Of queries and circuses Cynthia 12:24 PM

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
(photo credit: Wikipedia)

Again with the synopsis. That dirty, dirty nightmare of a word. No one really gets excited when you say synopsis—not fiction writers, college students or, I'm guessing, agents and publishers, since they have to muddle through myriad half-hearted, but well-meaning attempts at boiling a 100,000-word manuscript down to a few pages.

But as annoying as they may be, synopses are important for a few reasons:

• They help writers focus their plot lines.
• They are an effective way for the agent/publisher to see if aforementioned writer knows how to tell a story without having to slosh through hundreds of pages to find out.
• They are great practice for concise writing.

Every writer should want to write a synopsis for every manuscript. And they should do it before they send out their first query letter. Many writers get ahead of themselves and dash off a query letter while they're still editing. This is like auditioning for X Factor after your third voice lesson. If you want to be taken seriously, you won't waste your time and the agent's/editor's. This is how your query checklist should look.

1. Write manuscript--it seems obvious, but sometimes people try to skip over this step.
2. Edit manuscript at least twice--no matter how awesome you think it is on the first try.
3. Let a dozen beta readers read the manuscript and consider their suggestions/comments--you don't have to use all of them, but if five people are telling  you the same thing, maybe you should listen.
4. Edit manuscript again--until everything flows.
5. Write query letter--one page to really sell your story.
6. Edit query letter at least twice--no matter how awesome you think it is on the first try.
7. Let at least one beta reader read the query letter and consider his/her suggestions/comments--are they dying to read your manuscript based on the query?
8. Edit query letter again--until everything flows.
9. Write synopsis--summarize each chapter and condense and hone.
10. Edit synopsis at least twice--no matter how awesome you think it is on the first try.
11. Let at least one beta reader read the synopsis and consider his/her suggestions/comments--but only choose the people you don't mind spoiling your story for. The synopsis should include the ending.
12. Edit synopsis again--until everything flows.
13. Research agent/publisher--what genres do they represent? What books/authors do they represent?
14. Make sure your manuscript fits agent/publisher criteria/book list--you're wasting your time and theirs if it doesn't.
15. Send query letter according to agent/publisher guidelines--they love it when you do this. It's like candy in a rainstorm.

That's right. There are (at least) 15 steps you should take before you send out a query letter. Most importantly, your manuscript should be finished, unless you are pitching a concept, and by the agent's/publisher's guidelines it is okay to do so.Only slightly less important, is the targeted query. It's important for the prospective agent/editor to know they are more than a whim or afterthought. You should know who they are, what kinds of books they represent and which books, specifically, they represent.

I was recently involved in the hiring process for a job that opened up in my company. I got cover letters that were obviously not intended for the job we were looking to fill, and one very unprofessional phone message, during which, the caller forgot a) who she was calling b) which job she was calling about. There was a long, awkward pause while she searched through a pile of papers for the information and ultimately, she named the wrong job. I immediately shredded her resume, and agents and editors will do the same if you send a half-assed query letter. It's about quality, not quantity. It's not how many agents/editors you can annoy, it's about finding the one who's a fit for you and your story.

That's my rant. In other exciting news, I finished reading The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern last night. It was one of the most beautifully-written books I've ever read. You should read it. Everyone should read it. When they make it into a movie, I'll watch the hell out of it, but it won't be as good as the book.

Blog off.

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NaNorific Cynthia 11:13 PM

Well folks. I did it. I NaNoWriMo-ed my butt off and finished the rough draft of a novel in 30 days. Just over 50,000 words ready to be rearranged, deleted and rewritten over the next few months. This makes novel number four, all at varying stages along the continuum of completion.

I feel like celebrating, but I'm tired, my neck hurts and my hands cramped up as I was power-typing my last 2,000 words. My forearms feel like I've been doing pull-ups all night. And here I've been wasting time at the gym. All I need is a late-night word count panic to whip me into shape.

That being said, I want to thank those of you who helped me through this month--who encouraged me to keep writing, or even thought to ask how it was going. And now, I'm going to watch some episodes of The Big Bang Theory as my reward.

That is all.

On Evolution: Cynthia vs. Jason Sherman Cynthia 4:00 PM

This is a column that was published originally in March 2008. It was written in fun and is not intended as an angry rant on either side. 

Cynthia:

Millions of years ago, an amoeba oozed around in the ooze until it had a good idea. It turned into a fish, grew legs, walked on the land, climbed a tree (meteor crashed, dinosaurs died), climbed out of the tree, stood on its hind legs and became a man.

Woman arrived via taxi wearing heels and a tasteful scarf to keep the primordial ooze out of her hair.

It’s never been a neck-and-neck race. Evolutionarily speaking, women have always been a couple of millennia ahead of the men who missed their stop on the punctuated equilibrium bus ride of life. We were the first to not have hair on our backs or pee on the toilet seat, we were the first to groom ourselves and ask for directions and we were the first to realize it’s not okay to spit in public.

Women use their opposable thumbs for turning book pages. Men use theirs for mashing X-Box controller buttons.

Women use their pinkies to fine-tune their eyeliner lines. Men use theirs to dig stuff out of their ears.

It’s just painfully apparent that in the evolutionary scale, men haven’t made much progress—except those metrosexuals who have reached some sort of tentative evolutionary high based on the fact that they act, dress, talk and walk like women—they wax their eyebrows, swallow their expletives, gel their hair, wear great shoes and have learned how to read. They are considerate of others and don’t smell funny. Fortunately for women, these evolutionary hybrids have allowed us to continue reproducing with little or no harm to ourselves.

Any man reading this column (congratulations on your ability to read) is probably offended, but be honest, are you picking at your ears right now or scratching your butt?

I spent too many years picking greasy laundry up off the floor, prying mashed Skittles off pocket change and wiping little after-shave hair bits out of the sink. I spent too many years involuntarily watching Max X and Fear Factor out of the corner of my eye—watching him drink straight out of the milk jug and turn all the clothes pink. And guys—as righteous as your indignation may be, he’s not the only one. You’re doing something gross right now. You just won’t admit it.

Yes, I’ll admit that there are various incarnations of man/woman, woman/man, man/man and woman/woman. There’s always an exception to the rule, but bear in mind—it’s an exception. 

But it’s not too late to play catch-up. Just wait around for the next catastrophic world-wide event, and make sure you go with the flow this time. Come on. It’ll be fun.

Then well have someone to talk to.

Jason Sherman:

Contrary to popular belief, evolution isn't something that actually matters. There's the scientific community who postulate that we evolved over millions of years, the religious community who argue that Adam was the first man created by God, the scientific/religious community who argulate that God used evolution as a means of creating man, and then there’s the rest of the population who simply don’t care.

I'm with those guys.

Argument and debate are great things, as they inspire thought about different points of view, but at some point this particular argument got way too fanatical for its own good.

Honestly—people go insane over this. For some reason, the question "Do you believe in evolution?" has become akin to asking "Are you an atheist?" or "Are you a Christian?" Seriously people—we're talking about something that, if it’s true, takes place on such a huge timeframe that there is no possible way it would have any effect on any human, ever.

By the time evolution crops up again as a valid point of discussion for humans (in a Why-is-my-face-melting kind of way), I’m fairly certain the human race as we now know it will still resemble itself in the way a FOX News story resembles something that actually happened: not very.

We will probably have gone through seven nuclear winters, four Zombie Apocalypses, and at least three million more seasons of American Idol before any living thing has actually visibly evolved, and by then, we won’t remember what we looked like now anyway. (Sorry; I ran into a sort of paradox of tense there.)

What began as a simple conflict of theories mushroomed into a completely irrelevant Science vs. Religion SmackDown 2008. You might as well argue about the exact orbital patterns of galaxies, or try to understand the plot of Syriana. It would take way too long to know for sure, and isn’t worth the effort.

Whenever someone comes up to you and asks the question, (and the answer’s not, "Of course I’ll marry you!"), try to change the subject as fast as possible, or better yet, simply give them a good, hard slap.

No amount of discussion is going to change either party’s mind anyway, and this guarantees that:

1. They’ll never ask you about evolution again and
2. That they’ll think twice before asking anyone else. And come to think of it, anyone walking around looking for an argument deserves to be slapped. Hard.

On finding directions: Cynthia vs. Jason Sherman Cynthia 12:32 PM

This is a little light reading for my followers and other random readers of my blog. It's from a column that was published originally in April 2008 called "The Battle of the Sexists." Keep in mind, it was written before smart phones with built-in GPS became a thing. It was also written in fun and is not intended as an angry rant on either side. While your comments are appreciated as always, please be nice.

