Boring title for today's blog, but I think I've mentioned I suck at naming things. And if you think this is bad, you should see the titles I put on the poor books in my futuristic proposal. :-(
I finished a first draft of the synopsis yesterday. I was shooting for 5 pages since I have the overview arc to go along with it. I believe the synopsis came in at around 11 pages, which would put it at more than double what my goal was. I honestly don't know how this happens, it just does. Today I'll polish it up a bit, maybe manage to do some streamlining and get it down to 10 pages, and work on writing the story.
I did about four pages of that last night before I went to bed. I'm not sure whether or not it's working. It's that damn balancing act between grounding the reader in where they are and not boring them to death with the world. And IMO, this balancing act gets worse in connected books. I mean, it was easy in Ravyn's Flight--or relatively easy considering I loathe description--to give the reader enough info to visualize for themselves. It was harder in Eternal Nights because I had a third factor in the balancing act--readers who were familiar with RF. Now I'm dealing with that factor times 2 in Flare's story.
How much is too much? How much does the reader need versus how much slows the story? Is there a better way to get the info across without leaving the reader lost?
The struggle with these questions will continue today. The goal is to have this package wrapped up and ready to mail by the weekend. If not the weekend then on Monday. Revisions are coming. (And doesn't that sound ominous?)
I had to get up early today because I have to take my parents to the airport before I go to the day job. I've been tired all week and this is just making that worse. This also leaves me with sprinkler duty for the new sod. I know, I'm spoiled, but my dad is obsessive about my yard, and in all honesty, I don't care much what the outside of the house looks like. Of course, I'm not going to let all that brand new grass die, so I'll diligently water, but it's going to be such a PITA. I've been told to move the sprinklers every half hour and that I have to turn the water off on the south hose before I do that because it uncouples from the sprinkler otherwise.
This basically means that while I'm trying to write a story that I'm struggling with anyway, that I have to stop every half an hour, go outside and spend 5-10 minutes jockeying the hoses. Um, yeah, sounds really conducive to writing.
And just to put something non-writing related on the blog for a change, why are all the movies so long? Everything I've gotten from Netflix has been over two hours! What happened to 90 minute movies? I've had Armageddon for like a week now, but it's hard for me to commit 2.5 hours of my life to a movie. I don't know when I'm going to get around to watching this thing.
