Synopsis - MEETING OF THE WATERS (mid-length)

[ryanznock]

Hey all. Folks here provided some excellent help with the query for my novel, and now that I've finally finished the first draft of my synopsis, I'm hoping y'all'll pull through a second time. Thanks in advance for any help or critique you can offer.

This synopsis runs 4 pages single spaced. I still have to take a crack at a more 'general overview' 1-pager.

(Edit: After this posted I realized it's a pain in the butt to read on my screen, with the text running so wide. I found it easier to read by making the browser window narrower, about the width of an actual sheet of paper. Or just copy-paste it into a Word document. I just don't want to turn anyone away due to the thing being unpleasant to look at. Hope this helps)



MEETING OF THE WATERS

In August 2016, JAIME ADRICKS quits playing his favorite video game, Ages: High Seas, because the company making the 17th century pirate MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) chose to have a crossover with their 20th century game Ages: World War. Jaime thinks time-traveling Nazis are cheesy, and even though he was close to defeating the game’s archvillain, the demon pirate QUINDON SABRIEL, Jaime just can’t take the game seriously anymore.

While attending a friend’s wedding in New Orleans, Jaime gets a call from his ex, AFIONG WHITEHEAD, whom he broke up with after high school because he couldn’t handle her depression. Afi asks him to visit her in Brazil, where she works for Tachyon, the company that produces the Ages games. Though he senses she needs his help, Jaime initially refuses, but afterward he discovers her father has fallen into a coma. When he’s unable to contact Afi again he resolves to fly to Brazil to bring her home.

Jaime tracks Afi’s call to somewhere in the state of Amazonas, near the city of Manaus, but political turmoil and the upcoming Olympics in Rio de Janeiro complicate his trip. The normally-friendly Brazil has grown hostile to Americans after the United States deployed warships to defend its interest in Brazil’s off-shore oil reserves from the Chinese. Civil unrest and the possibility of war are on the tongues of pundits and politicians, including Senator BOB DICKWORTH, who unbeknownst to Jaime plays the Nazi occultist who sank his ship in Ages and made him give up the game he loves.

Denied permission to enter either Manaus or Rio, Jaime gets as close as he can: São Paulo. Figuring he’ll need some guidance, Jaime uses the Ages social network to contact ALESSANDRA “ALÊ” ROCHA, a Brazilian gamer who works a boring government job, pines for her more magical college days, and whose World War II superspy character recently snuck into the 17th century aboard a time-traveling U-Boat. Alê picks Jaime up from the airport, and they hit it off over dinner at his hotel, where Jaime demonstrates his knack for getting into places he shouldn’t be by sneaking them both up to the roof – with a bottle of wine.

As they drink and swap stories, Alê tells tales of her ‘faerie powers’ ruining her past relationships, like how she accidentally discovered that her ex-boyfriend was going to propose when the man’s dead grandmother called her and spoiled the surprise. Jaime assumes these are just stories, until Alê casually mentions the names of the pirates she has allied with in Ages; by seeming coincidence, she met Jaime’s former crew mere moments after he decided to quit the game.

The next morning Alê asks to accompany Jaime, because she longs for a real-life adventure and is afraid Jaime will get in trouble. She has a friend in Rio who can get him a travel permit to Manaus, but police checkpoints dot the main interstate, so they take the longer scenic coastal highway, and they have to stop for the night at a rustic beachside bed and breakfast.

While Jaime tries again to get in touch with Afiong, Alê plays Ages on her laptop, practicing for an upcoming event where players will have a chance to determine the influence of the game’s plot. During an evening stroll along the beach, she tries to convince Jaime to give the game another try, especially because Manaus has a top-line gaming arcade run by Tachyon. Jaime, though, still can’t reach Afi, and so is in no mood to play games.

The following day they reach Rio and hit dense pre-Olympic traffic. To get out of gridlock they pull off for coffee and briefly admire a public art display with a two-way teleconferencing screen to the New Orleans riverfront. When they get back on the highway the traffic has cleared out, bewildering Jaime. Alê just chalks it up to her faerie powers.

They get Jaime his travel permit, but when they try to book a flight from Rio to Manaus an airline clerk discovers the forged papers, and they just narrowly talk their way out of getting arrested. A nervous Alê asks Jaime to give up before they get in trouble, but Jaime instead convinces her to help him con a woman with a private jet into letting them ride along. They take off, and as their plane approaches Manaus at sunset, Alê points out the window to show Jaime Encontro das Aguas, the Meeting of the Waters, where two rivers dramatically unite to form the Amazon.

Alê and Jaime head to the Tachyon arcade, her to play, him to ask about Afi and find out why she was calling him from the middle of the rainforest. He gets stonewalled though, and while spectating on Alê’s game he sees she and his old pirate crew about to fall into a Nazi ambush. He logs in to the game and saves them, but then is dragged off by the arcade’s security staff. They question him about how he knows Afiong, rough him up, then dump him with Alê, warning them to stop snooping.

No longer interested in having real adventures, Alê wants to quit and go home, but Jaime implores her to see this through to the end. They rent a car and drive into the Amazon, passing through a town having a surreal book fair, and then cutting through a Native American reservation where a booby trap in the road wrecks their car and strands them. Alê blames Jaime as they try to extricate themselves, but then Native brigands arrive and kidnap them. Jaime engineers an escape and gets shot trying to rescue Alê, but is saved when representatives from Tachyon arrive and pay their ransom.

Jaime receives medical treatment at Tachyon’s jungle compound, part of a larger facility owned by VAI, a major artificial intelligence corporation operating in the Amazon without government oversight. Afiong worked here scripting the Ages games, which with their large player base served as testing grounds for ways AI could subtly influence public opinion by means of distributed targeted propaganda.

When Jaime asks to see Afiong, a company lawyer explains that Afi went missing the same day she called him. Though at first they thought she was committing corporate espionage, they later found an unfinished suicide note, and they suspect she simply disappeared into the woods to kill herself. The lawyer hands over Afi’s effects, arranges compensation so Jaime and Alê will keep quiet, and then asks them to leave.

Stunned by Afi’s apparent suicide, Jaime returns with Alê to Rio, planning to fly on to the U.S. and saw farewell to Afi’s comatose father. As the Olympic opening ceremonies turn the city into one massive party, Alê gets Jaime to open up about Afiong to mourn and celebrate his lost friend. The night wears on, and drunk and emotional they wander the streets and eventually make love within sight of the water. When they awaken, however, they discover they have stepped through the screen in the art installation they saw earlier, and are now in New Orleans.

Alê admits to Jaime that she’s starting to fall in love with him, but after all their danger together, and in light of the growing rift between their countries, she had planned for Rio to be their last night together. Now that they have witnessed magic together, though, she is excited and wants to stay with him. Unlike Jaime she’s unconcerned about the ramifications of illegally teleporting into the country, confident that these things ‘tend to work themselves out.’

Jaime, surprised at how easily he accepts this magical occurrence, contacts the friend whose wedding he attended two weeks earlier to ask for money for Greyhound bus tickets. They pay his friend a visit as she is watching an episode of a web series derived from actual Ages gameplay, and during the credits Jaime spots Afi’s name as the lead designer in charge of writing his nemesis Sabriel.

They depart New Orleans for Atlanta, where Jaime lives. During the lengthy bus ride, while Alê sleeps, Jaime looks across the aisle to see Afiong sitting there, perhaps dead yet quite outspoken.

Afi rejects her youthful optimism and proclaims that the world will always be a wretched place because people just want to make their lives better, but once they stop suffering, they stop feeling sympathy for others. The only way to be happy is to never seek uncomfortable truths, to be content with mystery. When she realized that her job was profiting off people’s blindness of why they act as they do, she couldn’t stand to be part of it anymore, so she disappeared. She tells him not to bother visiting her father, then vanishes.

Jaime arrives in Atlanta disturbed and shaken, but determined to do what he thinks is right. He and Alê plan to rest a day before going on to Afi’s father’s nursing home in Savannah. Hoping for a fun date, Jaime takes Alê to Atlanta’s Centennial Park, which commemorates the city’s own hosting of the Olympics in 1996. But just then news breaks of riots in Brazil over a Brazilian athlete who was shot and killed while trying to visit a woman at the American dorms.

Jaime tries to calm Alê’s worries, but they soon argue, each blaming the other’s country for the violence. Alê wants to go home, and claims that seeing Jaime risk so much to help Afi has made her wish she could help others. Jaime, upset at her recent waffling between staying with him and giving up, loses his temper, and so she steps into a fountain shaped like the Olympic rings and vanishes.

When he gets over his surprise and calls her, she immediately regrets leaving, but can’t get back, so says it’s best if they don’t talk. Alone, Jaime returns home and sifts through Afiong’s last effects, finding an old map of Encontro das Aguas, plus obscure notes on her final project for Ages.

