the to-do list of doom
Howdy!
Enclosed: ebook sale at Rebellion Solaris, how to write a one- to three-paragraph synopsis, and FAQ (Foxily Asked Questions).
First, Rebellion Solaris is running an ebook sale until July 14, which includes my Machineries of Empire books and Phoenix Extravagant as well as offerings from authors like S. L. Huang, Derek Künsken, and Rebecca Roanhorse, among others. (Availability may vary depending on your region.)
How to Write a Synopsis (one method)
Disclaimer: If this method gives you the hives, it's okitty! Find a different method that works for you. This has worked for me.
This is a cockamamie guide to writing a one- to three-paragraph blurb/pitch for commercial fiction. It will not apply to a bunch of other things.
One-sentence pitches obviously look different! (If you ask me, they are easier, but people differ: but inherently fewer things you have to explain!) These are one to three paragraphs.
What to include:
- key speculative element/high concept if applicable (sf/f/h)
- who is the protagonist
- what is their goal
- what is standing in the way
- what are they doing about it
- how does this resolve-ish
Rando examples:
DRAGON PEARL (one paragraph, middle grade)
Min, a young fox spirit in a future that combines Korean mythology and space travel, chafes at hiding her shapeshifting magic to escape prejudice while growing up on a poor planet. When an investigator accuses her older brother of going AWOL to steal the fabled Dragon Pearl, an artifact that can terraform a planet in hours instead of years, Min runs away to clear her brother's name. Using her powers to impersonate various people leads her to her brother's murderer, who plans to destroy worlds with the Dragon Pearl. However, it's only by coming clean about her identity that Min stops the villain and uncovers her brother's fate.
(The one-sentence pitch was "Korean mythology in space." That's it! There were no comps. Functionally none existed. I’m not sure any exist now.)
MOONSTORM (three paragraphs, young adult)
MOONSTORM takes place in a fantastic universe where the power of conformity and following the rules enforces gravity. On one side is a future empire whose giant robots (mecha) destroy starships with gravitational beams. It’s so despotic that gravity becomes too strong and its worlds are at risk of collapsing into black holes. On the other, the clanners who refuse to join the empire are so independent that their worlds literally fall apart when they’re unable to work together and their gravity fails.
Hwa Young is a clanner who is orphaned, her homeworld destroyed, when she’s ten years old. Only the compassion of an imperial mecha pilot saves her. She’s so awestruck by the mecha’s power, and determined never to be a victim again, that she switches sides for a shot at becoming a pilot herself.
Hwa Young is selected as a pilot while hiding her clanner origins from her comrades, including her rich bitch archrival and her best friend the hacker. Her childhood dream becomes a nightmare when the Empire orders her unit to attack the last place she wants to go: her clanner homeworld. Her mother is alive after all—and leads the clanners’ resistance there. Does Hwa Young cling to the mecha that’s her one route to power and remain loyal to her comrades by attacking her own people, or does she repudiate everything she’s gained so she can rejoin her long-lost mother?
CODE & CODEX (one paragraph, unusually long & involved because I'm tired - I sold this on a one-page synopsis + sample chapters, would normally trim this more aggressively for something one-paragraph query-shaped as opposed to a one-page synopsis + three-chapter sample)
The stars-spanning Censorate is ruled by Aurelia, master of a reality-warping language. Valentina, as the chief censor, oversees the destruction of foreign texts; as Aurelia's sister and champion, she ensures Aurelia's safety. The one remaining threat is the Basilisk, a man so lethal he destroyed a fleet with his gaze, and who burned out his understanding of language so no one can compel his obedience. When Valentina obtains a grammar for an extinct language, it turns out that one speaker remains: the Basilisk, now vulnerable to Aurelia's commands. Valentina's pursuit of the Basilisk leads to her uncovering Aurelia's plans for conquest by rewriting reality backwards and forward in time; Valentina herself was Aurelia's first victim. By allying with the Basilisk, Valentina breaks Aurelia's hold over the Censorate—and herself.
Shorter is better. No, really. The longer your blurb goes on, the more reasons the agent (or whoever) has to say no. You want to minimize the things that might make them go "no" while giving them enough information to decide ZOMG YES.
For a query letter, one paragraph MAX (unless otherwise instructed).
For sf/f specifically, you are at a disadvantage because of the speculative elements. That's okitty. An agent (or whoever) who represents sf/f at all is aware of this. You do not need to samizdat your world's Silmarillion into the blurb. You do want to mention the key speculative element(s) - if you took this out of your world, the story wouldn't be the story anymore.
