The New Description for THE CITY DARKENS

Well, as I mentioned, I have spent a chunk of time reworking the description of The City Darkens. I got a lot of help from my good friend Kathryn, as well as the awesome folks over at AbsoluteWrite. After pulling out most of my hair as I struggled to string coherent sentences together, here is the new description:

In an island metropolis, where robots serve the wealthy and glittering skyscrapers light up the night, a woman from a country estate, unschooled in the ways of the court, fights to get back her son and resist the tyrannical new order.

After Myadar Solboi's efforts to navigate the perils of the court lead to betrayal, she becomes an urban incarnation of a legendary highwayman, pursuing revenge on those who wronged her as well as on the capital itself. The city's underclass stirs in response, but before she can rouse them to revolution, she falls into a peril she cannot escape.

This twisting tale of the struggle against the birth of a new, violent age is dystopian decopunk inspired by a 1920s aesthetic. A world of fanatical rulers, ambitious priests, seductive courtiers, shining robots, and a nearly forgotten people living under the city in the sewers... all seen through the shocked eyes of a determined heroine.


That last paragraph may seem like it's all tell and no show; I decided to include it to state my novel's genre in the clearest terms I could come up with, after running into several people who had never heard of dieselpunk, much less dystopian decopunk. Which is a genre I have just coined. I expect all future writers of dystopian decopunk to pay me royalties for coining it, by the way.

What with the new description giving away that Myadar goes all Robin Hood (sort of) I think my cover doesn't quite fit as well. I'd asked the artist, Dolly G, to have Myadar holding this red piece of cloth, so that when people read about Myadar's red silk mask, they'd go, "Oh! That's what she's holding on the cover!" Dolly did a wonderful job, and she really listened to me, so I am grateful to have worked with her. It's just that since the whole mask piece of the story isn't a surprise anymore (can you tell I'm conflicted about this?) it seems like the cover ought to highlight the action aspect more. Hence, I covet a cover (that's fun to say out loud) by Benjamin Carré. Here's one of his works, from his website:

This is the cover to Tim Aker's The Horns of Ruin. I haven't read it, though it's on my ever increasing to-read pile.

I've written Carré twice and he hasn't got back to me. There's an immense chance I couldn't even dream of affording him, but I just wish I could know for sure. Sigh.

Blurb Writing Hell

Yep, that's where I am. I got some feedback on the blurb I wrote for The City Darkens (along the lines of it sucking) so now I'm trying without a ton of success to rewrite it. I'm really lucky, though, because a bunch of people are helping me (for free!) on AbsoluteWrite. I am genuinely grateful for this. I've realized, though, just how very, very bad I am at writing blurbs. (I've also realized how truly obscure dieselpunk is to the vast majority of people out there, even other writers on AW, but that's not the point of this blog post.)

I never really thought I was great at writing blurbs, you know, but now I have a sense for how truly terrible I am at it. For one thing, I usually only read the first two sentences of a blurb on a novel I'm thinking of reading. I do this not because I'm impatient (well... maybe that too) but because I hate when blurbs have spoilers in them. And they almost always do. And basically a lot of the advice I've been getting from the folks at AW is leading me to do some of that with my TCD blurb. This so goes against my tastes. But let's face it, writing, "This is a really great novel. Trust me. You'll like it. You don't want me to give anything away why, right? Just trust me." Isn't going to work. So I'm biting the bullet and writing a new blurb that says a lot more about the story than the original blurb did.

In my latest attempt, I went and looked at the blurb for Kushiel's Dart, since it was one of the books that I thought of when I was coming up with my ideas for TCD (Cynthia Voigt's Jackaroo was another, as were a couple of Marion Zimmer Bradley novels). I followed the Kushiel blurb line by line, trying to come up with what the equivalent would be for TCD. That was interesting, and some of the AW peeps say they like this latest version the best. Now, of course, I'm going to rework it, both to incorporate the newest feedback but also to change it enough that it's not so close to the Kushiel blurb.

This process is frustrating and tiring and may be interfering with my regular writing energies. In any case, I haven't worked on the WiP in a couple of days. I haven't wanted to, which is disappointing because for a while there I was chugging right along. Today, though, I did think of something that was missing in the story, so with luck, I'll find the energy for it again tomorrow. 

When you read blurbs, do you like there to be a lot of information about the story, or do you avoid finding out a lot, like I do?

What qualities do the best blurbs have?