Thursday Thoughts

So I am now a bit past the halfway point with my Journal of the Dead synopsis. Laugh if you will at my slowness, but I've always found synopses painfully hard. Am I providing enough detail? Am I providing too much detail? Which elements are too minor to mention? Am I describing this in too banal a fashion? Am I describing this too dramatically, not appropriate for a synopsis? Am I creating enough character emotion, or am I overdoing it? Is there enough world description? (This is particularly important as I think the setting is fairly original and hopefully a selling point.) Is there too much? Which characters need their names capitalized? Why X and not Y? Is this sentence painfully clumsy? Can I please commit hari-kari now?

However, I have found that having the outline has been very helpful in funneling myself along the appropriate lines. Once I'm done with the long synopsis, my goal is to polish and cut ... eventually it will need to be 3-4 pages. I managed that with Flow, but Flow was almost 40k words shorter and with significantly fewer plot elements and characters. Then create a one page synopsis from the long synopsis ... and finally a capsule description for the query letter.

I'm also concerned with whether or not the synopsis makes it clear that there is a change in tense (from third person past to first person past). This is not something I want to "surprise" an editor / agent with. On the other hand, it's called Journal of the Dead ... still, I'm going to make sure that it is crystalline clear in the query letter segment.

Also, to completely switch thoughts, Fantasist Enterprises (http://www.fantasistent.com) is having a fundraiser in an attempt to fund their next book project! ... which includes one of my stories. So check it out if you feel so inclined.