Outlining One Book, Revising Another

Photo of a blue-winged wasp on a coleus leaf.

The other morning while I was out watering the plants on the patio, I saw this cool looking wasp with iridescent blue wings hanging out on a coleus leaf. So, I did some online research and learned that this is a blue-winged wasp, and I have to say it’s nice when something is named logically.

The other research I’ve been doing is for a book I’m currently outlining. It’s speculative fiction, so really the extent of my outlining is falling down Reddit rabbit holes. Then when I manage to claw my way back out of the abyss, I scribble down some notes on a white legal pad. I’m trying but not always remembering to snap photos of these written notes because apparently this is something we’re doing now. I read this on a non-Reddit forum about suggested ways authors can defend ourselves against accusations that we use AI to write our books. So, yeah I’m snapping photos of pieces of paper and note cards to prove I’m a human who writes my own books.

On the subject of proving our humanity, this week Ron showed me a weird captcha thing he got while trying to log into Ebay. It had the instructions to select images with “all concepts shown” with the example image being an illustration of a brown rabbit with upright ears sitting amongst some flowers. The images to pick from included rabbits and other creatures, but with different colored rabbits, standing up rabbits and rabbits with floppy ears it wasn’t clear that any of the pictures really had “all concepts shown.”

The other writing project that’s been occupying me of late, is revising a completed (Are any books ever complete?) novel, and looming over my head is the synopsis that I will eventually have to write for this book. Why is it easier to write a complete novel than it is to write a brief synopsis? I don’t know, but maybe because I have been outlining and photographing outlines I had a bit of an epiphany this week. That completed novel that I need to write the dreaded synopsis of started out its life as an outline not too long ago. What if I just use my outline to craft my synopsis? Why did it take me so long to come up with that idea instead of constantly trying to start from scratch? Well, we’ll see how brilliant this idea is when I actually sit down to turn that old outline into a shiny new synopsis.

In other news the local peaches have been pretty tasty this year. I baked some into a pie: