Water Lilies aka Ripples Synopsis

[gypsygurl]

Ok guys.  This is what I've got... PLEASE take a moment and critique this if you have one.  I've never done a synopsis and am not sure this is right.  My story is told in alternating chapters between the present (where Aiden is busy dealing with grief and loosing his marbles) and the past (which shows the moments that lead he and Emily to the climax).  I tried to work that in without making it too jarring.  Let me know what you think! Of course, I offer a bribe of karma and critiques when yours is ready!


AIDEN’s girlfriend EMILY is missing.  From the suspicious looks of the police canvassing their house, Aiden knows better than to mention that he can’t remember the last night Emily was safe.  Instead, he tells them she left early in the morning and keeps the letter she left behind to himself, not knowing if the search parties would look harder or give up based on the rambling contents. 

While he should be helping with the effort, or even taking care of their five-year-old daughter, LILLY, he spends his time in the attic typing the memoir Emily had asked him to start days before she disappeared. Inside, he lets himself hope that she will come back when he’s finished, but from the start Aiden knows that she is dead.  Each night, he hears her ghost come up the path from the pond behind their house, and sees her toes outside their bedroom door, but is too frightened to open it, afraid to learn what happened during those last hours he can’t remember.
 
During the day he pours himself into writing and attempting to adjust to his new role as a single parent.  Unnerved by his inability to get the grass stains out of Lilly’s jeans, he doubts that he will be a good father to her after failing yet another task that Emily had mastered.  He begins to wonder what he could have done to save Emily and if he has any hope of giving his daughter a normal childhood. 

From the story he’s writing, we learn Aiden and Emily met in a class in college.  During their first night together, spent ghost hunting in a cemetery, Emily forces Aiden to tell her a story.  Aiden finds himself revealing his recent suicide attempt, unsure why he’s able to trust a girl he just met.  As they grow closer over the months, he falls in love with her for her adventurous ways and the vitality she brings into every day he spends with her.  Though they remain just friends Emily has a constant string of boyfriends, none of which seem to hold her interest.  Aiden sees each one as an opportunity to learn what not to do, while strengthening his resolve to win her over and make her his own.  But Aiden’s hesitation leaves Emily to fall in love with COLE and she is swept away when Cole asks her to move with him from Ohio to Texas.  Aiden is left abandoned, blaming her for his now stagnant life. When, after three years, Emily leaves Cole and turns up on Aiden’s doorstep he is overjoyed at his chance to be there for her, if only because she needed somewhere to stay.  But the girl who moves in with him is not the same girl who left.  Emily is a shadow of what she once was, haunted by years of abuse at the hands of the only person who managed to win her heart.  Her sorrow culminates in her own suicide attempt, which Aiden comes home just in time to stop.

In the present, as the police search begins to wind down due to lack of leads, Aiden falls deeper into despair.  He pulls away from Lilly and rereads the mysterious letter Emily left behind, desperate for anything that might help him find her.  After realizing that she had darkened the words eave and eve in her letter, he leans out of the attic window to find a message scrawled under the eave of the attic window where she had set up his desk after asking him to write the story of their life together before she died.  He now knows Emily wanted him to save her from whatever she seemed to know was going to happen to her and blames him for not intervening.   

His memoir begins to take a stark contrast to the world he’s living in.  While the story he writes tells of how he finally wins Emily’s trust by moving with her to Oregon and away from where Cole’s threatening letters had found her, his real life is falling apart.  As he tells of how they fell in love and had Lilly, the same daughter he had thought would be the joy Emily needed to move on from her past turns further against him each day, blaming him for not letting her mother come home.  Wracked with guilt over Lilly’s anger, Aiden’s mind begins to crumble.  He becomes obsessed with the ghost of Emily standing outside his door each night, giving up sleep to watch her decay outside his door with every visit, sure there is some clue she’s trying to give him to bring her to peace.  He writes about finding letters from Cole that left no question that Emily had written back and is in danger of breaking Aiden’s promise to keep her safe, but in real life he finds he has no one to trust but the silent ghost.  When Emily’s ghost appears in the attic window in the daylight, almost toying with him while he’s trying to answer probing follow up questions from the police, he becomes convinced that Emily is trying to trip him up and frame him for her death.  Worse, at night through the floor boards when she should be alone, he hears Lilly whispering from her room below him. 

