And now, THE MAGIC BRIGADE.
Revision's done.
Added 5,000 words, a hell of a lot of world building, stripped away potential Harry Potter similarities (teens + magic x school setting = HP -- the new math of urban fantasy), did some word tweaking. This sucker's done. Stick a fork in it.
It's on the way to my agent. God willing, he'll love it and then...submission time.
Before that can happen, I have to come up with...the Evil Synopsis From Hell. (And no, not the good HELL kind, either. The pull-your-hair-out-of-your-head, WTF-is-this-freaking-book-about-anyway kind.) And a series arc. Gah.
After all this time -- 17 years and three books later -- the synopsis is STILL an evil beast.
Maybe it will come to me in the morning, after some sleep and a lot of coffee.
For tonight, huzzah that the revision is done.
For tomorrow...boiling 220 pages down into 3. Joy!
(Here's to the day when editors say, "Jackie wrote another book? We don't need to know anything about it -- give her an obscenely huge advance, because we want that book...whatever it is!")
7 Comments:
Isn't it funny how easy it is to write a 70k+ manuscript compared to how hard it is to summarise all those words in a single page?
Hi Jackie,
I'm commenting from home 'cos the uni firewall won't let me comment from work.
Is this the new and revised Lorn? 'Cos if it is, how much more synopsis writing do you have to do? ;-)
"And a series arc. Gah"
Easy. :-) Stuff happens, then it gets worse. Then after that, it gets REALLY BAD. And then: OMIGODWE'REALLGOINGTODIE. And then the good guys win. See?
Cheers,
Euan
Naomi, tell me about it! I'm going to try this one a bit different; I know the story cold, so I'm just going to channel Cliff Notes and see if I can summarize the damn thing without getting side-tracked too much.
Euan, yep, this is the all-new, all-different LORN. Except it's a YA, it's an urban fantasy, and it takes place on our world...except there's magic. Sorta. Totally different from the mess you read a couple years ago. Really. (This one's actually, cough, good!)
As for the series arc...that's all spot on...except you forgot the part about some characters *actually* dying. ;-)
I got yer synopsis:
"This book just rocks--TRUST ME."
and then you scribble down JK Rowling's signature. :D
What? Too much?
LOL -- I think it's perfect, Heather!
How about we have a pre-submission blurb from up-and-coming NYT bestselling author Heather Brewer? ;-)
Woooo! How exciting pull out that fork!!! :D
Done with revisions - cheers!!!
Yuck I hate doing sysnopsis writing. Good luck.
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