Cynthia:

I get lost a lot. It’s frustrating and embarrassing.

I didn’t get the internal compass that tells me which way is north. I thought I just had a horrible sense of direction. I didn’t realize I was missing vital parts. It turns out there’s a reason.

Some people have natural iron deposits or something in their noses that helps them know instinctively where north is. Now that I know this, I want iron deposit implant surgery—it’s not cosmetic, it’s a necessary procedure. (Will my insurance pay for it?)

Well, according to theregister.co.uk, CALTECH scientists found that human noses have magnetite, the same thing that bats, homing pigeons, migratory dolphins and honeybees have, that helps them find their way through the earth’s magnetic field. It’s a tiny, shiny crystal of magnetite in the ethmoid bone, located between your eyes, just behind the nose.

I am apparently magnetiteless.

Because of this, I hate driving in new places—I take my directions in the flavor of right or left. North and south mean nothing to me unless I can see our familiar Utah mountains. I MapQuest everything, but still frequently find myself driving off into oblivion.

It goes like this:

“Hi, I think I’m lost.” I say into my cell phone after I’m already 10 minutes late.

“Where are you?”

“I...uh...just passed Snickerdoodle Street.”

“Snickerdoodle and what?”

“Snickerdoodle and 4th.”

“Snickerdoodle and...what? 4th North? You’re in the entirely wrong city! How did you get there?”

Substitute different street names and that describes any of a number of my ventures into the wilds of America’s streets and freeways.

My brother has the same problem I do. Apparently the lack of magnetite in the nose is hereditary. But he found a smart solution to his problem.

Global. Positioning. System.

It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever experienced. See, you plug it into your car, input the address, and it tells you where to go. Literally. A magical voice tells you when to turn and which way. It even says things like “left” and “right”. If you overshoot your mark, it corrects for you and recalculates your path. I feel now like I can conquer the world via freeway. Then I found out that it cost money, and gave up on my dream. I went back to MapQuest and somehow made it from Ogden to St. George, to Las Vegas, around Las Vegas, and home again. I found out along the way you can send the MapQuest directions to your cell phone—a happy compromise.

So, no. I don’t have any sense of direction whatsoever, but it’s not because I’m a woman, it’s because I’m a Loveland. It’s my father’s fault.

Jason:

For Spring Break my pal and I sojourned to the slightly smelly ultra-consumerist neon Mecca of Las Vegas. Not to have my trip ruined by failing to find the place (which would actually be an accomplishment unto itself, considering the city is like a radioactive blemish on the face of the planet), I nimbly jumped to a computer and, in turn, the Internet to procure directions on how to reach the 500-mile distant societal scab.

And instead of a complex list of twists and turns, instructing me to merge onto I-9whatnot, which gradually becomes State Road 274563, taking the right-hand turn onto Jeb Podunkers dirt road after 72.695 miles to cut over to west-bound I-9whathaveyou, a mere eight-step list appeared nearly instantaneously, and four of them were telling me how to get out of my own neighborhood. Step numbers one through seven combined for a grand-total distance of three miles, and number seven was comical in its simplicity: Turn left to merge onto I-15 S/I-84 E toward Salt Lake; Continue to follow I-15 S; Passing through Arizona, Entering Nevada—460 mi.

These days, you have to be really trying hard to get lost. In an age where helpful technology (as opposed to unhelpful technology—Microsoft, I’ll have a chat with you later) flows like running water, no excuses exist for even the lowliest non-tech-savvy 20th-century Earthican to get lost (and mom, I’m talking to you here: The Internet isn’t broken; there’s a binder laying across the keyboard).

In fact, we did get lost when we got to Vegas. Here’s the situation: Two Vegas-newbs show up at two a.m. in a city neither of them has ever been in, the person were supposed to be staying with has turned off his phone, and we have no idea where he lives. However, unlike your abacus-using auntie, we didn’t simply find the cheapest motel and bed down for the night (we’re two dudes—that would be just weird anyway: Me and Chris spent a night in a cheap motel in Vegas. Kinda a party-stopper, that).

