Tag: Stieg Larsson

People Always Underestimate Me


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve just finished what I believe is the second draft of the first chapter of the first book in a five novel series. At least, that’s what I am aiming for. It is very easy for “normal” people to take it for granted that I’m just another bonkers Internet crank.

And, I guess, to some extent that is true.

My literary hero, Stieg Larsson.

But also I know that the very “eccentricity” that leads “normal” people to dismiss me is also my secret weapon. I can be very, very focused if something strikes me just the right way and these five novels have done just that. Each of the five novels is a compelling story.

The issue is I have to work harder, faster and smarter. I’m not going to live forever and I’d like to wrap up all these novels a lot sooner than you might otherwise think.

If Stieg Larsson can write three novels and sell them, I can write five novels and sell them. Hopefully, of course, I won’t drop dead of a heart attack right after I do so. That’s the plan, at least.

But I really need to put up or shut up. I’ve talked way, way, way too much about the process of writing these five novels over the years, but I can’t go back and change all that. I’m 100% extroverted and I have no friends and no one likes me, so sometimes — maybe a lot of the time — I sometimes need to let off some steam by writing about writing.

Write, write, write.

I love to write — I do it like shedding skin, without even thinking about it. So, really, the issue is just to stay focused. I hope to use the weekends to bounce around the other four novels in the series so I will have some forward progress on all five novels instead of just fixating on the first one.

I have got to do something to speed this overall process up if I’m going to finish in the next, say, two years or so.

These Five Novels Will Have A Lot of Heart


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve been doing a lot of writing today and I’m very pleased with what I’ve managed to come up with. These first few novels, as I keep saying, will have a lot to owe to Mare of Easttown. Even I am taken aback by how female-friendly from an audience perspective these novels may be. Or not. What the fuck do I know. I’m a middle aged white CIS male who should be neither seen nor heard.

But here we are, with me being my usual bonkers crank self, pontificating on shit I shouldn’t.

I’m working on the assumption that if I should actually manage to write the “break out” novel — which, in itself would be a miracle — that I will be canceled at some point soon after because my well documented views don’t always follow the media narrative. I believe what I believe and if you don’t like it, then fuck you. Wink.

But, like I said, I am pleased with how much heart these novels have. How much they at least try to accommodate the needs of the female audience. One thing I’m taken aback by is how this first novel is far, far more Mare of Easttown than the book that started all of this, The Girl Who Played With Fire.

At the moment, it really won’t be until the last two novels I’m working on, when we start what will hopefully be an open-ended thriller series, that the direct homage to Stieg Larsson’s work becomes obvious. But I have to make clear — I’m simply not as dark a write, by nature, as Larsson. I have used The Girl Who Played With Fire as my “textbook,” but it’s a real struggle for me to be as dark and serious as Larsson in, say, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Anyway. I’m going to throw myself into writing, reading and development this weekend. That, at least, is the plan.

Fuck this fucking storytelling “test.”

All Systems Go


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

All systems are go with either a real first draft or only-a-second-draft-because-of-my-huge-ego. I spend a few hours last night restructuring things and now I know what to do.

The story has a lot tighter chorology than I ever expected, but I came across some constraints within the logic of the story that I could never expected. But, the point is, this is going to be a very, very fast paced novel for no other reason than the reader is going to realize we’re talking events that take place over barely two weeks, if that.

Events are going to be so tight with this novel, that I’ve thought maybe have a time stamp on each scene might be helpful. But I’ve not decided to do that yet. But it definitely would remind readers that a lot of stuff is going on in just one day.

Anyway, I now am going to do two things. One, a lot of reading. Two, I’m going to try to try to go through the scenes of the first few chapters and do some development stuff with them so I can start writing at full speed in the next few days. But I want to really be prepared since I’m hoping this is going to be so good as to be a second draft that can have beta readers.

Meanwhile, I’m going to also begin to bounce around the other four novels in the series to see about moving them forward as well. I’m going to continue to study Stieg Larsson’s first two books to get some sense of how he did some things in a general way. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo handles some time issues that I need to know how to handle in future books.

I would prefer all my future novels not take place within roughly two week span. I need to figure out how Larsson was able to have books that took place over a longer period of time.

So that’s where things stand. Let’s rock.

History May Not Repeat, But It Does Rhyme: My Potential Stieg Larsson Fate Problem


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

After years of willfully not looking it up, I learned today how old Stieg Larsson was when he died — 50.

This is meaningful because if I’m lucky, that’s how old I will be when I sell somewhere between 1 and 3 and 5 novels. So, it’s beginning to sink in that that may very well be my fate, too.

I sell a novel or five at 50, then within days promptly drop dead.

That’s pretty deep.

It’s so eerie as to be a potential Twilight Zone episode.

Wow. I’m Actually Working On A Second Draft Of This First Book


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

For the first time for this massive project I’ve been working on for about four years now, I’m finally — finally — working on a solid second draft. I think a number of things have contributed to this being possible.

The man, the myth, the late Stieg Larsson.