He drives to Savannah, says his farewells to Afiong’s father, and when he dies soon thereafter, Jaime attends the funeral. In the process, he misses a major event in Ages, during which the Nazis ally with the demon pirate Sabriel and learn the location of their goal: the Fountain of Time, which can grant immortality. Jaime barely cares, not even when a scandal reveals that Senator Bob Dickworth, the politician pushing hardest for military intervention to protect America’s interests in Brazil, is the leader of the Nazis who have been causing him grief in Ages.

Jaime worries about Alê for days, but doesn’t know how to help. Then, hours before the finale of the Ages time travel cross-over, Jaime learns that the riots in Brazil have intensified to organized attacks against Americans. He calls Alê, and she tells him that numerous Americans have taken refuge in the government office where she works, and she’s with them now. Suddenly their call is cut off, and the news reports that the U.S. military has invoked a telecommunications interdiction in Brazil as a warning to get the rioters to back down.

Glued to the TV with worry, Jaime watches slickly rendered news gearing the nation up for war. Reporters ambush Senator Dickworth, who is preparing for a meeting with the president, where he’ll recommend a military rescue mission for endangered Americans in Brazil, even though this would risk provoking China. Then Dickworth gets a text message on the screen as simultaneously Jaime gets one on his phone: a reminder that the Ages finale is about to start.

When he realizes Dickworth will be playing, he has an epiphany. Though he rejects Afiong’s fatalism, she was at least right about how people are being manipulated by the media. But if the media can do it, so can he. He knows it’s a slim chance, but if he can keep Dickworth and his Nazis busy long enough, he hopes cooler heads will prevail and stave off war.

He still can’t contact Alê, but he knows he needs her help, so he grabs his laptop and sets his car’s GPS for Alê’s address in São Paulo, trusting that somehow he’ll find her. He drives until the streets become a blur, but then realizes he has arrived in Brazil. Though rioters surround Alê’s office, he manages to get inside and claim refuge as an American citizen. Jaime reunites with Alê, just as elsewhere around the world his various friends and enemies log in and begin a climactic naval battle on the Amazon River – at Encontro das Aguas.

Since his laptop magically still connects with the network in Atlanta, they bypass the communication blackout over Brazil and both log in just in time to give the pirates a fighting chance against the Nazis. Using his knowledge of the river and Afiong’s notes, he’s able to turn the tide and crash his ship and the Nazis’ time-traveling U-Boat into the flooded forest surrounding the Fountain of Time. They capture Dickworth’s character, then break the game’s fourth wall to speak out against his warmongering. Dickworth logs out in embarrassment, leaving only Sabriel to deal with.

Instead of a grand duel with his nemesis, however, Jaime’s victory over the Nazis earns him a pre-scripted scene where Sabriel takes the power of the fountain and opens more time portals, revealing that ultimately the game’s archvillain was just a marketing gimmick to promote additional cross-overs between different Ages time periods. Jaime may have defeated the Nazis, but there’ll still be more time travel, which he still thinks is cheesy.

But as all the interlopers from the 20th century – the Nazis as well as Alê’s character – are whisked away to their own time, the novel ends with Jaime having a choice; does he reject the time travel and remain with what’s comfortable but lose Alê, or does he change his opinion and continue his journey with the woman he loves?

[Serzen]

I know little to next to nothing about a synopsis, or, at least, how one should prepare one, but this was clear to me. Or, at least as much as I read. My inner pendant made me skim through about half of it so I could get to the Reply button faster when I saw "Native American" used to describe an Amazonian. Technically, yes, Brazil is in South America and the indigenous people could be called Native Americans, but, really, they're not. Native Amazonian, Indigenous, call him by the name of his tribe, but not Native American, please.

No complaints, otherwise. You write well, and your plot is clear and thought out. It provides me with what I need to know regarding your text. Huzzah! &c.

~Serzen

[BlancheKing]

I'm sorry if this sounds rude, but while I was reading this, a few of my friends who play online games started reading over my shoulder and would like to know if this is adult or young adult. They pointed out that the plot seems trivial for adult fiction and cheesy for YA (One of them would like to know if "Bob Dickworth" is suppose to be a joke name). Maybe the novel is fine, but the synopsis is giving off the wrong feel?

I did a little editing for the first parts. I don't have much experience but the first time I sent out my own summary, I got a full request. Just some thoughts I hope will be helpful.

[quote="ryanznock"]


MEETING OF THE WATERS

In August 2016, JAIME ADRICKS quits playing his favorite video game, Ages: High Seas, because the company making the 17th century pirate game. MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) unecessarychose to have a crossover with their 20th century game Ages: World War. Jaime thinks time-traveling Nazis are cheesy, and even though he was close to defeating the game’s archvillain, the demon pirate QUINDON SABRIEL relevance? sounds like something only serious game-players would know about, Jaime just can’t take the game seriously anymore.

