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Posts Tagged ‘synopsis’

Queries and Synopses–Again

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , , on September 29, 2010| 3 Comments »

Well, since I’m working through a polishing edit on MAGE STORM, preparing it for readers in the very near future, it’s time to think about queries and synopses again.

I have a query, although I’m quite sure it can be improved:. 

Fifteen-year-old Rell lives in a world where magic is dead.  It died with the all the mages at the end of the Great Mage War.  All that’s left are the mage storms, composed of the ashes of the dead mages, wreaking havoc.

Or so everyone believes until a freak mage storm infects Rell with magic he can’t control.  When he fails to learn how to control his frightening new abilities on his own, Rell runs off to seek help.  It turns out magic isn’t as dead as people think and real help isn’t as easy to find as Rell hoped.

The only teacher anyone knows of is Trav, who turns out to be an overbearing cult leader who murders anyone with real talent.  After witnessing his latest murder, Rell is next on Trav’s list.  Rell is forced to flee, but he can’t forget the friends he left behind.  Somehow, he has to learn enough to return and free the others.

That is, if Trav doesn’t catch him first, because Trav doesn’t let anyone get away that easily.

Now I have to start working on the synopsis.  I had a basic one I used as an outline, but it’s not helping as much as I hoped it would in creating a really interesting version of the story.  It’s still got to hook.

Ah, well.  Back to work.

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Quite a Week

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , on July 25, 2010| 2 Comments »

Well, it’s been quite a week.  I ended up being late blogging, too.

For three days this week, I had no running water due to a water main leak.  Kind of upset the entire apple cart as far as my schedule goes.

Meanwhile, I’m wrapping up a Synopsis Challenge on Hatrack River Writers Workshop, which I hope will be a good learning experience for all concerned.  As I’ve said before, synopses are the very devil to write, so hopefully getting several opinions on our attempts will help all of us see what works and what doesn’t.

In spite of all that, I’m making great progress on MAGE STORM.  I love it when a story just sort of rolls out like this.  I’m approaching the half-way point in my first draft.

To make up for a very poor post, I’ve added The Modgud (still another culture from the world of THE SHAMAN’S CURSE and THE IGNORED PROPHECY) under Worlds.  Enjoy.

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Synopses (Again)

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , on July 18, 2010| Leave a Comment »

If you’ve read some of the older posts in this blog, you know that synopses are a particular bugbear of mine.  Like them or not, though, they are necessary, so I’ve got to make peace with them one way or another.

I’m currently in the middle of a synopsis challenge on Hatrack River Writers Workshop.  That means I’ll have half a dozen or so other synopses to read and comment on over the next week.  It’s amazing the things you can spot when your critiquing someone else’s work that you’d never spot in your own.  Hopefully, this helps all of us learn to write better synopses–or at least improve our current ones, if nothing else.

Since I was already in synopsis mode, polishing up the synopsis for BLOOD WILL TELL, I went ahead and wrote the first draft of a synopsis for MAGE STORM, too.  They say that it’s easier to write the synopsis before you write the novel and before your head is full of all the wonderful details and subplots you create.  We’ll see.  I don’t see how it could be any harder that way.  I also took a crack at the synopsis for THE IGNORED PROPHECY and wrote a proto-synopsis for the new version of SEVEN STARS.  Glutton for punishment, I guess.

Now that that’s done, I’m back to work on MAGE STORM, and making progress, with assorted revisions to balance things out and try to keep the internal editor busy with something besides my first draft.

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One-Sentence Pitches

Posted in writing, tagged , , , on May 23, 2010| 3 Comments »

Update:  I’m making good progress on the revisions to THE IGNORED PROPHECY.  I finished the first five chapters and I really like the beginning, now. 

In his blog last week, Nathan Bransford talked about writing one-sentence pitches.  Since I’m all for anything that promises to make writing queries or synopses easier, I tried my hand at writing one-sentence pitches for my current projects.

BLOOD WILL TELL: (This one is complete and currently seeking an agent.)

Even a suburb of Los Angeles may not be a big enough hiding place when a half-werewolf and a dragon unite to protect an innocent woman from a murderer.

THE SHAMAN’S CURSE: (This one is on the shelf for the moment.  It will need some rewriting before it’s ready to go back out.)

When a boy fails to save his friend from a flash flood and earns the hatred of the friend’s father, he can only put an end to the vendetta against him by learning to accept and use his own innate magic.

THE IGNORED PROPHECY: (This is the one I’m currently revising.)

A young man new to magic is terrified when his magic starts doing unexpected things no one can adequately explain and must pull together clues from completely different magic traditions and one very ancient source in order to understand what’s happening to him.

