I’ve become and I only rarely feel like showing any of what I’ve written to anybody. The next step is to finish a first draft of the first book in this two book story. Then turn around and work on the second book for maybe a month before writing a first book second draft.

The point is — I still have a huge amount of work to do. But at least things have stabilized significantly.

Fashion In The Novel I’m Developing & Writing


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing I’ve learned over the last few years of working on this novel is readers are acutely aware of anything you point out to them on the page. As such, I’ve had some alpha readers take note of how much fashion there is in what I’ve written to date.

I really like fashion as an art form. There was a point when I wanted to be a fashion photographer until it dawned on me how impractical that was given where I was in my life. But I still have a dream that maybe someday, someway, I’ll get an opportunity to prove my photographic chops by taking pictures of models. I have an eye for beauty.

Since the character at the center of this novel is a young woman, I feel what she wears is really important at times in driving the plot along. I struggle to make my heroine as dark and interesting as Lisbeth Salander while also making her more accessible — what she wears at any particular moment helps a lot with that.

Some of this comes from the inspiration for the heroine. The late Annie Shapiro in Seoul was a kook and was a hipster before I even knew what a hipster was. Though, I have to note, some of what she wore at any particular moment while we were working on ROKon Magazine was her reflecting my own wardrobe. But all that was so long ago. So very long ago. A totally different era in my life.

But I’ve been working so hard — and so long — on this novel at this point that I’m kind of tired of being too conspicuous about talking about it. I’m kind of embarrassed, in fact. I need to just throw myself into this thing and get it done, knowing that once I finish this novel, I have another in the series to finish.

I no longer think about who will play any particular character in the film adaptation. All I can about is just finishing the damn thing so I can move on to the next book. B

I’m Quite Pleased With The State Of My Novel


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

After a number of years, I’ve finally — finally — reached my high expectations for the novel I’m working on. Every once in a while I do a major reset of the whole thing and this go around I really feel I’ve gotten where I have longed to be for so long.

But this is just the beginning.

I have a huge amount of work ahead of me. I have a lot of reading to do to flesh out characters and it just takes physical time to write a novel. But, thankfully, the structure of the novel is stable enough that pretty much all I have to do is “just write” as people suggested I do when I started this process.

As is usually the case with me, I did everything wrong of course. I should have just been silent and kept writing a novel to myself. But since I’m 100% extroverted I couldn’t help myself.

Yet, I can’t go back now. I just need to buckle down and get this first draft done.

An Update On The Novel I’m Working On


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The novel is shaping up to be an even bigger creative project that ROKon Magazine which totally consumed my life for about eight months in late 2006 to early 2007. I’ve been working on this novel for what feels like forever, but I think it’s probably close to about three years.

Finally, finally, things have clicked.

But I still have a huge amount of work to do. I’ve learned a lot about how to structure a novel over the last few years and one thing that’s becoming clear is you need to read your stuff as you write it. If you do that, then you catch problems with pacing before you show it to other people.

I’ve spend all day today getting the sequence of events in this novel just right. It’s been exhausting, but well worth the hard work. I really feel like how I felt with ROKon Magazine at its height when I was lugging a backpack full of magazines around Seoul. It felt as light as air.

So, spending about 12 hours throwing myself at this novel today was a breeze. I know why I was working so hard — I have something I need to do and I was avoiding doing it by working on the novel.

Another thing I’ve learned is you need to map out scenes. At least I do. Mapping out individual scenes before you write them is a great way to force your characters to do what you want them to do. They don’t have any opportunity to do anything unexpected.

The key thing I’m focusing on with this novel is readability. I want these two novels to be such fast, easy reads that you zoom through them. I want you to look up from reading these two novels and realize it’s 4 a.m. on a Thursday morning and you’re willing to stay up all night to read them.

The last time I felt that way was while reading the book I’m using as my “textbook:” The Girl Who Played With Fire, by Stieg Larsson. The two novels I’m working on are so different from Larsson’s stuff in some ways that you would be hard pressed to believe there’s any connection between what I’m writing and what he wrote

He was a better storyteller than I am (at least at the moment). But I’m getting a lot better. I still think I might need to do some character studies to make what I understand about my characters to be more concrete. Right now, everything is pretty much in my mind. This lends to a huge amount of flexibility, but it also leads to problems of canon management.

Anyway, I hope to get into the second act of the first draft pretty soon. Hopefully, in the next few days. I’m trying to write these two novels as one big story that just happens to be told in two self-contained novels. Then it will be easier to sell both books.

The Fate Of Yahoo


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m so old I remember when Yahoo first burst on to the public consciousness. It was probably around the same time as blogs like Suck.com took off. Those were wonderful, revolutionary times. My biggest regret is I wasn’t able to take advantage of them to do something more…productive…with my life.

Anyway.

Yahoo is kind of circling the drain right now. But it does have two big things going for it — eyeballs and a namebrand. Yet there is a major problem going forward: it’s kind of been bought simply to have all the money squeezed out of it while it slowly dies. For Yahoo to mean anything again, you would need someone with big bucks and a lot of vision to wrestle control of it and completely think outside the box.

If I had a few billion on me, here are two ideas as to what to do with Yahoo.

  1. Social media
    While I know social media is not very hot right now, if you really wanted to save Yahoo, what you do is completely re-imagine it. You lay off a big chunk of its workforce and then rebuild it from the ground up to be something akin to a mixture of Twitter and Facebook. I have thought this out to an extreme, absurd degree. But, in general, what I would do is bone up on the old Usenet news of 25 years ago, updated it and make the site sort of like Reddit but with more features.
  2. A Modern TV Guide
    You might also turn Yahoo into a TV Guide of sorts for the all the streamers people now use. Turn Yahoo into an entertainment portal for streamers with content connected to them.

    Otherwise, I got nothing.

Golden Globes: Goodbye & Good Riddance — It’s Time For The Streamers To Step Up


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The Golden Globes, if you think about them, have always been something of a grift. What happened was, over the years, as the Oscars grew more powerful and our society began to grow more modern, The Golden Globes kind of came along for the ride.

They became a part of the Oscar voting season because they gave people some sense of who was leading heading into them. But, at their center, there was a problem: they were nothing more than the votes of the Hollywood Foreign Press. That’s it. Nothing particularly special about them.

As such, it definitely seems at the moment that their era has ended because of changing expectations on the part of Hollywood. In the end, their demise may be historically value free.

Having said all that, it’s past time for the major streamers to join forces to have their own awards shows. They’re so powerful in Hollywood now, it makes sense that they would have some sort of awards show of their own. Something big and flashy for Hollywood types to get dressed up for. If MTV can have its own movie awards, then the streamers can, too.

I have no idea what is going to happen. Maybe the Golden Globes will come back after some existential thought. Who knows.