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On the way home today I heard the most astounding realization of /h/: a teenage girl, probably 15 years old, who was consistently using [k] where most people in this part of the country would say [h]. I was dumbfounded, but I listened for several minutes and am pretty sure of what I heard. Every “he” was [ki], and every “who” was [ku].

I am baffled by this. My first thought was that the girl wasn’t a native speaker, but she had no other perceptible anomalies of pronunciation. My second thought was a peculiar speech impediment, but what kind of speech defect would result in replacing [h] with [k], rather than dropping it? I considered that I was simply mishearing, but again, in a noisy situation you’re more likely to not hear [h] at all than to consistently mistake it for [k]. My last thought was that it was an affectation, a deliberately non-standard pronunciation adopted to confuse others.

Who knows? Are there any linguists in the audience to shed light?

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Last night was a night of great and portentious (not to mention pretentious) moment. Four of we who met at Potlatch, gathered at my house. The celebrants were myself, Jessie Kwak, Natasha Oliver, and Brian LeBlanc, all denizens of Seattle and ambitious neophyte writers. We had agreed to a get-together shortly after Potlatch, and this was the day it got together.

Food was had, and in delicious quantities. Natasha supplied fantastic ham quiche squares, Brian blessed us with alcohol, and Jessie took up the rear with a kind of Mexican cookie whose name I have forgotten. The entree was supplied by me and my wife: ciorbă rădăuţeană, a traditional Romanian soup made with chicken and sour cream. I requested that the revelers learn to pronounce the word before they started eating, which they did with admirable aplomb. Well, at least Jessie and Natasha did. I think that Brian got away with not saying the name of the dish the entire night.

Food meant discussion, which eventually led to reading and critting. Jessie agreed to be the first victim with a short story about… Actually, I won’t say what the story was about. It’s her prerogative to divulge details of her own WIP. In any case, everyone agreed that the format was enjoyable and useful, so others will provide further grist for the crit mill in the future.

We all agreed to an encore, with the exact date to be established in the future. The last order of business was to agree on a name for our cadre. After heated discussion, we agreed on the Shining Creamsicles, for reasons to ridiculous to explain. Note that the name is only temporarily plural: when the Creamsicle Singularity occurs (like the Technological Singularity, but with Creamsicles), we will merge and become The Shining Creamsicle. And I know we’re all looking forward to that.

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First, a big public thanks to Sän and Eva, who helped me wring the horrible parts out of my synopsis.

Second, I really need to pass forward this page of synopsis advice that I got from Sän. I recommend that you read it and study it. Then click on every single link and study the more in-depth advice given therein. They’re all worth it. Even the one with the horrible background music.

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Yet another manila envelope sits at my door, waiting to be dropped in the mail slot tomorrow morning.

I’m now about halfway down my initial list of agents to query. I haven’t yet decided what to do if I get to the bottom…

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CS Inman (aka Sän) has a surprisingly good synopsis up to read. Basically everyone, everywhere, hates writing their novel synopsis, so I’m automatically impressed by anyone that manages to write a synopses that’s entertaining and informative.

This even applies to the victims participants in Joshua Palmatier’s synopsis day. Now the synopses listed here were “successful” synopses, meaning that they were for novels that eventually sold. But even so, I found most of them dull, incomprehensible, or overly long. Probably the easiest one to read was Mike Brotherton’s synopsis of Star Dragon. That one suffered from the opposite problem: it was fast-paced and easy to follow, but the writing style itself felt amateurish. (I have no idea if that applies to the book itself, which I haven’t read.)

Reading all those pro synopses made me think that maybe the synopsis was free to be long and boring, which was good because my synopsis was long and boring. It was 2500 words of dull. It was a plodding, interminable death-march through a dozen names and a series of irrelevant places.

When I set out to pare it down this week, the first pass got it down to 1250 words and something of a respectable hook.Sän and Eva have both helped me further pare it down and spruce it up, so the final draft will be under 1,000 words, and hopefully will actually help sell the novel.

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I’ve started up the novel that was giving me so much trouble, again. And I did what I originally said I wasn’t going to do: I’m starting from the top, and rewriting all of the chapters that have the new POV. This is, fortunately, less that I was originally afraid of, since most of the stuff that’s in the other POV will still work, though there’s some things to be moved around.

I don’t know, though. There’s a lot of cut-and-past, and a lot of scenes being rewritten with the same dialogue but different characters. I suspect that it’s turning out a mess, though that’s what first drafts are for, nu-i asa?

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This one came back with a very polite note at the bottom:

PS: You might want to be more careful with cut and paste next time. 😉 My name isn’t (other agent’s name).

Oh, wow. So now I’m one of those writers. The ones I’ve read about on other agent blogs, the ones that send out way too many queries and get confused and insult the agents by using the wrong name. I am horribly humiliated. I would have rejected me too.

However, this agent was so winning with her smiley that I’ll be sure to put her near the top of my list next time. I’m sure she’s incredibly honored.