DREAMER’S ROSE: (I just finished the second draft and have a couple of readers taking a look at this one.)

When a demigod succeeds in becoming a god only to find that nothing has prepared him for the challenges he now faces and the results of his own failures, it takes an outcast girl with the ability to enter dreams–even his–to help him make things right.

SEVEN STARS: (On the shelf while I do more world-building.)

When a young man unintentionally unleashes the berserker curse in his blood, he exiles himself from his home and everything he loves forever, until he can find a way to control the berserker fury and, if possible, a cure for the curse.

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Spreading Myself Too Thin

Posted in writing, tagged , , , , on April 5, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Lately, I haven’t felt like I’m making any progress.  It’s not because I haven’t been putting in the time, either.  I’ve decided it’s because I have just too many projects going right now.  Generally speaking, I prefer to have a couple of projects going.  That way, if I hit a stumbling block on one, I can stay productive and just switch over to the other until I can get past it, but I’ve decided that I’ve just got too many projects going at the moment.

Part of my problem is that I don’t really consider anything finished until it sells–which means that nothing is finished right now.  Until then, I feel like I should either be trying to make it better or trying to sell it.  That leaves me with too many things on the active list.  That wasn’t so bad when I had fewer projects nominally completed, but it’s just not going to work any more.  I have to prioritize. 

First, is the project I can actually finish.  I need to polish up the synopsis for BLOOD WILL TELL so I can send out more queries.  I’ve already sent most of the ones that 1) accept email queries and 2) don’t require a synopsis.  Now, I need the synopsis to be polished up and ready to send.  I can’t express how much I dislike working on the synopsis, but it has to be done.

Second, really should be my current main project, which is the first revision of DREAMER’S ROSE.  I’m so close to having the new material finished, if I just stop letting myself be distracted.  There’s only about a chapter and a half to go and then on to the revisions on the part that’s already written, which should go much faster.

Third, my current short story, “The Wrong Lion” (tentative title), set in the same world as THE SHAMAN’S CURSE and THE IGNORED PROPHECY.  (I have a fondness for titles with multiple meanings and this one could be read at least three ways in reference to this story.)  I’ve targeted this to a market with a short window for submissions.  I need to finish it up, if it works out, and get some critiques on it.

Fourth, revisions on THE IGNORED PROPHECY.  I’ve been doing a chapter exchange with another writer on this one and I do want to keep up with the chapter revisions as the critiques come back.  The rewrite of the beginning can wait until I finish the second draft of DREAMER’S ROSE.

And that’s really plenty to be working on and hope to show progress on any of it.  The stories that are currently out on submission are to be considered finished at least until they come back.  BLOOD WILL TELL is finished and in the query process.   THE SHAMAN’S CURSE and SEVEN STARS are on the shelf for now.  The only other thing I will permit myself to work on is brainstorming for the two novels I haven’t started yet, but I do that best outside of writing time, anyway.

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Queries and Synopses

Posted in writing, tagged , , , on March 2, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Wow.  It’s been a few days since I last posted.  That’s because I’ve been working on the query and synopsis for BLOOD WILL TELL.  And, let me tell you, compared to writing the novel, this part is work.  It’s necessary, but it’s nowhere near as much fun as writing a story.  So, once I convince myself to tackle it one more time, it’s best not to allow too many distractions.

BLOOD WILL TELL actually came incredibly easily.  The first, rough draft just flowed.  For the most part, the revisions weren’t much more difficult.  But now it’s time to do the hard work.

Imagine you’ve just spent several months of your life writing a novel in something around 100,000 words.  You’ve created characters and a world, crafted the plot, built conflict, and brought the whole thing to a satisfying ending.  You’ve had people you trust to tell you the truth read it.  And revised based on their critiques.  You’ve polished it.

After you’ve done that, the next thing you have to do is retell that story in 1,000 words or so.  And you’ve got to try to make it interesting, because this is one of the tools to help you sell your novel.  You can’t just summarize the plot like a book report.  It has to have character and conflict, just like the novel.  I’m still fighting this one. 

Oh, and if you think the synopsis was fun.  Now you get to do it all over again–in about 250 words for the query letter.  Except for that one you don’t want to give away the ending.  I’m on the sixth revision to this version of the query letter.  There were two versions before this that went through similar revison processes only to be discarded.

I would so much rather be writing the murder scene for SEVEN STARS.  But this is part of the job, too.  It can’t be avoided.  And it has to be done the very best I can, because otherwise, no one will ever get to read BLOOD WILL TELL.

 

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