I've revised my synopsis for book 1. My goal was clearer descriptions of subplot resolution for characters' arcs.
I thought hard about all the character arcs. How they mostly resolve, but not completely at the end of book 1: The Time Bomb From Outer Space: Day One, Discovery.
Series can be tricky. You want some satisfaction, some resolution, at the end of a book, but enough tension remaining to carry you into the next. A balancing act.
This is a revision of my original synopsis, posted here. I hope this is an improvement.
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Engineer Jim Morgen isn’t expecting a visitor from outer space to land on his scenic, Door County Wisconsin peninsula. He is also unaware that in two days, without intervention, a lost alien machine—lost during the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald—will blow up his popular tourist community. Jim expects to grapple with three simpler problems, instead:
First, Jim wants to help his disabled brother. Andy is an improvisational genius. Unfortunately, Andy is also compelled to mimic people when he gets scared, a compulsion that frequently escalates conflict between Andy and those who scare him. Andy’s obsession with wearing costumes further complicates his quest for stable employment and romance.
Second, Jim wants to ask the new librarian out on a date. But Molly Combs is not who Jim thinks she is. A PhD candidate in electrochemistry, Molly is in town only because her advisor insisted she take time away from her Madison-based lab to finish her thesis on her carbon-sequestering bionic leaf. Molly likes Jim, but she’s torn. Wary of romantic distractions, she avoids telling Jim that she took the library temp job on a whim, that she’s actually a scientist, and that she’s leaving soon. Molly confides in her best friend Sue Fitzpatrick about “library guy”. Sue and Molly both fail to realize that Molly’s unnamed “library guy” is Sue’s husband’s best friend.
Third, Jim longs to share with his best friend his new passion: meditation. Mark Fitzpatrick is more interested in saving his failing independent bookstore than trying Jim’s mindfulness tips. Mark and his tech-savvy wife Sue long for children but are overwhelmed with saving their bookstore.
Then, out of the blue, during an ordinary meditation session, Jim has an extraordinary vision. In it, he is leading his brother Andy and best friend Mark in a rapturous meditation walk. The vision highlights a specific spot in the nearby state park where Jim’s heard rumors of strange lights in the sky. Jim resolves to recreate his vision that evening, though he must work to ignore his Chicago-based therapist mother’s advice not to push his practice on others.
Meanwhile, overbearing Stew Wafflequisp is furious. The strange, secret machine he inherited from his father has provided decades of unlimited power to his now-wealthy dairy farm. Stew never had a clue how it worked, but assumed it always would. Hidden on the outskirts of his farm, his generator is now behaving strangely. It’s causing blackouts, sounding alarms and displaying disturbing animations of explosions. Stew’s belief in his late father’s yarn about dangerous Russian spies wanting their stolen device back compels him to keep it hidden.
The only other person who knows about Stew’s secret and supposedly-Russian power generator is Pascal Fourier. Having grown up with Stew as his childhood bully, Pascal now endures Stew’s verbal abuse as Stew’s top farmhand. Stew ropes Pascal into masking the generator’s alarms so that he can pitch its confidential sale to Effuflux Energy CEO Billy Sinclair. But Billy is shady and self-serving, buying promising inventions so he can sit on them to prevent future competition.
Billy’s spy Gasket confirms Stew’s generator delivers unlimited power. Billy pretends to befriend the gullible Stew while planning its theft. Stew grows dangerously ill, disregarding clues that a neighboring factory farm’s toxic runoff is the cause. Envying his neighbor’s apparent success, Stew craves Billy’s payment for the generator to convert his tourist trap farm into a factory farm that is bigger than his neighbors’.
Pascal is stuck. He dreams of a life partnered with Chicago-based vegan baker Luis Xavier, but can’t leave his beloved cows unprotected lest Stew get his factory farm. Since Pascal is the only other person who knows Stew’s secret, he knows that as soon as Stew sells the generator, Stew will fire him. The generator, with its crude machine intelligence, accelerates attempts to warn Pascal that it requires a recycling procedure to keep from exploding. Pascal resolves to understand the generator’s alien messages before it gets sold.
Jim finally arm-twists Mark and Andy into the sunset meditation hike of his vision. Jim’s on a high, having promised the librarian—who has resolved to reveal to him who she really is—that he will see her the following morning. But deep in the woods of the state park, the trio are terrified by a spaceship landing. Koyper, the spaceship’s human pilot, introduces himself as a bioprospector from a secret, ancient space colony. His colony just received an emergency signal from a long-lost spaceship power generator. The reader alone knows that Koyper’s father died when this generator was lost in a spaceship crash. Koyper recruits the three men for his mission to find and disable the generator before it blows up in two days.
Jim realizes that in order to save Molly and countless others, he must break his promise to see her while keeping his mission a secret from her. Koyper’s mysterious calming influence on Andy gives Jim hope that Andy’s disability is curable. And in counseling Mark on managing the terror of their new crisis, Koyper plants a seed for how Mark might revive his bookstore business.
Jim finds Koyper’s mindfulness superior to his own, but a source of worry. When the spaceman insists they take time to relish Earth’s wilderness with so little time left, Jim grows alarmed. Even so, Jim resolves to trust Koyper. Together, Jim, Mark, and Andy start their search for Koyper’s time bomb from outer space.
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