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I think I’m finally happy with the first chapter of A STROKE OF MIDNIGHT.  I’ve got lots of pages for later in the book, but the first chapter just kept elluding me.  I mean, it was close, but not quite there.  Now I’m happy with it, except for the very last line.  I’m very big on first lines and last lines, especially of first chapters.  The first line makes people start reading, but it’s the last line of early chapters that keeps them turning pages. 
 
I just got my first sip of the first cup of tea of the day.  Ambrosia. 
 
I used to put off making the first chapter shine until I finished most, or all of the book, but lately I haven’t had that luxury.  Lately, my editors want pieces of the next book to put in the back of the paperback of other books.  Or, we end up with a novelette like we did with INCUBUS DREAMS in the anthology, CRAVINGS.  A slightly revised version of the first hundred pages of INCUBUS DREAMS  is in CRAVINGS.    Revised to take out references to people that aren’t in the first hundred pages much, that sort of thing.  But it was an interesting experience to have the front end of a book in editing when the back part of the same book wasn’t finished.  Awkward, at least that’s how it felt.
 
I agreed to it.  And I don’t regret doing it, but more and more the beginning of a book is wanted in New York before the entire book is finished.  It has made me look differently at the first chapter.  I can’t help but read it over and ask myself, is it really close enough to finished, close enough to being the right opening, for me to ship it off.  It has slowed me down in this book.  Because normally I write something, then move on, and rewrite the first chapter to something resembling perfection later.  But later, just keeps getting sooner.  It’s made me more cautious, and cautious is not fast, caustious is slow.  Now that I’m about to nail the last sentence to the first chapter, I hope, fervently, that I will pick up speed.  A lot of speed. 
 
Gotta go.  Talk to you later.