Bewildering Stories News

What’s the Story Story Here?

With Tala Bar’s Sacrifice and euhal allen’s The Bridge, II we inaugurate a new feature: the synopsis. The idea originated with the editorial board and has been debated at length. The following is our consensus.

What is a synopsis, anyway? It’s the equivalent of the blurb on the back cover of a paperback novel or on the flyleaf of a hardback. Officially it’s an extension of the Readers’ Guides: it tells what the story’s premise is, who some of the main characters are, and, possibly, what the main conflict is. One thing it must not do: give the story away.

Why have a synopsis? We’ve had a number of rather long serials of late, e.g. Julian Lawler’s Battle Seer, Michael E. Lloyd’s Observation One, and now euhal allen’s continuation of The Bridge. New readers can’t see at first glance how they can find the beginning of a serial; now, if they open a later chapter, at least they’ll be told in brief what the story is about. Continuing readers might also like a reminder.

Where does it appear? In the header of any serial that appears in three or more issues. It’s not needed for serials appearing in only two issues; readers can easily backtrack to the initial installments. If a serial has more than one installment in an issue, the synopsis appears in the first installment only.

Is a synopsis required? No, it’s optional. It’s intended as a favor to the author and a service to the readers. Some authors may prefer to do without one, as a matter of taste; that’s quite all right with us. Sometimes the editors may simply not know how to write a synopsis, and unless the author supplies one, we may have to do without.

Are there other display options? They’re very limited. We can’t use a sidebar, because that would require the readers to scroll up and down too much. The text is also rather short for an auxiliary page, which would open as a new window. However, if the author prefers that the synopsis be displayed on an auxiliary page, we can make a “Synopsis” link in the title line. It would make the synopsis optional for the readers rather than being automatically displayed “up front,” so to speak.

Were there other options? We considered a summary, namely a “story to date” recapitulation of the action. Print magazines such as Analog and Asimov’s use them because readers seldom have back issues at hand. We did not adopt the idea, because all our back issues are readily available all the time.

Who writes the synopses? The editors will be responsible for them; however, we prefer that the authors themselves provide a draft. The guidelines are simple and are set out here in “What is a synopsis?” Two more: the length limitation is fairly strict: the ideal is 150 words; the maximum, 200. A synopsis does not count against the 3,000-word limit on page length.

We are also going to ask all authors to provide one- or two-sentence descriptions upon acceptance. These descriptions will go into the files’ meta tags. What are they for? Search for anything in the Archive: some files will not have descriptions, some will. A comparison will show you immediately how useful descriptions can be. And the descriptions give the editors a head start on writing introductions in the Readers’ Guides.

Will the synopsis vary from issue to issue? No, the synopsis will always stay the same. Technically speaking, it will not even be a part of the files in which it appears: it will be stored in a “synopses” directory and inserted into the appropriate pages by means of a server-side include. That makes formatting a lot simpler than it would be otherwise.

However, we are ready for exceptions. For example, euhal allen’s The Bridge, book II will be followed by books III and IV. Each book should have its own synopsis.

If you have any questions, comments or ideas, please write!