Diving in

With the whole "First chapter is a promise to the reader" concept in mind I started writing a new first chapter. I took an incident that had happened before the first version started (and is mentioned later in the story) and fleshed it out..

I know, I know, I've also read that you should start the story as close to the end as possible. But this really worked. That incident had the potential to have a few foreshadowings built in and when I did that it also fell right in with the themes in the story. I love it when things dovetail like that. Now it feels like a really good promise to my reader. One that is true to the book.

Now what to do with my previous first chapter? It still has some important information in it, but it doesn't have the same tone as the new piece. It makes an OK chapter 2. I'm ignoring it for right now. It needs to be re-written, but I'm not sure, yet, what it needs. I'll let it sit for a few days, then read it aloud.

I remembered a few scenes from the first version that I jettisoned in the 2nd version and wanted to go back and find them. Then I nearly had a heart attack because I thought the only copy I had was on an old set of floppy disks. Luckily, I had transferred them over to CDs at some point. Whew! This story has been around a long time.

And I have learned the hard way to save my revisions as new docs instead of constantly writing over the same one. Sometimes it's good to go back and see how a scene was originally written. The last tweak I did dropped out a lot of subplots that I now may want to use.

Now - off to write!