Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: sick
  • Music: Conterpoint 2007, 'The Black Death.'

Still sick, but also accomplished, so we take what we can get.

The tiny little part of my tiny little blonde head that controls essential tasks—those things that have to be done, but which I absolutely dread and abhor doing, like formatting submissions, writing cover letters, and outlining projects—decided that the perfect time to write the series outline for the Mason Trilogy* would be while I was all hopped-up on cold medication. Because my brain is special.

Series outlines are the bane of my existence. Basically, they're your "short pitch," your chance to try to sell your story in a format that's longer than a cover letter, but shorter than the whole manuscript. Series outlines are sort of like high school book reports: they're packed with spoilers, and they strip out most of the detail of a story. "A young girl travels to a foreign land, kills the first person she meets, and teams up with three strangers" levels of stripping out the detail.

Feed is over five hundred pages long. Deadline is on track to be just as long. I have no real idea about Blackout, but I'd be astonished if the last book in the series was somehow shorter than the first two. I managed to condense all three volumes to nine pages. My agent loves me right now.

Fear me. And now? I'm going back to bed.

(*This may or may not be the official name of the series, but since all three books are about Shaun and Georgia Mason and their exciting journalistic adventures, it's as good a name as any. My original name for the project was "a good excuse to study virology and talk about zombies a lot," so this is really a pretty big improvement, marketability-wise. I'm great at naming books. I'm terrible at naming series.)
Tags: being productive, blackout, deadline, feed, pandemic time, personal superhero, zombies
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  • 12 comments

ladyamber

November 25 2008, 22:33:40 UTC 8 years ago

...you know, the more I immerse myself in my reporting lifestyle, the more I come to appreciate really horrible journalistic puns. You do not know just how dead a reporter's brain can get when they've just written nine different articles for the same deadline.

seanan_mcguire

November 26 2008, 01:23:32 UTC 8 years ago

I love this series because it lets me a) make horrible journalism puns, and b) make horrible pandemic puns. Seriously, it's like a great big ball of gooey chocolate goodness filled with zombies, all for me.