Say it in one sentence

As part of the submissions process for Angry Robot's open door I have to sum up my novel Eyemind  in one sentence.

This is an interesting challenge I've never met before.  I've had to do it in one paragraph, or a hundred words, but never one sentence.  This is the elevator pitch on steroids.

The shorter a piece of writing, the more effort it takes.  The blurbs for the back of my books are around 150 to 200 words long, and usually go through half a dozen edits before I think they're snappy enough.   The same with a synopsis.  Reducing a 100,000 novel to one page of description means you have to strip out everything but the essential spine of the story.  

      

Most writers hate writing a synopsis, I think because of this discipline.  It is the complete opposite of the creative process by which we produced our masterpieces.  It is a reduction of our individual pieces of creative output  to a product for the market.  We have to accept that, if we want a mainstream contract, our work will be treated as just another product by a publisher.  But it isn't easy for us creative types.

So what did I come up with for my one sentence?  'Keri and Bi must find out who is using interactive artworks to programme people, and stop them.'  That sums it up, I think.