I hate hate hate writing synopses. For those of you who aren't deeply mired in the publishing trenches, a synopsis is sort of a cross between an outline and a back-cover blurb, laying out the whole story in anywhere from one to twenty pages. It's something that, paradoxically, I may have to do more of as I become more successful, since successful authors can eventually pitch a book based solely on a synopsis + a couple of chapters, rather than writing the entire book before trying to sell it. So, I should be trying to get good at it now...but that doesn't make me loathe them any less.
The problem is trying to tell the story concisely, cleaning, and with glimmers of the same voice you're using in the actual writing, without getting bogged down in details or secondary plot points. I reread the synopsis that I wrote for the Golden Heart entry that won last year, and it was actually pretty good -- but then I was depressed for a couple of hours, because I no longer really like that book and would rewrite the whole thing if I had a chance. So I worked on the synopsis for this year's entry after I ate some leftover pizza to get over my depression, and while I'm making progress, I think I need to take a break and get some sleep before trying to finish it in the morning.
Today was not a great day for the writing; the dreaded synopsis brutalized my productivity. I did make it into the gym for a ten a.m. training session with Alyssa, and then I stocked up on groceries so that I can eat for the next week without having to scavenge too badly. Then I did a combination of writing, procrastinating, and watching Stanford decimate Oregon State -- all fun, but not as much work as I should have done.
I'm recognizing my own self-sabotaging tendencies -- there is a part of me, as you all well know, that does not like to lose. I particularly do not like to lose when I have won before. And there is something scary about the possibility of not winning this contest that I'm entering, even though writing is much more subjective than math, and I could fall victim to having a couple of judges who don't appreciate my actress-in-disguise plot. Alternatively, perhaps last time I got really lucky with having judges who like marriages of convenience, so perhaps that victory was the fluke and this entry will land me back in loserville where I belong.
Clearly I'm being just a little bit ridiculous, and the rational part of me sees that. It's the rational part that also recognizes that leaving the synopsis until the last minute is one of those classic "well, if they had seen my better work, I would have won" defenses that is an ultimate act of self-sabotage. But the emotional part, which has been oscillating wildly between "this is a great book" and "Madeleine and Ferguson must die" for several months, is just scared enough that it's making it hard to concentrate.
So anyway, I need to get over this, not just in relation to this contest entry, but also in regards to publishing in general -- rejection happens all the time and I will have a much higher fail-rate than I'm used to, and I'm going to have to figure out how to keep moving on and not let it throw me into a local minima each time I get some bad news. There is time to get over it tomorrow morning, though; for now, I desperately need to go to bed!
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