Earlier this year, before acquiring an agent, I wrote a very short, like back-of-book-blurb, romantasy proposal that I sent to an editor I had access to. She asked for a full proposal (a full synopsis, 3 chapters), and that’s been on a back burner while I’ve been doing a thousand thousand other things. But yesterday I got to get started on it, and… I’ve talked often about how I tend to get to the 1/3rd mark in any book, no matter how long, and hit a wall that I have…
My latest question from the peanut gallery was about how I write synopses. Or at least, I think that’s what it was about: the entirety of the question, actually, was, “Synopsis?” :) I’ve talked about writing synopses before at least once, in depth, as part of the Great Plot Synopsis Project (warning: that contains the entirety of the (2 page) synopsis for URBAN SHAMAN, and is therefore spoilery). However, that was written in early 2008, and I have Changed My Process since then. Specifically, in fact, I’ve changed it in…
MAGIC & MANNERS is off to the editor. I’ve lined up a copy editor, the cover artist is working on the cover art (as she can; poor woman broke her arm!), and I’ve got a couple people I need to talk to about book layout. I also need…to think about what I’m doing with ISBNs, and I need to grit my teeth and delve into the Ingrams system, as I don’t see myself suddenly being flush enough with cash to hire someone to deal with that for me, much as…
I *just* about finished up the REDEEMER synopsis last night. In fact, I called it done even though I knew there was more I could put in. I thought it was primarily emotional storyline stuff and probably wouldn’t make *that* much difference to the synopsis as a whole, but in a fit of Covering All Bases (I guess) this morning I decided to go ahead and put those bits in. Somewhat to my surprise, what happened with the addition of those 400 words was the whole thing suddenly came together…
I’m still working on the REDEEMER synopsis. I’d been living in this magical-thinking place where I thought I could the half-worldbuilding-totally-SPLAAAH synopsis I was roughing as the Actual Synopsis, since I wasn’t going to have to send it to anybody. Turned out I can’t, even if it’s *not* going to anybody else. It was too chaotic and unstructured, so despite the fact that I’ve got thousands of words of worldbuilding & synopsis, I’ve now got…thousands of words of new synopsis. I did about 8K–actually, including the *original* synopsis, more like…