While attending a friend’s wedding in New Orleans, Jaime gets a call from his ex, AFIONG WHITEHEAD, whom he broke up with after high school because he couldn’t handle her depression. unecessary Afi asks him to visit her in Brazil, where she works for Tachyon, the company that produces the Ages games. Though he senses she needs his help, Jaime initially refuses, but afterward he discovers her father has fallen into a coma.screams daytime cat-lady soap opera When he’s unable to contact Afi again he resolves to fly to Brazil to bring her home.

Jaime tracks Afi’s call to somewhere in the state of Amazonas, near the city of Manaus, but political turmoil and the upcoming Olympics in Rio de Janeiro complicate his trip. fact dump; more story, less setting The normally-friendly Brazil has grown hostile to Americans after the United States deployed warships to defend its interest in Brazil’s off-shore oil reserves from the Chinese.Woah... straying into detailed politics in fiction is a nooooo. make more abstract Civil unrest and the possibility of war are on the tongues of pundits and politicians, including Senator BOB DICKWORTH, who unbeknownst to Jaime plays the Nazi occultist who sank his ship in Ages and made him give up the game he loves.Even the gaming guys protest against this sentence. The priorities are wrong; impending war is more important than Jamie's lost of interest in some game. This sentence falls along the lines of "not only did Guy#1 rape and murder my niece, but he also hacked my World of Warcraft lv 1000 mage and stole my super-awesome-rare battle axe. See my point?

the rest fall along the same lines... TOO MANY ADJECTIVES. Use nouns and verbs to convey the point, or at least specific adjectives. And try to remember that while there are many gaming people out there, they may not all appreciate the stereotypical nerdiness. (Their game is their escape for reality's demands.)

[ryanznock]

Apparently the wrong tone is coming across. While I wouldn't say that it's a 'mature, serious' book, I don't intend for it to come across as 'trivial.' I was going for a sort of "internet gaming meets Latin American magical realism" feel.

It's not easy for me to synopsize because there are multiple factors of the narrative all progressing simultaneously, playing off each other. Jaime starts off just wanting to find his missing friend, and the MMO is something he's trying not to care about because he feels petty thinking about a game when his friend's in trouble. But everything ends up tied to it: the fledgling romance with his dream girl, the political crisis stoked by the senator, and Jaime's own crisis of belief provoked by his friend's suicide.

His friend was a designer of the game, and so her struggle with depression seeps into the game. Throughout the novel that gives Jaime a way to understand why she killed herself, and at the climax how he defeats his enemies in the game acts as a metaphor of how he can come to terms with his friend's death.

At the same time, there's a bit of consideration of how he copes when he has to take his 'liberal arts education' style of all-inclusive belief into the real world. There are real consequences to the conflict which he's just passing through, and his inclination is to be disdainful of both sides but not get involved because he's busy worrying about his own life, and finding his friend*. The climax gives him a chance to make a decision and actually make a difference. He can keep standing by the sidelines, which tacitly endorses his dead friend's depressed belief that nothing matters, or he can get involved to help the woman he loves. And in this case, getting involved requires that he accepts that he lives in a more magical world than he wanted to believe.

Thank you for the comments. They got me thinking about what the core of the story is, and they should help me trim down the synopsis significantly.

Oh, and I knew an actual kid with the last name Dickworth in school, but you're the second person to object to the name, so I'll have to ponder whether the mild amusement I get from using the silly name outweighs the possibility it will turn prospective agents off.

* Among my social circle of recent-ish college graduates, myself included, I see a lot of people who bitch about the way things are, but who never actually do anything to change it. It wasn't a conscious motivating factor in writing the book, but I think it's a bit of a reaction to my own involvement with Obama's 2008 campaign and my disappointment with what actually got accomplished once he was in office. In the past year my political views have gone all screwy, and I can no longer find comfort in simple liberal stances.

[ryanznock]

Here's my first stab at a shorter version.



In August 2016, JAIME ADRICKS quits playing Ages: High Seas, because the company making the 17th century pirate MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) begins a crossover with their 20th century game Ages: World War. Though he was close to defeating the game’s archvillain, Jaime just can’t take the game seriously anymore. He thinks time-traveling Nazis are cheesy.

Jaime’s depressed ex-girlfriend AFIONG WHITEHEAD invites him to visit her in Brazil, where she works for Tachyon, the company that produces the Ages games. He initially refuses, but after her call is cut off Jaime discovers that Afi's father is dying. Worried for her physical and mental safety, he resolves to bring her home so she can see her father one last time.

