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I love it the way my agent blithely says: Send me a synopsis, will you? – as if I can churn one out in ten minutes. I’d rather write a 5,000 word chapter than one synopsis for a single book, and I’d make a better job of it, too.

And this one is for a whole trilogy.
We are talking summarizing half a million words down into something that makes sense and sounds interesting. For a fantasy. Right. Aaaaargh!

So I sacrificed a whole day of novel writing to write a synopsis instead…and I still think it sounds like the lunatic ravings of someone on hallucinogens. I had actually done this before, a year and a half ago, but at the time the books were unwritten and the trilogy was actually going to be a quartet, so it needed changing drastically now that it is only 3 books and one and a half of them have already been written.

Imagine an arid, ancient land where it no longer rains without magical intervention.

Such is the Quartern, where rainlords sense and move water and cloudmasters make and break clouds to bring rain. Their abilities bring them unlimited wealth and power, as well as a burdensome responsibility.

When potential new cloudmasters are murdered and the land is left short of water, a boy with the ability to move clouds becomes a pawn in a power struggle that leads to war, and two squabbling rainlords are forced to marry in order to produce more cloudmasters. In the meantime, in a poverty-stricken Quartern city, a girl able to depict the future on the surface of water is trapped in a painted destiny, not knowing that her skills will one day be crucial to the survival of the land.

The three books follow the story of these four characters in a time of drought and war, when men and women governed by greed seek to rule, and honour means risking all to stop them.

If only I could stop there.