I’m also working on my synopsis which, after asking on AW if I should even write one, has already been rewritten once.  Synopses aren’t too heavily critiqued in AW (they don’t have their own subsection so they get stuck in Queries and tend to get lost) so it’s hard to find something that does work.  Like AW has a thread for successful queries but not for synopses.  I could use Agent Kristin’s tutorial on how to write one but the standards for them vary from person to person.  Bottom line is you want to sell your work.  You need to strip your story down to its basic plot and give that from beginning to end only in a short story type of set-up, with more telling and little showing.  Wholly contradictory to everything I’ve learned as a writer but it’s standard for synopsis writing.  Fun.

Now I’m just waiting for some feedback on how to query one particular agent.  When I went to my reading in San Francisco a couple years ago, I was offered representation by a reputable agent and after some discussion with her, we decided another one of her agents would work better since she reps YA and the one that offered doesn’t.  I just don’t know how to send the query.  Do I email the YA agent and CC the one that came directly to me?  The other way around?  What?  After some fine tuning I might even be able to start getting some queries out on Monday.

Puke.

It’ll be a never-ending cycle that I won’t win.  It just has to get to a point of good enough or where I really like it and not willing to make more changes.  I’m digging the simplicity of my most recent incarnation.  It still remains in Michael’s voice and gets the point across but does it need to be edited again?  I don’t want to overlook something huge that I’m not seeing in my own work.  At the same time I don’t want to be stuck in a vortex.  I also don’t want to rush it out the door so I can just have a completed query.

Ugh.  Editing.  Fun times.

So it’s now turned into a slight portal story.  Just slight.

And Sabina totally doesn’t know that the DC world even exists because her parents escaped during the take-over and took her to ours, ending up in New York City in the Alphabet.

Yeah.

I had this beginning swimming around in my head for a few weeks now and I really like it.  Originally she was a suburbanite with parents that totally acclimated to the suburban lifestyle but meh.  This one . . .

The original usurping of the big guy (how bad is it that I have to consult my own notes to remember the world I created?) stays in, the Sickness is probably going to be eliminated altogether or at minimum grossly altered because the entire world would be destroyed if it stayed as it functions currently.  At the usurping Sabina (now called Sabi) was very young (a year or two at most) and since he’s a diamond crier, her parents took her and ran.  They end up in our world (haven’t figured out how yet), dead broke, homeless and destitute.  Mata, Sabina’s younger sister, is born in our world not too long afterwards.  Her parents end up with mediocre jobs and like in a crap apartment in Alphabet City.  At least they’re not in Raydin.

Until it comes to get them.  Surprise!

Sabina has personality!  Yay!  And not author-induced!  Woohoo!  I’m excited.

Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos­trophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.  (Elmore Leonard)

The accent should be in the structure of the sentence, not the structure of the words.  Go find a book where the author wrote phonetic dialogue and let me know how much slower you travel over those paragraphs.  It ruins flow and it almost takes a step back into reading in Middle English: you’re not wholly going to understand what you’re reading unless you read it out loud.  And it’s the same damn language.

Instead of , “He is gettin’ outta here wit me tanight,” use something like, “We is getting out of here tonight.”  The ‘we is’ alone will give the reader enough of an idea of what the dialect should sound like without, literally, spelling it out for them.  You don’t interrupt the flow of the work and you allow for the reader to utilize that imagination of theirs and create the sound of the voice in their own heads.  We can assume that said person isn’t going to say, syllable for syllable, ‘getting out of here’ but probably something closer to the first line.  Leave it up to the brain to fill in that gap.

So when you get the urge to write dialogue phonetically, remember the flow.  Do you really want to throw it into a screeching halt?  Or would you rather keep it flowing at the same pace yet get the idea across of what you want your characters to sound like?  You’re not spelling everything else out for your readers.  Why should you do it with dialogue?