We interrrupt this regularly scheduled blog

I apologize for being the worst blogger in the world for the past few days, but I have an excuse! Honestly! I've been furiously working on my synopsis and partial to get it in tip-top shape to start submitting it to my top ten list of agents.

Thanks to the help of a few friends, the synopsis is rocking (Thanks MH, MF, and KMJ). I'm really proud of it. After going back and forth over the past few days, I'm going to stick with my first person POV synopsis. I just feel that it's the best fit for the book. Any agent who reads it is going to know right away whether or not they want to read further, or if they even like the story. I don't think that writing it in the third person is going to improve my chances of getting them to read the partial. That's my humble opinion.

The partial is taking longer because I've just reduced 3 chapters to 2. I had the briliant idea to up the conflict in my first chapter, which meant that I know had to totally rewrite them both almost from scratch. Yikes! But I really think that dramatically it works better and raises the stakes for one of my characters. And I wouldn't have known to do that if it weren't for my synopsis.

O0oh, I also wanted to alert readers, if they don't already read Diana Peterfreund's blog to head on over and check out her GREAT BLOG EXPERIMENT. There's been alot of talk on other blogs, message boards, and reviews on Amazon talking about books coming out with similar plots as writers sit down and think to themselves "Hmm, what can I write about that's already been done?". Readers are screaming 'copy-cat.' For some reason, readers tend don't seem to have figured out that it happens that books come out with similar themes or plots.

It could be that something was in the air, or it's a popular theme right now (all the teen vamp books). I once read 3 different category romances in a month that all had male bosses with babies dumped on their doorsteps who either had colleagues or assistants who helped them out, and then they fell in love. All published by Harlequin/Silhouette. But that's all they had in common because the execution was so completely different in each one.

It happens in Hollywood too. Witness the two volcano movies that came out in the same summer Dantes Peak and Volcano. Both movies about Volcanos totally different plot. Or Deep Impact and Armageddon, both movies dealt with a giant asteroid heading toward earth but Deep Impact was more a character study with special effects and Armageddon was totally big budget dreck. Oh, and who can forget Tombstone and Wyatt Earp? Or the two versions of Emma, Paltrow or Beckinsale? Now we have the two Capote movies, Capote with Philip Seymour Hoffman and the new one with Toby Jones and Sandra Bullock coming out this fall. Should any of those directors abandoned their movie because someone else was making a similar story?

Anyway, check out Diana's blog. The experiment is to give several authors the same premise and to see what they come up with. All of them are amazingly different. Particularly my personal favorite which was the newly contracted Marley Gibson's. It was so original and fresh, if she wasn't my friend, I'd hate her guts! Just kidding. But really I'm smelling another series here.

So next time that you see that two authors are coming out with books that have similar plots, stop and think for a second and give them both a chance. You might be surprised.