Been working on tabs

Had a bit of a quiet weekend.  It's cold, grey and miserable in Blighty. 


Decided to set up another blog which concentrates on Rust and Weathering.  Spent a merry time playing about with HTML and CSS and Javascript, and hacking the Blogger templates provided by this site.  I managed to get some rudimentary tabs working.  I have no idea what the Blogger parser does, but it really screws up HTML.

I suppose there are other blog sites and templates.  Must investigate.

In the meantime, having discovered even more about this blogging lark, I may set up a separate FRAN blog.

That's all for now folks.

Quiet in here

Been rather busy of late; the normal stuff: work, looking after my daughter, moving house.

Anyway, I think I need to redo this site, err Blog, so this one may disappear.  I think I shall set up a FRAN writer's blog, detailing my journey to, hopefully, getting published.

I also need to set up another Blog of interest blog.  Hmmm, that sounded funny.

Anyway, before I sign off: I was rejected by Brenda Bowen, though I got a nice letter from her intern.  Nowt else, just the normal: not my cup of tea type stuff.

Well, on with the house move stuff.  You will not believe how many forms you have to fill out to sell a house.  Blimey, talk about destruction of a major deciduous forest.

Until the weekend or perhaps sooner.

FRAN on the loose

FRAN is away and running.  I couldn't stand it any longer, all this tinkering with the Query letter come synopsis, so I fired off my first salvo, in the new format, to none other that Brenda (Rabbit eats rabbit) Bowen of Sandford J GreenBurger.

The result should be interesting, a British interloper in New York.  Perhaps I should have entitle this post, A Brit in New York.

Anyway, I am steeled for the inevitable rejection.  I do, however, take heart from the experiences of J. Rowling and B. Potter, and the thought of all those agents and publishers who turned them down and felt as sick as a parrot afterward as they realied what they had rejected.

On a completely different note.  Do you realise how stupid the average British house buyer is?  I have never encountered a bigger bunch of numpties in all my life.  These people are incapable of reading and visualising the dimensions of rooms on property details from estate agents.

Hello people!  Get a bleedin' tape measure out and measure out the room dimensions, rather than turning up to a property for a viewing and then saying, 'oh, the kitchen is too small.'  It's all in the details, you numpties.  And use your bleedin' imaginations.  If you don't like the width of the kitchen, widen the thing with an extension.  You have eightfive feet of garden to play with.  The average garden, these days, is a mere 35' deep.

Sorry, rant over.

Arrgh! It was bound to happen.

Having left the Query synopsis for a day, I looked at it last night and decided it was not quite right.  Yet more tinkering ensued.

Am I entirely happy with it?

No.

Will I leave it alone?

Probably.

Why?

Well, in my trawls across the internet, and with my interactions with people (and Literary Agents) I have realised that their requirements are all different.  I have come across so many different suggestions as to what constitutes the perfect query letter.  Perhaps the best site I have encountered thus far, are the ones set up by Janet Reid aka Sharky.

But each literary agent, and publisher, has their own idea of the perfect query letter, the perfect synopsis, and the perfect biography. They have, also, their own idea of what constitutes the perfect manuscript or at least one they are prepared to take on.

What is depressing is that this changes with time, the seasons, what they ate that morning, what mood they are in, etc, etc, etc.

So that is why I have decided to call time on my tinkering. Instead I now concentrate on assembling the disparate parts, perhaps polishing the first three chapters a bit more - for that is all they are interested in seeing - and then blasting the documents out to agents and publishers alike.

Then one steals one’s self for all the rejections.

A mystery solved.

Willow is not a spam Bot, but a warm, loving person.  Ya had me going for a while there, Willow.  Should’ve realised earliet.

Moving swiftly on from this sticky moment.  The struggles with the Query synopsis continue.

There I was, pleased as punch that we had successfully assembled a neat little synopsis which captured the quintessential essence of ‘FRAN, one mustn’t destroy the universe’ in under 250 words, when the doubts spread their insidious influence.  Although the Query synopsis (what is it’s real name?) broke the rules in what I hoped was a positive manner, it still lacked the punch and signature of individuality I was seeking.

So, girding my loins (girding too tightly brings tears to one’s eyes) I blasted out another version, then we agonised over it for a while.  Admittedly it wasn’t a long while, but it did take a bit of thinking. It really hurts the head.

With the Query synopsis neatly bedded, I noticed that the literary agency needed a proper synopsis and a bio.

Sigh.

My original hack of a synopsis was extracted, dusted off and inspected.  Hmmm, the writing of the Query synopsis really focuses the mind.  The original synopsis didn’t look or feel right.

Oh well, nothing for it, more tears to the eyes as I girded my loins, and tackled the synopsis.

Wow! Such freedom!  A whole one to two pages of space to expand the plot. Sheer luxury.

T’was done, but having had it rest a day, it is possible I may have to hack the thing again tonight.

As I said earlier, writing the novel is a breeze compared with all this Query letter and synopsis business.

And finally. The weatherman promised me it would get warm. Indeed, it was warm (well 3.5C) when I got to work, but there was this small matter of the temperature of -1.5C when I exited the house and had to scrap off the ice welded to my windscreen this morning.  Granted, it’s nothing like the stuff hitting places like the U.S., but that was expected.