May 28, 2008: I can't uncross my eyes!

I've spent the last two hours in a cycle of emailing myself query letters, checking to see where the little oogies arise (lines breaking in the wrong place, for example), fixing those, emailing myself, fixing the new ones I caused by fixing the original ones, emailing myself... two hours. And I now have two completed queries ready to send out on the weekend. (I'm actually happy about this - I expected to only have one finished. :)

Raoul went off on a tangent today as I was reviewing its outline. Basically, I thought of a way to reverse the roles of the male and female main characters. I find it difficult when a huge book-changing idea hits me like this - I'm never sure whether to run with it or not. I'm leaning toward 'not' in this case, because it'll take away a big part of what I wanted to explore, but I'm not completely there yet. It's going to percolate until Friday morning and we'll see then!

I walked to and from the grocery store today and the post-race soreness seems to be nearly gone. Tomorrow I'll try the elliptical machine, and if that doesn't destroy me I'll get back into running. I'm doing a ten-mile race July 13th (yes, the day before my birthday :) so I don't have a lot of time to get ready again. I must like being busy, I guess!

Writing Project: Raoul's outline review and Seven's queries
Time Planned: 2 for Raoul, 3 for Seven
Time Spent: 2 for Raoul, 3.25 for Seven (lost track of time and honestly didn't hear the Palm signaling the end of the session)
Favourite Part: seeing a few areas to deepen Raoul

Exercise: walk to the grocery store
One Fun Thing I Did Today: spent time in City of Villains (online game) making costumes for my characters. Seriously, such a nerd. :)

Ah, the synopsis, how crazy-making

Guess what I worked on today? I have a list of each scene in "Seven", so I have, on two pages, a list of the key points in the book. It should be easy to turn that list into a synopsis, yes?

No. I spent three hours on it today, and I now have a five-page document that swings from far too detailed to way too vague and back again. Joy. However, at least it's something, and now I'll let it rest for a few days and then go through it again, and repeat that cycle until it seems to describe "Seven" without giving the entire game away.

Interesting articles on synopsis writing and similar:

• Alicia Rasley's article on outlining your novel in 30 minutes
  
• Kathy Carmichael's site with several articles on synopsis creation
  
• Vivian Beck's five steps to writing a synopsis
  

I'd be remiss to not mention the Snowflake Method, which I used to create my outline for "Seven". The five-page synopsis I completed today is an expansion of one of the Snowflake stages.

Writing Project: Preparing to query "Seven"
Time Planned: as much as I could stand
Time Spent: three hours
Favourite Part: that I didn't give up before finishing it

Exercise: none (scheduled to do the elliptical machine, but woke up sore, and since I'll be running 1.5-2 hours this weekend...)
One Fun Thing I Did Today: I cleaned out the cupboard above the fridge, to put the china from under the microwave stand there. The space under the microwave is now filled with alcohol, which I took out of the bookcase with doors. The bookcase with doors will hold books come next Thursday, when the piano leaves for my neighbour's house and I get to have my writing space back! (This may not sound like fun, but I've been wanting this space to be entirely mine for months, so it's fun for me to know it's a week away!)