Say Blurb One More Time!

Anyone who tells you writing the story is the hard part is full of shit. It’s a matter of sculpting a pile of letters into words and putting those words in an order that describes the movie you’re watching in your head. The hard part is dealing with all the shit that happens after you wrote The End.
Granted, Stephen King is probably not very concerned about the blurb on the back. If I released my story under the name Stephen King I’d make a killing on name alone. Until the lawyers come, anyway. After that, I’ll probably see a little dip in the profits.
Still, I’ve gotta write a blurb. Or rather, write another blurb. And then some. I’ve composed a few blurbs already and they all suck. As far as I can tell, anyway.
Imagine wanting to post a picture of your kid online, but you’re not allowed to show the whole kid. That sucks, right? You probably love your kid and as far as you’re concerned it’s the best kid ever. Except now you have to summarize that kid in a way that makes other people want to see more of it…

Okay, maybe I should have gone with a dog. I realize now that asking for pictures of kids might be weird.

So how do you sum up your dog? Do you show a picture of his tail because he wags it so happily when you call him a good boy? You could do that, but then nobody can see the cute puppy-eyes he makes when he would really like some food but is too polite to beg for it. Or maybe you want to show his mouth, because he’s the absolute bestest boy when it comes to fetching tennis balls… Eh, maybe not. All those teeth could give people the wrong impression.
There you go. I used about 150 words to talk about a kid-dog and you still don’t have an idea what’s going on.
Well, my dog is 99,000-something words long and it needs to be reduced to a blurb of somewhere between 100 and 200 words of crowd-drawing buzzwords… Is this… Ehm, is this how hookers feel? Reducing yourself to the parts that’ll draw a crowd?

Great. Now it’s hard and a little dirty to write a blurb.