December 3rd 2016

Today I had to write a 50-word synopsis of my novel. It was hard. 60,000 words summated into fifty. Just over a tweet’s worth of characters to describe a project that I’ve been working on for three years of my life.

It had to be written as a sort of blurb. It had to describe the story without spoiling it, and I had to make it sound exciting. My issue lied within the fact that I no longer find the story exciting. Out of all the books I have ever read, my own is the one that I have read the most (followed closely by Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s stone) – so I’m pretty bored of it by now.

I struggled because every way I tried to write this blurb sounded so overdone and cliched. I don’t know whether I felt that way because of subject matter, or because of the fact that to me it was cliched, because I’d literally read that story 100 times before.

I call myself a writer, it shouldn’t be hard to write 50 words. It wasn’t this hard to write the whole damn thing in the first place.

Okay, maybe that’s a stretch.

It just… it felt cliched, and uninteresting.

In the end I sort of half way fashioned a blurb that I was happyish with. Only when reading back through it repeatedly do I notice the flaws in my novel. And they’re fundamental flaws, not just typos.

But I’m too invested to just scrap the project, and I’m not invested enough to go back and change it. So I’m stuck with it in it’s current form. Until one of these literary agents gets back to me and offers me an editorial and a book deal.

I think I’m just about out of literary agents now. I submitted a manuscript to like 25 of them, and I think almost all of them have rejected me by this point.

Promising.

But, I live in both hope and fear.

Until tomorrow, what’s your 50-word story?

Jacn