I have started the edit for In the Blood of the King. At the same time I am reading A story is a Promise by Bill Johnson.

What do the two have in common? The writing process. A Story is a Promise postulates that the writer has to promise the reader a story from the very first sentence. When I think about all the great stories I have read, that is so very true. One of my favourites, Covenants by Lorna Freeman starts “We were lost.” And in that one sentence, the whole book, the whole world the book is in, is summed up. The characters were lost physically, the main character, Rabbit, is lost to himself and the country he lives in is rapidly loosing its identity as it is transformed into something different. The we in the opening sentence is so freighted with meaning that in retrospect I am surprised the word remained printed on the page and hadn’t fallen out of the book!

Oh, to write an opening line like that. What I would give, but I am not Lorna Freeman and who knows how long it took her to get to that simple 3 word sentence. So instead, I have to edit and cut and edit and cut until I am crazy, not knowing if the cutting is good or bad. Ha, there goes the prologue, snip, snip, there goes the beginning of chapter 1. Snip, snip, snip.