Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Late on a Tuesday I post this, my weekly update. I keep the streak going! Once again I cannot lie to you, my friends, it is because it has taken until this day for me to finally break through my own resistance to rewriting the opening.

Sometimes the wall of already written words, even if meant as temporary when first put down, assumes an aura of permanence, and possesses a powerful resistance to change. They defy you to imagine another version, and can win, making it hard to go in a new direction.

One way of getting around them is to start from scratch, a blank page with no trace of what existed previously. Another is to just start tinkering with sentence order and grammar, to start changing details, to see if the spark ignites to make larger changes once the seal of permanence has been broken.

Today I looked at the opening three paragraphs and realized that while they conveyed a lot, they also overlooked a good deal more, and armed with the feedback I have received, I saw how much more needed to be added.

I dread the info dump. Probably because I’ve done it before despite my best efforts otherwise. Knowing not to do a thing and successfully not doing it are separate things, sadly.

But the three paragraphs did not anchor the setting well enough, did not give enough of a sense of my heroine and her world before the first great challenge of her life, so what to do?

Write. Perhaps awkwardly at first, but write. I added detail of setting, introduced friendship, family, and authority figures sooner, gave details of early life, family structure and play in little sentence and half sentence fragments, enough to resonate properly with their already written later use in the novel.

At least that’s what I hope. It feels right at present. Obviously it needs polishing, and will be worked and reworked as I finish it off and then work my way through the book stitching in new threads of ideas that link the small events here to greater events and issues later.

And after all that, when I read the whole book over, I’ll probably make more adjustments then too. About the last thing I do, it seems, is agonize over the first page. It’s the sales pitch of the book to the casual reader, so it has to work well. Hence the desire not to info dump early—could be deadly to the book’s chances to have a first page of leaden background. Fingers crossed I avoid that fate!

I have begun. New conversations written, new interactions created, new scenes and locations created that explain, in small ways, later relationships and interactions. Writing may not be rocket science, but if you want to do it well there are complexities that have to be embraced, wrestled with, and pinned down, made clear for the reader so they read the simple story, not the complex mechanics behind it.

There is a lot of hope in writing. Maybe that’s part of why I like it. In writing a book about a crisis of faith, I must have faith in my own ability to execute story improvements, because without that belief, without the hope that it will work and reward not only myself but my readers, it would be all but impossible to carry on.

That’s rather dramatic, but I hope (haha, groan) you know what I mean. If every change made a manuscript worse, we’d all just publish first drafts. For me that would save time, but not be optimal!

No corned beef this weekend, friends, it will be a year or two before I fall for that temptation again. Spanakopita, tirokafteri, and hummus are much less challenging on the gut. Second visit to an excellent local Greek grill trying new things on the small plate menu. Had the falafel (and a whole lot more) a couple of weeks ago. Yum.

Eat well, persevere, and have faith in the changes you make when being creative. You never can tell when hope will be rewarded, and in what way.