Pushing myself

I am literally forcing myself to get going today. I've been sitting here pretty much doing nothing, finding excuse after excuse not to get my query and synopsis written. It's funny how I can sit here and crank out a book in 10 days with no problem, but it takes me weeks and weeks to write a simple query. It's the brief description of the book that I get hung up on. So much is hanging on those couple of paragraphs and I find it's really difficult to describe my own book.

Jamie finished reading Life After Death the other day, so last night I gave her some homework. I asked her to write a couple of paragraphs describing the book, kind of like you'd see on the back cover. I was gonna send her the description I had written and just have her give me opinions on it but I decided it would be good to get a totally fresh perspective on it. I was glad I did because she took a completely different approach than I did. Now I plan to take the two descriptions and find a way to meld them a bit. I wish I had some other people who were finished with it so I could get more feedback first, but I really need to get moving on these queries so I can start my next book.

Writing books is fun. Working on query letters, sending them out to agents, waiting for replies that are generally just rejections, none of that is fun. So I tend to want to just skip all of that and move on to writing the next book. I'm not letting myself do that this time. I need to get more serious about the publishing part before I've got 20 finished manuscripts sitting here and nobody is getting to read them.

A lot of it is confusing to me, though. Some agents ask for a query AND a synopsis. So I did some research on writing a synopsis, and found out that all agents are different. Some want a 2 page synopsis and some want 20 pages. I'm not quite sure how I'm supposed to know what they want when all they say is "synopsis." Really, how much information should I be including in this synopsis? Should I go chapter by chapter and put everything in there? Or should I only put the key points of the book in there? I honestly don't have answers to this and I haven't really found an answer that I trust on the internet. So I figured I'd just write it, and see how it goes.

The synopsis was scaring me quite a bit. More than the query, actually, because I've written queries before. But as I was reading information on how to write them, I realized I've pretty much already done it. I always outline the story in a notebook before I start writing, and I update that outline as things change. So I should be able to easily turn that outline into a synopsis that I can send to agents.

Hopefully. We'll see. Gotta go get started on it.