With each passing day he becomes more isolated, refusing to answer the phone, letting the dishes overflow the sink and leaving Lilly to take care of herself.  When he sees Lilly rolling a ball through the grass he is sure that she’s conspiring against him and can see Emily when he can’t and maybe has heard the truth of what happened to her mother.  A truth he can’t face told by a ghost he can’t live without.  While Aiden tries desperately to win his daughter over and get her to share the secrets he’s sure she’s hiding, we learn of how he had again found that Emily had broken his trust and continued writing Cole; how she’d tried to convince Aiden that she was only answering to get Cole to leave them alone. When Aiden doesn’t believe her and decides to move the family again to a fresh start, they end up in the house in which the novel is set. 

The final night, though he is sure he never falls asleep, he has a dream that Emily is with him.  Almost a hallucination, he can only watch as a mute Emily lightly scratches the word ‘home’ onto his arm foreshadowing her return.  When he crawls out of bed at first light and finds his way downstairs he stumbles upon Lilly, already awake and coloring on the living room floor.  The picture she draws seems to be of a fish, but Aiden sees it as Emily’s hand reaching out from the pond.  Coupled with his vision from the night before, they are the final straws that break what’s left of his fragile grasp on reality.  Convinced Emily is fine and coming back to join them, Aiden leads his emotionally exhausted daughter on a frantic cleaning spree to get the house ready for Emily’s homecoming.  As night falls, he bathes himself and Lilly and dresses them in their best clothes.   When the frogs near the pond go suddenly silent he knows it’s because Emily is coming up the path and rushes his daughter out to meet her. 

Through the mist, Emily comes closer, looking alive.  But beside Aiden, Lilly is terrified.  She tries to tell her father what Emily really looks like, with her rotting flesh and empty sockets that once held her eyes.  At first, Aiden sees only what he wants to see, a happy Emily full of vitality and ready to come home but as Lilly’s fears increase Aiden begins to see Emily for what she really is – a lonely corpse bent on keeping her family together, even in death.  When she snatches Lilly away and carries her towards the pond, Aiden begs her to take his life and spare their daughter.  Emily leads him into the pond and pulls him below the surface to what he is sure is certain death.  Aiden is shocked when he bobs up under the pier, even more so when he feels strands of hair brushing against his skin and answers the question of where Emily’s body was hidden.  And he remembers the last night.

He had been searching their photo albums  for ideas to write into the story, when he’d found new letters from Cole tucked behind the pictures.  Each one forces him to believe Emily plans to leave him for Cole’s  shallow sounding apologies taking his daughter with her.  Aiden confronts Emily, but instead of pressing her to stay ends up berating her for getting herself in the situation in the first place.  When he tries again, he finds her uncommunicative and believes he’s pushed her further into her decision.  He hears her climb the stairs to the attic to get the letters to take with her.  For long minutes Aiden waits for her to come back down, and when she doesn’t he thinks there may be a chance she’s hesitating.  He makes his way to the attic to find that Emily has hung herself.  Sure that Cole is coming for her and overcome with grief, Aiden hides her body in the pond where Cole will never be able to hurt her again. 

When Aiden finally faces what happened, he realizes Emily had never wanted to hurt him, but had only wanted to be laid to rest.   

[Chelc]

I wanna be the first to edit!
yay!
now give me ten minutes...

[gypsygurl]

You got it! Karma paid upon receipt...

[Chelc]

I'm getting there...

[joanjunkmail]

good job!  not too much to do to it, so i'll wait until tomorrow when i'm more awake.

for now, all i see is little tweakings.

again, good job!

[Chelc]

sorry I took so long! I was doing a bunch of stuff at once. anyway, biggest thing I have to point out is your tendancy for run on sentences, which can get confusing. otherwise, yay! you did it! you have a synopisis!

as usual, feel free to ignore me. I'm not all that great at this stuff. But without further ado, here it is!

AIDEN's girlfriend EMILY is missing.  From the suspicious looks of the police canvassing their house awkward phrasing alert!, Aiden knows better than to mention that he can't remember the last night Emily was safe.  Instead, he tells them she left early in the morning keeping the letter she left behind to himself, not knowing if the search parties would look harder or give up based on the rambling contents. 

