Splitting the synopsis difference

Gratuitous chicken photos grace this post. All eight hens enjoyed a field trip yesterday to the garden! (Yes hens, as they are eighteen and a half weeks old, woo hoo!)

A few posts ago I wrote an inadvertent and certainly impromptu synopsis for Home and Far Away. It was so cathartic and, well, thrilling to write all that, but the big question was would I employ any of that off the cuff random prose to promote a novel.

Well, I used some of it. Hence today's title.

Nadia Chicken likes investigating on her own. She's a Barnevelder, and one of my faves.

Here's the post. (Again, as I linked to it right off the bat, lol.) And below is what I actually sent off with the manuscript, all retailers using it. Well, Smashwords proffers a short synopsis first, then you can click for the long version.

 

Liberating Chelak from reproductive slavery, Sooz and Dardram find themselves in 1971 California on the front yard of widower Richard Lund and his five-year-old daughter Gilly. The Lunds are stymied by their visitors’ claim to be from another galaxy, but Sooz’s medical acumen remains only for those in the Mendocino County district who fear being harassed for their ethnicity.

A love story, Home and Far Away explores Richard and Sooz’s irreverent attraction as well as Sooz’s assimilation of Earth’s culture via soap operas and the chance to put her medical skills to use. Entering the local physician’s practice, Sooz discovers the truth behind Noth’s motives, and in having judged Richard according to her beliefs, those assumptions are turned inside out, as well as Sooz’s heart in regard to Gilly and her father.

But how to boil down, without spoilers, the essence of a thirty-nine-chapter novel that defies genres and all manners to shoehorn it into an acceptable box. This is no typical time-travel romance or space-opera adventure; this is a tale about human beings, even if two are from how many galaxies away, and one not even our DNA. It’s about an alien merging into humanity, cattle finding liberty, an entire hamlet affected by a black female doctor who correctly believes she has all the rights of those within her scope, as well as the harried clients she treats. Read the first three books in this series if you wish, or Far Away from Home, which details Sooz’s past, or simply dive into this installment of The Enran Chronicles; you’ll figure it out quickly. Science fiction blended with women’s fiction along with a heavy dollop of romance, Home and Far Away proffers an outsider’s analysis of late twentieth century America and immense healing for all involved. You want a happy ending? You’ll find it, and much more, in this fourth segment of The Enran Chronicles.

I'm still grateful to have gotten plenty out of my synopsis-challenged system. As I've come to not want to make quilt bindings, writing blurbs for novels is...tricksy. In part that I'm not a genre-compelled writer, so there's always some new point to be made. And, oh I don't know, writing synopses is tough. A drag. Not fun. Yet SO NECESSARY. Sigh.

A few moments of sun was a nice change, as well as temps flirting with seventy degrees F, I kid you not!

 

Would I again split the difference? If I come up with a post that includes some decent blah blah blah about a book, sure! Time will tell, as it does for most things.

Owl Chicken right after she pecked at my shoes, bless her!

In the meantime, if character-driven fiction and that synopsis call to your heart, pick up a copy of Home and Far Away: The Enran Chronicles Book Four at myriad online book establishments. At most of them, the novel is free! As are the rest of my catalogue, insert shameless plug/smiley face emoji here. (And don't be put off by this book being the fourth in a series. Telling Richard and Gilly's tale makes this story very much its own singular happy self.)