The first is I’ve made this second draft as tight as possible chronologically. Second, this story is far more Mare of Easttown than it is The Girl Who Played With Fire, so I’m dealing with something I’m pretty good at — detailing the human condition — rather than having to live up to the potboiler expectations of Stieg Larsson.

But things are moving fast. I have a pretty stable first chapter now and am going to work on the second chapter today. My first draft was stable enough and good enough (in my opinion) that revisions are going pretty smooth. Unlike previous versions of this process, things haven’t fallen apart the moment I review what I’ve written.

Really leaning into making this first novel a homage to Mare of Easttown.

So, I think I’m well on my way to start querying as part of the fall querying season of 2022. And, as I’ve said, if it gets pushed into the spring season, then I will have several other books in this series finished and I can try to sell them as a series.

Hopefully, however, I won’t drop dead of a widowmaker heart attack like Stieg Larsson. Go, me!

‘Mare Of Easttown,’ Stieg Larsson & The 5 Novel Project I’m Developing & Writing


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I can still remember exactly how it came about that I started the process of going from writing two books to now five books. These first two books were meant to be a direct homage to the Millennium series that Stieg Larsson wrote before his tragic death of a heart attack. I was lying on the couch, thinking about both the novels and the fact that Trump turned out to be so fucking lazy and stupid that he could not even do the most basic of autocratic things to stay in power.

I rolled over in my mind the strange little town that I come up with — which was meant to be something of a thinly vailed allegory for Trumplandia, when it occurred to me that I had this huge backstory as to how a small Southern town might endup in such a bizarre situation.

I thought about how Trump was no longer president and how the context of the two books would change. Then it occurred to me, why not tell the very compelling story of the two major events that led up to the opening of the then first book in the series.

So, a bit later, I sat down and began to sketch out the plot for these two prequels and I was very pleased. What I did not realize was how hard it was going to be to finish even a first draft of the first book. Along the way, I saw Mare Of Easttown and it occurred to me that THAT was the vibe I wanted for the first prequel. (Which readers would not immediately know was actually a prequal because my intent is to sell the novels in chronical order.)

Then, even later, it occurred to me to split the first book in two, so now I have five novels to work on.

But back to the first book. In the back of my mind, I keep thinking about how great Mare of Easttown is and how I want to write a novel that is as good as that show was. I really enjoy developing and writing female characters because I find them so much more of a challenge and also I’m irritated that people like Olivia Wilde and Jessica Chastain apparently think men, by definition, can’t write well developed female characters. Or, at least, it’s a lot more difficult for them.

Anyway, I’m finally working on the second draft of the first novel. I hope to wrangle me a literary agent by the end of 2022 (or, at least the fall querying season.) But I’m also working on the other four books as I work on this first book. So, it’s at least theoretically possible that I will have additional novels in the series complete when I try to find a literary agent.

I’m have a lot of fun now because I am really into the groove of things now. I have figured out how *I* develop and write novels.

‘Old Brown Thriller Shoe’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

From the beginning of this project, Stieg Larsson’s “Girl Who Played With Fire” has been my textbook. My goal is anyone who has read Stieg Larsson’s three novels will read my work and instantly feel at home. It’s meant to be like putting on an old brown shoe.

Throw in a lot of influence from Mare of Easttown and away we go. I don’t want to challenge the reader with anything too fancy, I just want to spin a great fast-paced yarn. And, yet I also want a lot of character development. I’ve read parts of one novel that wants to do pretty much want I want to do and I found it lacking. It’s author seems to have come away from Larsson’s work with a dramatically different interpretation of what made those first three books so popular. It was way more about the vigilante thriller part of those first three novels rather than the part I liked — what a unique person Salander is.

To me, what makes Lisbeth Salander so interesting is she’s weird, yes, but the case could be made that she would have been a lot more normal but for her upbringing which was pretty fucked up. And I want to write something really fast paced — so fast you stay up all night on a weeknight to finish it — but I also want to present well developed characters that seem like real people.

One thing I find interesting is how using The Girl Who Played With Fire as my “textbook” has caused me to make some decisions that I keep hearing people contradict in books and in conversations. I think what I’m really noticing is there is no reveled truth as to how to write a novel. Everyone writes a novel differently and the point is you tell a story in a coherent, cogent manner that keeps people turning pages — how exactly you do that is very much up in the air.

My interpretation of Lisbeth Salander looks like this.

You’re the master of your own fate when you write a novel. There are plenty of rules of thumb to tell your story in a better, easier to understand manner, but in the end, lulz, do whatever the fuck you want. In the end, the only thing that matters is when a gatekeeper reads your work they like it and understand it enough to be willing to buy it.

That’s it.

In the end, that’s the only hard, fast rule of writing a novel. Everything else is a lulz, in real terms.

As such, these five novels owe almost all their structure from what I’ve been able to discern from The Girl Who Played With Fire, mixed with what makes the most sense to me from all the “how to write a novel” how-to books I’ve read over the last three years.

It just can be annoying sometimes how absolute people — or books — can be about how wrong this or that thing that Larsson did, or didn’t do is. But I’m quite please with what I’ve managed to come up with.

Let’s rock.

Writing Four Novels At Once Is A Huge Undertaking


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It has begun to sink in — again — how massive writing four novels simultaneously is. But that’s what I wanted about three years ago when I started this process. I was originally going to write what gradually became a massive scifi series. Then I realized there was just too much I didn’t know about real world geopolitics and I pivoted to a story that I knew I wanted to use as a way to talk about how much I fucking hated MAGA.

I hope to come up with a character as compelling as this one.

Well, that has grown into four novels and the connection between my hatred of MAGA and the novels has grown very tenuous. But my hatred of MAGA is being fired up again by how fucking obvious that we really are living in Weimar America.

It’s very easy to imagine how future historians will depict this moment in American political history. America is running on fumes. Everyone is sitting around either oblivious to how obvious it is that Something Bad is going to happen around 2024 – 2025 or complicit to whatever the Bad Thing is. The people who should know better, who should be willing to fight to save democracy — conservative Traditionalists — are all-in with MAGA because of negative polarization and an extensive permission structure.

Anyway, every once in a while, it dawns on me the massive undertaking I’m doing right now. I have to write four novels about three times. Just the writing part takes time because it takes physical time to write unless you’re on, I dunno, crank like Philip K. Dick.

But I do have a broken ankle at the moment, so I have “all the time in the world” to just read, develop and write. Only time will tell if I use this time as wisely as I should. I do have a tendency to just get drunk and pass out. But I have been doing a good job avoiding that of late. I have managed to stay sober enough to be productive.

I love having four novels to work on at the same time because I can always switch things up and still stay in-universe. I find myself wondering what Stieg Larsson’s development process was. But, interestingly, the more self-confidence I get as writer in my own right, the less I find myself dwelling on Larsson.

Though, I do find myself flipping through some of the stuff he wrote just to get a sense of how far I still have to go.

Anyway, wish me luck.

I Have My Eye On You, Mr. Bond



by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I saw the latest James Bond film, “No Time To Die,” today, and for once I didn’t walk out of a movie. There were a few time I rolled my eyes and a few times when I checked my watch. But, overall, it was a great movie and highly recommend it.

They definitely updated the character some by giving him some heart. I’m a life-long Bond fan and some of the additions to the character were long, long over due.

But having said that, I will also note that I got a significant amount of inspiration from watching the movie. The four book thriller series already has a lot of Bond-like touches to it and I realized something important about the Bond franchise when I watched No Time To Die.

My series about an a American, female James Bond-type person was missing something and I didn’t even realize it. But now that’s fixed and the series, once done, will be a mixture of James Bond, Stieg Larsson’s stuff and Mare of Easttown, if that makes any sense.

I will note in closing that it’s a testament to how much cultural self-confidence Americans have that No Time To Die would pick us so much and we just don’t care. It’s a lulz.

Of Stieg Larsson, Mare Of Easttown & The Thriller Series I’m Writing


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The original reason why I started working on a novel of any sort was my pure, white hot rage against the Trump Administration. I had no idea what I was doing, but I had a lot of energy and decided to work on a scifi novel that would talk about the major themes of the era.

It soon became clear that my ambitions were simply too huge and I would never have the resources to finish what I had come up with. Flash forward three years and I’m in a very different situation. While I’ve again come up with a massive creative project, this time I’ve got a handle on what it all means. And, much to my own shock, it’s not a massive sci-fi series that I’m working on, but rather a thriller series.

The fictional baby in question as a fictional adult.

This happened in large part because there was always one book that I was able to read over and over again and that was Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire. At first, the book I was writing was very much Stieg Larsson fanfiction.

And the, gradually, everything changed. The story was fused with an array of other themes, ideas, inspirations and it was not fanfiction, but it’s own unique story. What was one book was split into two with a cliff hanger connecting the two books.

Then the one thing I totally never expected to happen, happened: Trump was not able to steal the 2020 election.

That’s when I did an assessment of where I was and realized that with Trump out of office, I needed to do something radical. So, looking around, I realized there was a obvious fix — go backwards and time and develop two novels from the massive backstory that I had come up with for the two novels I was working on.

At first, I thought this was going to be a breeze. I had two solid plots in my mind and things were going really fast. Then, however, it soon enough became clear that I have a huge ego and am very demanding of myself. This is when I saw Mare of Easttown and was both shocked and inspired by what I saw. It was so good, that I realized I needed to up my game.

Mare of Easttown

And, so, here were are.

This first book now is being written with my impression of Mare of Easttown in the forefront of my mind. So, this first book is very different than one might think from someone who has studied one of Stieg Larsson’s books and used it as something of an informal novel writing text book.

But I’m feeling pretty good. I have shifted the focus of the novel from the abstract of owning a newspaper to the very concrete crisis of possession of a baby. The issue is I have a lot of thinking to do. I have to flesh out an element of this story that I didn’t even realize needed to understood better.

Yet, thankfully, at least I know which direction to go at last.