He should be helping with the effort. He should be taking care of his five-year-old daughter, Lilly. But he finds himself spending his time in the attic, typing the memoir Emily had asked him to start days before she disappeared. He allows himself to hope that she will come back when he’s finished, even though he’s known the truth from the start—Emily is dead. Each night, he hears her ghost come up the path from the pond behind their house, and sees her toes outside their bedroom door, but is too frightened to open it, afraid to learn what happened during those last hours he can't remember.
 
During the day he pours himself into writing and attempting to adjust to his new role as a single parent.  Unnerved by his inability to get the grass stains out of Lilly's jeans, he doubts that he will be a good father to her after failing yet another task that Emily had mastered.  He begins to wonder what he could have done to save Emily and if he has any hope of giving his daughter a normal childhood. 

From the story he's writing, we learn Aiden and Emily met in a class in college.  During their first night together, spent ghost hunting in a cemetery, Emily forces Aiden to tell her a story.  Aiden finds himself you've already used "finds himself" in this earlier. I'd try not to repeat any words/phrasesrevealing his recent suicide attempt, unsure why he's able to trust a girl he hardly knows.  As they grow closer over the monthsunnecessary, he falls in love with her for her adventurous ways and the vitality she brings into every day he spends with her.  Though they remain just friends Emily has a constant string of boyfriends, none of which seem to hold her interest.  Aiden sees each one as an opportunity to learn what not to do, while strengthening his resolve to win her over and make her his own.  But Aiden's hesitation leaves Emily to fall in love with COLE and she is swept away when Cole asks her to move with him from Ohio to Texas.  Aiden is left abandoned, blaming her for his now stagnant life.

Three years later, Emily leaves Cole and turns up on Aiden's doorstep. He is overjoyed at his chance to be there for her, even if it’s only because she needed somewhere to stay.  But the girl who moves in with him is not the same girl who left.  Emily is a shadow of what she once was, haunted by years of abuse at the hands of the only person who managed to win her heart.  Her sorrow culminates in her own suicide attempt, which Aiden comes home just in time to stop.

In the present, there ya go, that’s exactly the way to show the time switch!as the police search begins to wind down due to lack of leads, Aiden falls deeper into despair.  He pulls away from Lilly and rereads the mysterious letter Emily left behind, desperate for anything that might help him find her.  After realizing that she had darkened the words eave and eve in her letter, he leans out of the attic window to find a message scrawled under the eave of the attic window where she had set up his desk after asking him to write the story of their life together before she died.  He now knows Emily wanted him to save her from whatever she seemed to know was going to happen to her and blames him for not intervening.  

His memoir begins to take a stark contrast to the world he's living in.  While the story he writes tells of how he finally wins Emily's trust by moving with her to Oregon and away from where Cole's threatening letters had found her, his real life is falling apart.  As he tells of how they fell in love and had Lilly, the same daughter he had thought would be the joy Emily needed to move on from her past turns further against him each day, blaming him for not letting her mother come home. confusing Wracked with guilt over Lilly's anger, Aiden's mind begins to crumble.  He becomes obsessed with the ghost of Emily standing outside his door each night, giving up sleep to watch her decay outside his door with every visit, sure there is some clue she's trying to give him to bring her to peace.  He writes about finding letters from Cole that left no question that Emily had written back and is in danger of breaking Aiden's promise to keep her safe, but in real life he finds he has no one to trust but the silent ghost.  When Emily's ghost appears in the attic window in the daylight, almost toying with him while he's trying to answer probing follow up questions from the police, he becomes convinced that Emily is trying to trip him up and frame him for her death.  Worse, at night through the floor boards when she should be alone, he hears Lilly whispering from her room below him. 

With each passing day he becomes more isolated, refusing to answer the phone, letting the dishes overflow the sink and leaving Lilly to take care of herself.  When he sees Lilly rolling a ball through the grass he is sure that she's conspiring against him and can see Emily when he can't and maybe has heard the truth of what happened to her mother.  A truth he can't face told by a ghost he can't live without great sentence!.  While Aiden tries desperately to win his daughter over and get her to share the secrets he's sure she's hiding, we learn of how he had again found that Emily had broken his trust and continued writing Cole; how she'd tried to convince Aiden that she was only answering to get Cole to leave them alone. When Aiden doesn't believe her and decides to move the family again for a fresh start, they end up in the house in which the novel is set. 

