If you’ve been following along as I wade through revisions, you might have heard me talking about how I keep going back to Chapter One.

Well, I went back to it again. And again. And again.

Why?

When I re-read the chapter, I felt like I was puking information on the page instead of telling you a story. Serafina was in a terrible accident. Serafina was drugged. Serafina was stuck in a hospital. Serafina got married to someone she didn’t know. B-O-R-I-N-G. While those details are important to the story, they aren’t part of the story.

Whenever I went through my revisions, I kept trying to fix the issue by placing even more weight on how she felt and what had happened there. Even though it took me a while, I finally figured out that Chapter One needed to be about what had happened to Serafina the day she started getting her memories back. Chapter One needed to be about Chapter One, not Chapter Negative One or worse…six, different Prologues.

Part of my trouble, was that I had just finished writing a couple of short stories for different projects. Short stories are a different form and function than a novel, because they need to be self-contained. While I enjoy providing snappy prose, a novel provides you with more room to breathe than a short story does. What was funny about Chapter One, was that I gave myself too much room. I kept filling Serafina’s mouth with words and thoughts and emotions, but I never allowed her to tell the story in her own voice.

So now that Chapter One is pretty much nailed, I’ve been able to use that perspective to ensure the rest of the book is in line. There are LOTS of hidden meanings to very, innocent-sounding words. If you know anything about Alchemy or what sorts of things Alchemists used to do, you’d probably get a kick out of it.