Life in a Northern Town

Poetry Fishbowl today at Elizabeth Barrette’s journal. Explanation for how it works at the link.

The shared setting Torn World has just launched a new core storyline in which the cultures of the South and North meet for the first time. The first story is here, and you can follow the South meets North tag on the Torn World Livejournal to keep up on it. This is something I’ve been rather excited about; I really like the Torn World setting (it’s fantastically complex, with a huge amount of material) but it’s difficult to find a good place to jump in, especially as there are few large ongoing storylines — for the most part, Torn World exists in a lot of small vignettes without a core story. This storyline is meant to be a jumping-on point for new readers and a window for exploring the world.

Today’s main creative project (though I’m currently procrastinating, as you can see) is writing a query letter and synopsis of my novel for an agent submission package. As I was browsing through synopsis-writing advice, I stumbled upon this interesting page on developing a novel’s plot by focusing on the main story goal and the complications that follow from that. I’m still trying to find a method of story development that works for me other than the highly inefficient “just start writing” method; I’ll have to try this!