The final night, though he is sure he never falls asleep, he has a dream that Emily is with him; almost a hallucination. He can only watch as a mute Emily lightly scratches the word 'home' onto his arm foreshadowing her return.  When he crawls out of bed at first light and finds his way downstairs he stumbles upon Lilly, already awake and coloring on the living room floor.  The picture she draws seems to be of a fish, but Aiden sees it as Emily’s hand reaching out from the pond.  Coupled with his vision from the night before, they are the final straws that break what’s left of his fragile grasp on reality.  Convinced Emily is fine and coming back to join them, Aiden leads his emotionally exhausted daughter on a frantic cleaning spree to get the house ready for Emily’s homecoming.  As night falls, he bathes himself and Lilly and dresses them in their best clothes.   When the frogs near the pond go suddenly silent he knows it’s because Emily is coming up the path and rushes his daughter out to meet her. 

Through the mist, Emily comes closer, looking alive.  But beside Aiden, Lilly is terrified.  She tries to tell her father what Emily really looks like, with her rotting flesh and empty sockets that once held her eyes.  At first, Aiden sees only what he wants to see, a happy Emily full of vitality and ready to come home but as Lilly's fears increase Aiden begins to see Emily for what she really is - a lonely corpse bent on keeping her family together, even in death.  When she snatches Lilly away and carries her towards the pond, Aiden begs her to take his life and spare their daughter.  Emily leads him into the pond and pulls him below the surface to what he is sure is certain death.  Aiden is shocked when he bobs up under the pier, even more so when he feels strands of hair brushing against his skin and answers the question of where Emily's body was hidden.  And he remembers the last night.

He had been searching through their photo albums  for ideas to write into the story, when he'd found new letters from Cole tucked behind the pictures.  Each one forces him to believe Emily plans to leave him for Cole's  shallow sounding apologies taking his daughter with her.  Aiden confronts Emily, but instead of pressing her to stay ends up berating her for getting herself in the situation in the first place.  When he tries again, he finds her uncommunicative and believes he's pushed her further into her decision.  He hears her climb the stairs to the attic to get the letters to take with her.  For long minutes Aiden waits for her to come back down, and when she doesn't he thinks there may be a chance she's hesitating.  He makes his way to the attic to find that Emily has hung herself.  Sure that Cole is coming for her and overcome with grief, Aiden hides her body in the pond where Cole will never be able to hurt her again. 

When Aiden finally faces what happened, he realizes Emily had never wanted to hurt him, but had only wanted to be laid to rest.   

[gypsygurl]

Thanks Chelc! Karma! Any other takers??

[Nostrabuttus]

 

Wow! I have nothing critical to say. 

I will say that I couldn't stop reading. I was grabbed in the first paragraph and never let go.

I am sure others on this forum who write in the genre will offer their critiques and recommendations.

Best of luck, gypsygurl.

[gypsygurl]

Wow...wasn't expecting that! Thanks Nostra! 

[audal]

I only have a few minutes seconds here,  which is plenty enough time to say... this is good work, GG.

Also... Chelc did some solid work with the red pen (yes, C, you may pat your selves on the back.)  Incorporate those grammar & text suggestions and you've got something completely sendable.

Congrats!

[Jessica V.]

DUDE!!!! My MC hangs out in a cemetery!!!! And there's a ghost in mine too....

GG, did you do some type of Vulcan mind meld with me or something?

(Great synopsis by the way, loved it!) Are you going to double space it? I did for mine, but found conflicting info on whether or not that was appropriate.

[Abigail]

My story RIPPLES is told in alternating chapters between the present (where Aiden is busy dealing with grief and loosing his marbles) and the past (which shows the moments that lead he and Emily to the climax). I think you should start with this because it explains a lot about your book and your synopsis.  If the agent does not have this piece of information, s/he might find the synopsis choppy)

AIDEN’s girlfriend EMILY is missing.  From the suspicious looks of the police canvassing their house, Aiden knows better than to mention that he can’t remember the last night Emily was safe.  Instead, he tells them she left early in the morning and keeps the letter she left behind to himself, not knowing if the search parties would look harder or give up based on the rambling contents. 

