Progress!
Yesterday and today were great writing days. I got about 1500 words out yesterday, and had almost 1000 this morning alone. Hooray!
Best Synopsis Advice EVAR
First, a big public thanks to Sän and Eva, who helped me wring the horrible parts out of my synopsis.
Second, I really need to pass forward this page of synopsis advice that I got from Sän. I recommend that you read it and study it. Then click on every single link and study the more in-depth advice given therein. They’re all worth it. Even the one with the horrible background music.
Back to the max subs
Yet another manila envelope sits at my door, waiting to be dropped in the mail slot tomorrow morning.
I’m now about halfway down my initial list of agents to query. I haven’t yet decided what to do if I get to the bottom…
Subs: New and improved!
I dropped a crisp manila envelope in the mail this morning with a bright, scrubbed query. And I just e-mailed a slightly different query plus brand-spanking-new synopsis to another. Here’s hoping all my work has paid off!
Who Hates Synopses?
CS Inman (aka Sän) has a surprisingly good synopsis up to read. Basically everyone, everywhere, hates writing their novel synopsis, so I’m automatically impressed by anyone that manages to write a synopses that’s entertaining and informative.
This even applies to the victims participants in Joshua Palmatier’s synopsis day. Now the synopses listed here were “successful” synopses, meaning that they were for novels that eventually sold. But even so, I found most of them dull, incomprehensible, or overly long. Probably the easiest one to read was Mike Brotherton’s synopsis of Star Dragon. That one suffered from the opposite problem: it was fast-paced and easy to follow, but the writing style itself felt amateurish. (I have no idea if that applies to the book itself, which I haven’t read.)
Reading all those pro synopses made me think that maybe the synopsis was free to be long and boring, which was good because my synopsis was long and boring. It was 2500 words of dull. It was a plodding, interminable death-march through a dozen names and a series of irrelevant places.
When I set out to pare it down this week, the first pass got it down to 1250 words and something of a respectable hook.Sän and Eva have both helped me further pare it down and spruce it up, so the final draft will be under 1,000 words, and hopefully will actually help sell the novel.
Back to the Grind
I’ve started up the novel that was giving me so much trouble, again. And I did what I originally said I wasn’t going to do: I’m starting from the top, and rewriting all of the chapters that have the new POV. This is, fortunately, less that I was originally afraid of, since most of the stuff that’s in the other POV will still work, though there’s some things to be moved around.
I don’t know, though. There’s a lot of cut-and-past, and a lot of scenes being rewritten with the same dialogue but different characters. I suspect that it’s turning out a mess, though that’s what first drafts are for, nu-i asa?
Rejection #10
This one came back with a very polite note at the bottom:
PS: You might want to be more careful with cut and paste next time.
My name isn’t (other agent’s name).
Oh, wow. So now I’m one of those writers. The ones I’ve read about on other agent blogs, the ones that send out way too many queries and get confused and insult the agents by using the wrong name. I am horribly humiliated. I would have rejected me too.
However, this agent was so winning with her smiley that I’ll be sure to put her near the top of my list next time. I’m sure she’s incredibly honored.
Language Cousins in the Frozen North
Via Language Log, I discovered this big news item: Solid evidence for a relationship between Na-Dene and Yeniseic languages.
If you’re a language geek like me, this is really exciting news. First off, it’s not very often that new large language families are established. The high-level language groupings that linguists know of are pretty stable, and attempts to establish new relationships between families are usually done by crackpots using dubious methods to reach absurd conclusions, like asserting that all languages are descended from ancient Sumerian. (Or that guy who claims that the Romance languages all descend from Modern English.)
The other interesting thing is both the distances involved: the Yeneseic languages are spoken in central Siberia, while the Na-Dene languages are spoken across North America, from Alaska in the west to Greenland in the east (oops, that was confusion with a different language family) and Mexico in the south. This makes the Dene-Yeniseic language group one of the most dispersed in the world, with impressively ambitious speakers:
The distance from the Yeniseian range to that the most distant Athabaskan languages is the greatest overland distance covered by any known language spread not using wheeled transport or sails. Archaeologist Prof. Ben Potter of UAF reviewed the postglacial prehistory of Beringia and speculated that the Na-Dene speakers may descend from some of the earliest colonizers of the Americas, who eventually created the successful and long-lived Northern Archaic tool tradition that dominated interior and northern Alaska almost until historical times.
From the Linguist List
There are papers and more information on the pages linked; I’m just beginning to go through the material myself.
Beard and Belly Progress Report
The baby will be ready in about 10 weeks, at which time I’ll shave. This was the deal that my wife and I made when she got prenant: I would neither cut my hair nor shave for the time that she was pregnant, and she would get to, you know, have the baby.
