The new opening I excerpted earlier has grown rapidly and well.

I’ve integrated two scenes so far from the first draft, changing POV on one and picking up the pace on the other.

It’s sitting just under 10,000 words right now, with roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of the material being new with this revision.

Feeling very excited with the new angle.

The interesting thing to me (after beginning to toy with the idea of two books for this story) is that I may have found another blurb that lets me conceal the beauty and the beast angle in the description.

Not having to hand the reader my first major plot point makes me more comfortable with letting things lay as they fall.

~

Is anyone here familiar with the story of The Goose Girl?

Shannon Hale expanded it into a very good novel (though, keeping with the disappointing pattern of my other favorites the opening seemed too slow to be perfect).

Knowing the original story I knew the big shift happens when the maid steals the identity of the princess (sorry for those of you I killed it for).

Hale has some intriguing and well-written stuff before that big plot-point but I couldn’t properly enjoy it because I knew the event that was coming and guessed the real ingenuity would be after that.

That’s the difficulty I have with revealing in the blurb the girl gets her prince before the end of the story, because then (perhaps because this isn’t the romantic novel, Kaye?) there’s so much tension lost.

The road may wind, but it must also have been polished, because everything looks just a little too clean.

That would be my own fault, of course, but splitting the book without changing anything else lifted that feeling for me.  I’m still deciding what that means.

~

I think it’s way-cool that I get more scenes with the snake in this version, and I want the get-together question to be a little more hairy than your average RomCom.

Guessing ahead doesn’t bother me, but skipping without missing anything… That kind of defeats the point of creating the scene, right?