While he should be helping with the effort, or even taking care of their five-year-old daughter, LILLY, he spends his time in the attic typing the memoir Emily had asked him to start days before she disappeared. Inside, (the house, himself?) he lets himself hope that she will come back when he’s finished, but from the start Aiden knows that she is dead.  Each night, he hears her ghost come up the path from the pond behind their house, and sees her toes outside their beneath the crack of their bedroom door, but is too frightened to open it, afraid to learn what happened during those last hours he can’t remember.
 
During the day he pours himself into writing and attempting to adjust to his new role as a single parent.  Unnerved by his inability to get the grass stains out of Lilly’s jeans, he doubts that he will be a good father to her after failing yet another task that Emily had mastered.  He begins to wonder what he could have done to save Emily and if he has any hope of giving his daughter a normal childhood. 

From the story he’s writing, we learn Aiden and Emily met in a class in college.  During their first night together, spent ghost hunting in a cemetery, (reads a little awkward to me...maybe...Ghost hunting in a cemetery their first night *first date?* together, Emily...) Emily forces Aiden to tell her a story.  Aiden finds himself revealing his recent suicide attempt, unsure why he’s able to trust a girl he just met.  As they grow closer over the months, he falls in love with her for her adventurous ways and the vitality she brings into every day he spends with her.  Though they remain just friends Emily has a constant string of boyfriends, none of which seem to hold her interest.  Aiden sees each one as an opportunity to learn what not to do, while strengthening his resolve to win her over and make her his own.  But Aiden’s hesitation leaves Emily to fall in love with COLE and she is swept away when Cole asks her to move with him from Ohio to Texas.  Aiden is left abandoned, blaming her for his now stagnant life. When, after three years, Emily leaves Cole and turns up on Aiden’s doorstep he is overjoyed at his chance to be there for her, if only because she needed somewhere to stay.  But the girl who moves in with him is not the same girl who left.  Emily is a shadow of what she once was, haunted by years of abuse at the hands of the only person who managed to win her heart.  Her sorrow culminates in her own suicide attempt, which Aiden comes home just in time to stop.

In the present, as the police search begins to wind down due to lack of leads, Aiden falls deeper into despair.  He pulls away from Lilly and rereads the mysterious letter Emily left behind, desperate for anything that might help him find her.  After realizing that she had darkened the words eave and eve in her letter, he leans out of the attic window to find a message scrawled under the eave of the attic window where she had set up his desk after asking him to write the story of their life together before she died.  He now knows Emily wanted him to save her from whatever she seemed to know was going to happen to her and blames him for not intervening.  

His (should this be Her memoir?  I know he is writing it, but it is her story.) memoir begins to take a stark contrast to the world he’s living in.  While the story he writes tells of how he finally wins Emily’s trust by moving with her to Oregon and away from where Cole’s threatening letters had found her, his real life is falling apart.  As he tells of how they fell in love and had Lilly, the same daughter he had thought would be the joy Emily needed to move on from her past turns (is there a word missing between past and turn?) further against him each day, blaming him for not letting her mother come home. (This whole sentece confuses me.  Are you talking about his writing or what he tells Lilly?)  Wracked with guilt over Lilly’s anger, Aiden’s mind begins to crumble.  He becomes obsessed with the ghost of Emily standing outside his door each night, giving up sleep to watch (the progress of?) her decay outside his door with every visit, sure there is some clue she’s trying to give him to bring her to peace.  He writes about finding letters from Cole that left no question that Emily had written back and is in danger of breaking Aiden’s promise to keep her safe, (whose promise Emily's or Aiden's) but in real life he finds he has no one to trust but the silent ghost.  When Emily’s ghost appears in the attic window in the by daylight, almost toying with him while he’s trying to answer probing follow up questions from the police, he becomes convinced that Emily is trying to trip him up and frame him for her death.  Worse, at night through the floor boards when she should be alone, he hears Lilly whispering from her room below him. 