The upcoming Olympics in Rio de Janeiro complicates Jaime’s trip to Brazil, and a brewing Cuban Missile-esque crisis off the coast has turned the nation unfriendly to Americans. To navigate the dangers, he enlists the aid of ALESSANDRA “ALÊ” ROCHA, a Brazilian gamer who works a boring government job, pines for her more magical college days, and whose Ages: World War superspy character recently snuck into the 17th century aboard a time-traveling U-Boat.

He and Alê hit it off, and they travel from São Paulo to Rio to the Amazonian technoglitz mecca Manaus. There Alê shows Jaime Encontro das Aguas: the Meeting of the Waters, where two rivers dramatically unite to form the Amazon.

Throughout the journey Jaime feels conflicted: for being attracted to Alê while his friend might be in trouble; for being unwilling to take a side when Alê blames the U.S. for the strife in her country; and even for quitting Ages, since Alê convinces him she needs his help to defeat the Nazis. And though she’s intelligent and charming, he can’t help but dismiss her as superstitious when she tells him stories about magical events she has witnessed.

When he and Alê reach the Tachyon headquarters, Jaime discovers Afiong left a suicide note but has otherwise completely disappeared. Tachyon, secretive for reasons Jaime can’t decipher, arranges compensation so he and Alê will keep quiet, then flies them back to Rio, where the Olympic opening ceremonies have turned the city into one massive party. Mourning Afi's apparent suicide, Jaime roams the streets with Alê long into the night, both of them too drunk to realize when they magically walk under an arch and emerge in America.

Confronted by this impossibility, Jaime’s confusion only grows when Afiong appears to him on a bus, perhaps dead yet quite outspoken. She proclaims that the world will always be a wretched place because without suffering, people cannot feel sympathy, and without sympathy, people will always hurt one another. The only way to be happy is to never seek uncomfortable truths, to be content with mystery. Jaime suspects that the key to why Afi vanished is connected to Ages, but she vanishes before he can ask her.

Jaime and Alê decide to visit Afiong’s father, but before they can set out, riots erupt in Brazil when a Brazilian athlete is shot and killed trying to visit his girlfriend in the American Olympic dorms. Alê, who wants to go home and help stop the violence, argues with Jaime, who doesn’t think it’s his fight. Angry he won’t help her after all she has done for him, she vanishes through a fountain back to Brazil. He calls her but can’t convince her to come back.

Suddenly alone, Jaime visits Afiong's father to say his farewells and vent his anger. Waiting for the funeral, he skips a major Ages event, and instead spends his time sifting through Afi’s last effects. He finds old maps of Encontro das Aguas, plus obscure notes on her final project for the game, but he decides to stop looking for answers. Even when he discovers that the U.S. senator responsible for provoking the crisis in Brazil plays Ages -- as the Nazis' occultist leader, who has taken Alê's spy character captive and is on his way to seize the immortality-granting Fountain of Time -- Jaime barely cares.

But days later, a mere hour before the scheduled finale of the time travel cross-over, Alê calls Jaime for help. Her office is sheltering American athletes and tourists, but rioters have surrounded the building. When their call gets cut off, Jaime resolves not to fail Alê as he did Afiong. With a leap of faith, he hops into his car, sets the GPS for Alê’s address in São Paulo, and drives until the streets become a blur. He finds his way to Alê and reunites with her, just as elsewhere around the world his various friends and enemies log in and begin a climactic naval battle on the Amazon River, at Encontro das Aguas.

Realizing that the Nazi-slash-senator is playing too, Jaime and Alê log in and take the fight to him. Using his knowledge of the river and Afiong’s notes, Jaime turns the tide, sinks the time-traveling U-Boat, and captures the senator's character, then break the game’s fourth wall to reveal his identity and ruin his credibility.

With the Nazis defeated, Jaime and Alê continue on to the fountain, only to be forced to watch a pre-scripted scene where a spirit with Afiong’s face uses the fountain's power to open more time portals. Ultimately their victory is just a marketing gimmick to promote additional cross-overs between other Ages games. That’s Afiong’s great point: nothing you do can actually make a difference, and even if you think you’re doing something for yourself, you’re just being used by someone else.

With the cross-over complete, all the interlopers from the 20th century – the Nazis as well as Alê’s character – are whisked away to their own time, and Jaime has the choice whether to go with Alê’s character. The novel ends with uncertainty. Did Jaime’s efforts actually thwart the senator’s plans? Is Afi dead or just disappeared? And will Jaime reject the game, or decide to continue his journey with the woman he loves?