I watch a lot of forensic shows, Cops shows, Snapped, etc, because I get ideas for stories. Often not right then. But like in SEAL Wolf Hunting, one of the men in the story is suspected of committing a crime, and SEAL Paul tells him his story is full of holes–that criminals do stupid things, so that doesn’t automatically indicate he didn’t commit the crime. But he uses a true couple of scenarios to illustrate his point. Both were Cops stories that I had watched some years back and always stuck in my mind and had laughed about. They were so dumb, but some criminals just are. This picture made me think of two of the Forensics shows. The clock sitting here means I took the picture at the time shown on the clock, right? But the clock hasn’t run for years. LOL 🙂
Anyway, so during the holidays, I usually get requests for edits. It just seems the editors are getting caught up on their reading as submissions slow down. Word to the wise, you might have heard that everyone takes a break over the holidays and no one reads submissions. Not true. I’ve had full manuscript requests during the holidays. And as you can see from the situation with me, I often have requests for stuff by the editorial staff over the holidays. So right now, I’m rewriting the synopsis for the book that I had written before the book was written. What is the problem with this? I have NO idea what I’m going to actually say in the book. So I had lots of things happen that I had no clue about. My characters are total rogues.
And as I’ve been rewriting this, I’m like, wow, I really was clueless. Yes, some of the details were there, but most were not as important as what really happened because I didn’t know what would happen.
When I was a kid in school, we were always required to write an outline and then write our paper. It never worked for me. The teachers had some notion that planning out your paper was the best thing to do before you wrote it. Now, for plotters, yes, it works. But I’m a seat of the pants, pantser, writer, and it just doesn’t work for me. As I’d begin to do research for my paper, I’d realize that I’d need to go in a whole new direction. I’ve done that with my books too. And so what happens? The outline/synopsis is not anything like what I thought I was going to write.
If I could write the outline with the paper and turn it in, I was good to go. I would write my paper, and then write the outline. 🙂 But some teachers were out to get my kind, so they’d make us turn in an outline BEFORE we wrote our paper. No getting around that. 🙂
Everyone is unique in the way we think, the way we accomplish something. If you take a group of people to accomplish a mission, and asked each how they would do it, based on backgrounds, personalities, moral compasses, etc, each will have different ideas. We could see this in business models when I was in Grad school, or when I was in leadership reaction or other courses in Army ROTC where a leader was required to ask of his squad if anyone had different ideas of how to accomplish some mission. Some ideas will be better than others. But it’s really interesting to see this. Even my dad, when he was a prisoner-of-war in Germany, submitted his ideas to a committee on how to escape the POW camp. He was 16, so no one paid much attention to him, but he actually did escape twice on his own during death marches.
News Flash: Heard an elephant on the roof and thought it was a cat, ran to the windows, no cat. Then saw a squirrel! Tried to take a picture but it wouldn’t come out. My birds are all but gone because of the hawk. Maybe also because of the annoying cat, that isn’t mine, prowling around, but the squirrel is brand new. I’ve seen one of the bunnies too. Never had a squirrel out here before. But my live oak trees have gotten old enough that they’re starting to produce nuts, and my red oak tree is….
Okay, back to synopses….so I’m stuck rewriting one and need to turn it in today.
The moral of the story is do the job your way and it will get done–probably better than if you had to do it in some weird way that doesn’t work for you.
Are you ready for the holidays?
Still proofing Call of the Cougar print version. Then it’s back to Phantom Fae. 🙂
Have a super great Monday!! The good thing about Mondays, is they only happen once a week.
Terry
“Giving new meaning to the term alpha male where fantasy is reality.”
www.terryspear.com
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