Waiting Games

Deciding to query is terrifying. What comes after is...kind of anti-climatic. It's mostly waiting. You send out queries everyday (or every week, whatever your chosen schedule is) and then you wait. Some agents might respond to say no, some might not respond at all, some might get back to you with more optimistic answers (like asking for a full manuscript). But in the end, a lot of it is just waiting, and there's nothing you can really do to make that go faster.

I thought waiting would be horrible. I've never been very good at it. I sucked at waiting for my viva and got more and more anxious as the weeks went by. I was pretty bad at waiting for exams to happen too. And I've never been great at waiting for vacations, especially when they involve international travel.

But I've gotten much better at it now. Hurry up and wait is pretty much a motto of this whole thing, I'm discovering, because even once you're signed there's waiting for publishers to be interested, waiting for editors to get back to you, waiting for the launch, waiting, waiting, waiting. Patience is definitely a virtue of the publishing industry. There's mostly long stretches of nothing, interspersed with short moments of exited terror. Which is life in a nutshell, isn't it?

As always, however, waiting is much easier when you keep busy, and I've definitely been keeping busy. Formulating a business plan is a long thought process and one I'm very familiar with, even if I'm not familiar with business plans. PhD-ing is 80% in your head and only 20% content to show for it (or less, some days). This feels the same way. A lot of months of thinking and planning before there is any pay-off, and publishing appears to be the same way. I am not surprised by this fact.

So I am waiting, hopefully for a good day to come. Until then, I'm keeping busy doing things that I hope will also one day lead to good things. After a year of feeling stuck in the mud, it's good to be walking along the trail again, even if I don't know where that trail is leading.

How to Write a Synopsis

Here's the thing, after a great deal of research, it seems that a lot of agents still ask for a synopsis and not just a query letter (or actual pages). So, as well as working on editing and editing and re-editing the query letter (and still editing the novel), I'm also writing a synopsis.

Google was particularly unhelpful when I asked it how to do this. It was super helpful with the query letter, so I was rather disappointed by this. Most of the links that came up said things like 'there's not one way to write a synopsis' or 'everyone has a different way to do this' or 'it's hard to give advise on the dreaded synopsis'.

None of those filled me with much confidence. But after a bunch of sites, it became apparent that even if there is not 'one way', there is a bunch of things NOT to do, and there's a few things that YOU MUST do. Unsurprisingly, neither of these lists were as clear-cut as the query letter ones. Are you getting a theme here?

One of my favourite things on the NOT to do list was: don't make it sound like a story. And for a while that confused me a lot, because it's the synopsis of a story, how can it not sound like a story? But after reading a bunch of sample synopses online, I realized what they were getting at. It's supposed to be boring. It's supposed to be 'this is what happens' and then 'this is what happened afterwards'.

That doesn't mean it has to be dry as dust or just a statement of events. One of the best pieces of advice Google gave me was to remember to put emotion into the synopsis. The story is all about how the characters feel and react to the events that happen, and the synopsis has to convey that. So it can't just be all 'Character X goes to a party and meets character Y.' 'Character Y is a bad boy and isn't good for her'. 'Character X falls in love with character Y.' OMG I'm bored already. There's no emotion in that. There's no story in that. It shouldn't sound like a story, but it should clearly show that you've written a story. A story is not just a bunch of things happening. It has to have emotion.

Now how to show that in the synopsis. Well, I'll get back to you, shall I, because I'm still writing it. Like the query letter, it's a work in progress. It takes time. It takes a lot of rewriting and reworking. It takes a lot of editing. And a lot of having other people read it and tell me how wrong it is. I'm not sure I'll ever be 'happy' with it, but I will reach the stage that I have to let it go. And hopefully, at the end of the day, the query will make the first impression...and the synopsis won't blow it too badly.

Admittance

So, I have something to admit. Not many people know about it thus far, because it's taken me a bit come to terms with in my head. My own acceptance.

I didn't get full funding for the PhD. Now, that is not to say that partial funding won't come through yet, but any chance of a fully funded degree is out the window. I have a few options left for first year, but I will have to reapply to everything for second and third year. Which is a pain. I haven't told many people, because it brings up all sorts of questions.

The important thing is, is that I am STILL GOING TO ENGLAND. I have planned and calculated and concluded that it *is* possible, even without funding, to do this and not land myself in so much debt that I will still be paying it off when I retire (meaning I won't ever get to retire).

Also, my supervisor is Ross Parry. I can't *not* do this degree. And I certainly can't bugger it up!

In other news, in the next few months I will become published in an ACTUAL JOURNAL. The academic kind that they print and put in libraries!