Note that it is absolutely artistically valid to have a passive protagonist (an antihero in the older literary sense, rather than an active but evil protagonist - think Neon Genesis Evangelion's Ikari Shinji), but it may be a much harder sell in commercial genres. It's absolutely artistically valid to have a protagonist who fails to change or is static or who fails to achieve their goal or has a tragic arc. It's absolutely artistically valid for the goal to be internal since the novel excels at depicting interior movement/growth.
For a much more detailed take on query letters for traditional publishing, Seth Fishman’s Q&A on YouTube has deets (it’s from nine years ago, but still relevant). (Full disclosure: Seth is my agent!)
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FAQ (Foxily Asked Questions)
What are you working on?
I turned in CODE & CODEX last week! Which feels great although I am terrified my editor will hate it, because writer neurosis. I’ll throw a soggy pizza at that problem when I get to it, I guess.
I am now hard at work on CROWNWORLD, the third book of the Moonstorm trilogy. Also working on a couple Sekrit Projects.
For drafting presently, I’m enjoying the Freewrite Alpha. It’s quite pricey so not for everyone, but after my last Alphasmart Neo went kaputt…I like the faster LCD display (vs. e-ink for the Freewrite Traveler) and being able to sync to Dropbox or get my files off using a USB-C cable. The lack of a backlight may be a deal-killer for some, especially since the updated font isn’t very high contrast. I plan on sticking a clip-on reading light on the device and calling it good.
What are you reading lately?
Rachel Rosen’s Cascade urban fantasy eco-thriller Cascade opens with a banger:
On a blistering September morning, four months before magic tore the country a brand new asshole, Tobias Fletcher stood in front of his wife, a dizzying array of choices before him, all of them wrong.
It wasn’t idle nerves. Tobias had shot for AP in Aleppo, where the click of a shutter separated a clear, placid day from a maelstrom of bone and rebar. It was about preparation. Whether a combatant or not, you wore a flak vest in a war zone. Tobias was about to ride into battle against Ian Mallory, the federal government’s resident wizard, and he needed the right armour.
Yessssss.
I am also informed that this is very Canadian but this Texan is unable to tell. /o\
What are you listening to lately?
Itzy’s It’z Different - K-pop, which is great for keeping me awake enough to write.
What’s a game you’re playing lately?
My husband has gotten me into Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor: Martyr on the Steam Deck! It has Diablo II vibes, except grimdark future. I am in love. Also I have named my Sister of Battle character Cheris, because I am that troll.
On another note entirely, the solo tile game A Gentle Rain is smol (the box is about the size of two decks of poker cards) and is exactly the relaxing, meditative, fifteen-minute experience that it promises.
What’s a device you’re finding useful lately?
After long hesitation, I committed a Supernote Nomad for a smaller e-notebook. (The device is close to A5, the actual screen area more like A6.) I’ve owned a number of e-readers as well as ones where you can annotate, from my late lamented iRex iLiad to a Fujitsu Quaderno A4 that I use for serious PDF readings (usually papers or math textbooks).
The Nomad is unlikely to be anyone’s first choice as an e-reader, but it’s superb for certain kinds of e-notebook/note-taking. It supports headers and keywords (table of contents and tags, essentially) as well as links between or within a notebook file, and it syncs fairly straightforwardly to Dropbox (among others), or you can connect it via USB-C or use the microSD card slot. The display seems crisp and snappy to me, and the stylus surprisingly pleasant, but I have a loooooow bar here given that my standards were set by twenty-year-old devices.
My niche use case is note-taking and brainstorming, etc. primarily related to Ninefox comic/animation nonsense, because after (a) twelve notebooks and (b) getting six notebooks behind in digitizing them for backup purposes, I conceded that maybe I needed a better solution. (I am paranoid about the backup issue after losing all my paper notes, original longhand drafts, and MAPS for Machineries thanks to the 2016 flood; I also lost a bunch of backups to CD-R because we couldn’t evacuate them, which was a lesson in knowing your threat model.) In particular, being able to have my sketches (storyboards, character concepts and designs, etc.) in digital format directly was another big advantage for me.
I also stuck on some chess for n00bs workbook PDFs to work through, but, y’know.
Longer discussion of features/drawbacks at my Dreamwidth blog.
I have a foxy question you haven’t answered here!
Sure, please email deuceofgearsart@gmail.com and I'll get back to you!
And the obligatory catten pic:
Yours in calendrical heresy,
YHL