The Lost Prologue
Sometimes you just pick something floating in the air.
I have been involved in a six year quest to finish a book-length novel as a sequel to my novella, Harry’s War. I have vacillated back and forth with this story in my head for six years and stopped writing it for several reasons … telling myself I was busy with my technical writing career, allowing the local writing community to convince me my writing did not measure up, feeling sorry for myself because I am such a terrible writer, etc.
I finally ended up with a 250 plus page draft and hired an expensive substantive editor to critique it. After seeing over half of my 250 pages dismissed as chaff to the story and sulking over it for the last three or four months, I am now engaged in repairing my story and even accepting most of her suggestions.
I’ve found writing, even my technical writing, is as Thomas Edison put it, “98 percent perspiration and 2 percent inspiration.”
Sometimes, however, as I am pretending to write with my two fingers valiantly banging away at my keyboard, something just seems to float out of the air and find its way into my story.
One such thing is the prologue I drafted to start my book. It may not make it in the book because of another suggestion by my editor to add a chapter she deleted as the prologue instead of this one. If I kept both, I thought it may be awkward.
If I deleted it, the prologue would to end up in the graveyard of broken dreams somewhere within my computer files never seen by the eyes of humankind.
Whether or not it makes it into the final version of the book, here is the prologue I saw floating in the air one day, and I reached out and pulled it into my story.
By publishing it here on my blog, I at least know it will not become lost.
————————————————————————————
Our Story Begins
One of those moments existing in a different world…a netherworld. Some would say the space, the silence existing between life and death. Others would disagree and state it was just one millisecond of time where the soul considers its own existence—a silence seeming to stretch out and last an eternity. In the grand scheme of things, the nothingness existing only a fraction of a second… This dot of time, an infinitesimal portrait of life – where decisions are made, mind precedes matter, time seems to stand still, and decisions inalterably change the destiny of a soul.
Within the bowels of one of those tiniest, microscopic moments, our story begins.
————————————————————————————–
Thank you for reading it.
Sincerely,
Ed