Author: Sarra Cannon

The ending stages of getting a novel out are much more tedious than I expected. Once the book is finished (all three drafts or however many it took), there’s still the query letter and the synopsis. Not to mention figuring out the packaging itself. A synopsis is basically a 3-5 page summary of your entire novel, but it’s not that easy. It’s also got to show your “voice” as a writer and make the editor or agent reading it hunger for more. Until you’ve tried to do it, you have no idea how hard it is to shorten a novel…

Writing a synopsis is not as easy as it sounds. It’s so difficult to summarize the important elements of my 170 page novel into only 3 pages! Unfortunately, it’s a necessary part of my submission package, so I have no choice. The novel can’t go out until the synopsis is written. I think one of the main things that makes it difficult to write is that I love my book for all the little things. All those magical little moments that come together to make my story special and different, sure. But I also love all the pages in between….

I can’t believe the time has actually come to do a final read-through of my manuscript. It has almost taken me this entire year to get this story down on paper, and as novels go, it’s very short… a mere 49,000 words. But I’m proud of every single word, because it came from a place of creativity inside of myself that I always knew I had but never before had the courage to explore. Writing a romance novel, specifically for Harlequin, has been a dream of mine for as long as I can remember. I think the very first one…

Yesterday I was listening to iTunes on random when a song from the Sex and the City Movie soundtrack came on. I know I must have heard this song a thousand times, but for some reason the words never really clicked with me until yesterday. It won’t let me embed the video from youtube, but here is the link, the song is called “It’s Amazing”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XDxhDbtDak Here are the basics of the lyrics. It will be obvious why they mean so much to me: Do it nowYou know who you areYou feel it in your heartAnd you’re burning and wishingAnd…

The number one movie in America right now is about zombies. I haven’t seen it yet, but “Zombieland”, starring Woody Harrelson is supposed to be extremely funny. Considering that my next book is going to be about zombies, I have been devouring everything I can get my hands on that has to do with zombies, so I probably will eventually get out to see the movie as well. (Only thing stopping me now is the stupid $10 a ticket when we’re trying to save money for the wedding in 73 days!) I recently finished the book “Dead Sea” by Brian…

Some weeks just get off to a bad start. And once you’re off routine, it’s hard to get back on it. This week appears to be one of those weeks for me. I woke up about 6 am yesterday morning with a terrible back-ache that didn’t really start feeling better until last night. As a result, my routine was totally screwed up yesterday. Then, G had a review session until 8:30 pm last night, so we didn’t eat dinner until late. Rather than cooking something light, stupid me made spaghetti. Well, that pasta sat in my stomach like a bunch…