Being the MacGyver-loving future-nerds we are, we simply whipped out his laptop and cruised the dark Vegas residential roads, searching for... are you ready for it? ... An unsecured Wi-Fi connection. Yep, there’s actually a reason to password protect it! Anyhoo, after finding one and searching through several phone-book Web sites to no avail, and even signing up for one of those background-check services, we finally found the guy’s address by phoning back to Utah and waking somebody up (although we did find out an extraordinary amount of other information about him, such as his income and previous residences).


A quick Googlemaps search (note: Google is awesome: Street View anyone?) later, and we had pinpoint directions to the exact geographic coordinate from where we were. Actually, it was like a well-calibrated missile, (as opposed to that out-dated term, a well-oiled machine) ... (And if you couldn’t tell by now, I really like parentheses.) ... (And who cares? Threes no rule against excessive parentheses use!) ... (And for those who don’t like it, archaic grammar usage is simply another thing that changing to become more efficient, just like the advent of highly-effective technology. (Take that Ms. Biddix!))

My Post-College Writing Career: Student Loans and Job-Hunting Cynthia 9:11 PM

When I graduated from college, I was in the middle of writing THE GREATEST NOVEL OF ALL TIME called "A Scribble in the Margins." I finished it a year later, immediately following my epic trip to Europe, where I saw things like this pile of sleeping Germans (top) and this caveman on a beach in Barcelona (bottom). I gave my amazing novel to a physics professor to edit. He said he enjoyed the story very much and gave me some helpful feedback. I made a trip to the U of U physics department, where much of the story is set, and got some more helpful insight and background for my story. When I made all the edits and had my critique group look at it, I gave it back to the physics professor, who re-edited it and provided even MORE helpful feedback and suggestion. Done. It was done. And then. I had to write a query letter. Every writer knows about the dreaded query letter. Yes, we can write a 400-page novel. Yes, we can create believeable, loveable characters, complex plots and subplots. Yes, we can weave in elements of the Campbellian Monomyth. We can do all these things. But when it comes to writing a one-page query that not only effectively showcases the plot, characters and voice of the story, but the credentials of the author and a the reasearch said author did on whichever agent or editor he or she is querying, we choke. At least I choke. At least I feel like choking something.

In April of that year, I wrote a novel in 30 days. It was one of the most exhilarating things that's ever happened to me, like riding my bike down a hill at top speed--the wind whipping my hair wildly behind me. (The hair that's hanging out from under my helmet, that is.) With a premise based on an image from a dream I'd had a year or so earlier, I wrote the whirlwind novel, which I call Firedamp (see teaser image to the left that is (disclaimer) not mine).

Last November, I pulled Brynda Brandt out of mothballs and decided to revamp it for NaNoWriMo...well more like rewrite it from scratch. So I did. In 30 days, I rewrote it and it was much much better. But I'm still unsettled. Brynda Brandt is my white whale (or wide wail, depending on how frustrated I am).

I still have a pile of poems, sitting around being awesome. Some I adore, some I think are neat, and some are embarrassingly weird/lame. But I can't seem to get rid of any of them.

Below is another poem I'm fond of called Laetoli, Tanzania. As background, several sets of footprints were found in the aforementioned location that were dated to 3.6 million years ago and the earliest evidence of bipedal locomotion. There seemed to be evidence that a bigger pair of foosteps carried a tiny pair of nonfootsteps on one hip, and smaller pairs of footsteps trailed behind. Further research suggests that they were all the same size, crossing at different times, and the uneven gait was due to a bad leg, but it still spurred this poem.

Laetoli, Tanzania

More than three-and-a-half million years ago

she left her footprints in the ash,

fossilized, forgotten, found, and finally

studied with some kind of reliable science.

They think she bore the weight of a child on her hip—

while another…maybe two…trailed behind,

aping (but not apelike) her footfalls,

primitive and barely upright.

Kicking off from ancestors. Hobbling toward the future.

But they can’t calculate how much her shoulders stooped

as she stepped through the stifling heat,

or how hard her lungs spasmed—trying to cough out ash,

fleeing punctuated equilibrium.

And they haven’t yet hypothesized how many of her tears

joined the rain that made ash into mud—

the mud that preserved her heel-toe, heavy-hipped stride

as fodder for some article in Nature magazine.

After all the hours of observations—a plaster mold, a measurement—

and line after line of notes about half-life and bipedal locomotion,

she was just one more mother

skirting the edge of disaster.