With each passing day he becomes more isolated, refusing to answer the phone, letting the dishes overflow the sink and leaving Lilly to take care of herself.  When he sees Lilly rolling a ball through the grass he is sure that she’s conspiring against him and can see Emily when he can’t and maybe has heard the truth of what happened to her mother.  A truth he can’t face told by a ghost he can’t live without.  While Aiden tries desperately to win his daughter over and get her to share the secrets he’s sure she’s hiding, we learn of how he had again found that Emily had broken his trust and continued writing Cole; how she’d tried to convince Aiden that she was only answering to get Cole to leave them alone. When Aiden doesn’t believe her and decides to move the family again to a fresh start, they end up in the house in which the novel is set. 

The final night, though he is sure he never falls asleep, he has a dream that Emily is with him.  Almost a hallucination, he can only watch as a mute Emily lightly scratches the word ‘home’ onto his arm foreshadowing her return.  When he crawls out of bed at first light and finds his way downstairs he stumbles upon Lilly, already awake and coloring on the living room floor.  The picture she draws seems to be of a fish, but Aiden sees it as Emily’s hand reaching out from the pond.  Coupled with his vision from the night before, they are the final straws that break what’s left of his fragile grasp on reality.  Convinced Emily is fine and coming back to join them, Aiden leads his emotionally exhausted daughter on a frantic cleaning spree to get the house ready for Emily’s homecoming.  As night falls, he bathes himself and Lilly and dresses them in their best clothes.   When the frogs near the pond go suddenly silent he knows it’s because Emily is coming up the path and rushes his daughter out to meet her. 

Through the mist, Emily comes closer, looking alive.  But beside Aiden, Lilly is terrified.  She tries to tell her father what Emily really looks like, with her rotting flesh and empty sockets that once held her eyes.  At first, Aiden sees only what he wants to see, a happy Emily full of vitality and ready to come home but as Lilly’s fears increase Aiden begins to see Emily for what she really is – a lonely corpse bent on keeping her family together, even in death.  When she snatches Lilly away and carries her towards the pond, Aiden begs her to take his life and spare their daughter.  Emily leads him into the pond and pulls him below the surface to what he is sure is certain death.  Aiden is shocked when he bobs up under the pier, even more so when he feels strands of hair brushing against his skin and answers the question of where Emily’s body was hidden.  And he remembers the last night.

He had been searching their photo albums  for ideas to write into the story, when he’d found new letters from Cole tucked behind the pictures.  Each one forces him to believe Emily plans to leave him for Cole’s  shallow sounding apologies taking his daughter with her.  Aiden confronts Emily, but instead of pressing her to stay ends up berating her for getting herself in the situation in the first place.  When he tries again, he finds her uncommunicative and believes he’s pushed her further into her decision.  He hears her climb the stairs to the attic to get the letters to take with her.  For long minutes Aiden waits for her to come back down, and when she doesn’t he thinks there may be a chance she’s hesitating.  He makes his way to the attic to find that Emily has hung herself.  Sure that Cole is coming for her and overcome with grief, Aiden hides her body in the pond where Cole will never be able to hurt her again. 

When Aiden finally faces what happened, he realizes Emily had never wanted to hurt him, but had only wanted to be laid to rest.   

GG, I think you did a really great job!  I can't wait to read this book.  I wanted to crit this without looking at anyone else's crit so my judgment wouldn't get fuzzy.  So here goes...

I think you have a tendency to write very long sentences, which sometimes get confusing.  Another suggestion I have is that you use an awful lot of contraction words.  Maybe you could spell some of them out.

Overall, I'm very impressed...just some minor adjustments I think.

Way to go,
Abi

[joanjunkmail]

ok, so i'm awake and ready to critique...and chelc took care of it already.  i think abi's points are well taken, too.  just tweakings, really.  excellent!

[justwrite]

I came a bit late to the task here..I want to say for all the hand-wringing and the speed which you knocked it out, the damn thing rocks. After you revise, I'll look at it. I am terrible at synopsi (terrible) and could never have written mine without the kindness of strangers. How many typed pages is this? Because if it's longer than one, maybe we need to trim a bit.

JW

[joanjunkmail]

I am terrible at synopsi (terrible) JW

but, how are your synapsi?  obviously, gg's were all firing in synch.