i  have written chapter one (mostly). I have also written chapter—um, maybe seventeen. Mostly.

There is a school of thought that says that one shouldn’t revise chapter one until well after one was written chapter two, and likely chapters two, three, four, five and six. And to some extent, I imagine that major revisions will likely wait until I have a full manuscript draft. But I can’t help but feel that this chapter one doesn’t quite do it. There are some bits that are left wanting, and for some reason, I can’t adequately draft on computer. I need to print off a copy and make changes by hand.

Do I ignore the advice of what seems like every author there is and do so? Or do I doggedly do things my way, and continue to spin my wheels on my as-yet incomplete chapter one? I think that I doggedly do things my way.
The other thing is this: I am afraid that in order to do chapter one effectively, I’m going to have to make a few jumps between heads. I am trying to mark out those jumps as explicitly as I can, so that there can be no question about what I’ve done. But will that be horrendously confusing? My other alternatives appear to be:

  1. Overlapping times: Start with heroine, until about two minutes after she meets hero; jump to hero’s head, about two minutes before he meets the heroine. This has one jump, but I think that the time-jumping might well be more confusing. And I’m simplifying here; I’d have to head-and-time jump a few times.
  2. Don’t let you see what’s going on in the heroine’s head when they both meet. But the problem with that is that what’s going on in her head—or, specifically, the connection between what she’s thinking and what comes out of her mouth—is a major theme.
  3. Don’t let you see what’s going on in the hero’s head when they first meet. Again, if I don’t show his initial reaction—and his initial assessment of her—the conflict that crops up the next time they meet will seem rather unbelievable. He thinks she’s something other than what she is, and it’s that initial misapprehension that leads him to talk to her as he does.
  4. I can’t solve problem two or three by having the hero and heroine mention their thoughts in the course of conversation. The heroine is acting … not out of character, shall we say, but out of her normal mode of things, and wouldn’t want to give that away. And the hero wouldn’t share anything so personal or embarrassing, particularly when he wouldn’t think it relevant (because of aforementioned mistaken initial assessment).

Other interesting discoveries: I prefer names that start with hard consonants and contain Rs and Ls.

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