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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.

The lovely Satima has interviewed moi here, on Specusphere.

And in the meantime, here’s progress on Book Two (Stormshifter) of The Time of Random Rain trilogy. Zinging along now, with over 1,500 new words of immortal prose a day…

And here’s another photo from Como. Because I can.

I forgot to say yesterday that I am also giving a reading at Denvention. I shall probably read something from the new trilogy (Time of Random Rain) and I am going to keep my fingers crossed that SOMEONE turns up to listen.

And I have been writing like mad – all of a sudden back in the groove. I am now half way through the first draft of the second book, Stormshifter (working title). The final book will probably be around 180,000, but I aim to get the first draft to 170,000 because I always like – and invariably need – about 5,000 words more before I complete the second draft, and then another 5,000 between second draft and publication. So here it stands at the moment on picometer halfway to the end of the first draft:

And Hrugaar has pointed out that Interaction Glasgow was 2005, of course (see last post). Plus the fact that the book I was thinking of was Anne McCaffrey’s two Dinosaur Planet books. (And he says he has a bad memory. Huh.)

Today was a spend-the-time-at-hospital-clinic day, all re my 2 numb fingers. The good news is that they are SO much better. Not normal, but at least they don’t have the feeling of two bananas struck on the end of my hand any more. It has taken 10 months to get to this point.

And the other good news was an email out of the blue from someone I had not heard from in 25 years. I love search engines.