Opening Paragraphs, Take Two

Some time ago I posted the opening paragraphs from my first draft.  Now that my second draft is done, I figured I’d post the new opening paragraphs.  Here they are:

Like every morning, as soon as the sunlight pierced the eastern window Leopold awoke.  It was a lesson passed down from father to son – arise with the sun and you would catch your enemies while they were still sleeping.  Of course, that lesson was from the days in which the enemies the King worried about were the assassins sent by distant relatives.  While Leopold did not need to concern himself with those enemies, there were larger problems.

            Leopold looked over at the empty space on the left side of his bed.  His wife, Lissanna, used to sleep there.  In the mornings, he would roll over and give her a kiss on the cheek before beginning his day – she was always a late sleeper.  Now, she slept on the other side of the castle, estranged by her duty to the kingdom and the burden it placed on them both.  He still loved her, he always would, and he missed her warmth at night.  But he knew they would never share the same bed again, and like every morning as he lamented the past, Leopold let out a great sigh.

Now keep in mind that these are (very) rough paragraphs.  I decided to change around a few of the chapters, including moving what was the first chapter to later in the book.  These paragraphs will definitely get rewritten during the next step of the revision, and I’ll share them here after the third draft is completed.

Things I’m looking for (Part 1)

As I said in my last post, I’m going to discuss things I’m looking for during the third draft.  The first thing is pacing.

I found during my read through that (as I expected), I liked the second half of the novel more than the first half.  One of the reasons was the pacing.  The first half is fast — too fast.  The second half is a little slower, and far more enjoyable.

Now I’m not looking to slow down the book too much.  There’s definitely a delicate balance to pacing — too fast and the reader gets lost, too slow and the reader gets bored.  So I need to slow the first half down, but not so much that it’s too slow.

It’ll be interesting to see what I can do with it, and changing the pacing will require a straight reading of the draft once it’s completed.  Indeed, if I end up needing to do line edits on a fourth draft before it gets to my beta-readers, it’ll be because of the pacing issue (most likely).

Time flies when you’re . . .

. . . forgetting to update your posts.  In my last post, I lamented the fact that it had been a month since I updated.  That was just over two months ago.  So clearly I mended my ways.

That being said, I at least have an update.  TBTWNE is also The Battle That Would Not Lose.  Try as I might, I haven’t been able to come up with a draft version that really appeases me.  I’ve made several attempts, but nothing that satisfies me.  So I’ve decided to move on.

It’s now time to start step two of the revision process.  Tomorrow I take the file to Staples to print out the second draft, and then I start the line edits.  It’s 487 pages, so if I average 20 pages per day, it’ll take 25 days to finish the line edits.  I’m not sure if that’s a totally achievable pace (it’ll depend on how many edits I have to do per page), but that’s going to be the pace I hope to go with.

I figure that TBTWNE/TBTWNL will get some work-over through this part of the process, so I’ll end up with something I like a little better. 

Now I’m also planning on updating this blog more regularly.  To kick it off, over the next couple of days I plan on posting on some of the things I’m looking for while doing line edits.

So here’s to the second draft, and the third that is yet to come.