Rewrote opening--plus one page

I got back to work this morning. I had that fearful feeling that makes me want to find excuses and avoid the work, but luckily I recognized it for what it is and knew if I could just get started I'd be OK. Looking forward to a solid couple of weeks of specific, focused work.

Today's work was especially scary. I needed to rewrite the opening scene. It's weird to think that I let something so crucial go this long without getting it right--not that it's necessarily right now--but sometimes issues make themselves apparent or cry out loud enough only late in the process. The opening scene as it was is just how I started things off the first day of writing and the book has become something very different in the meantime. It needed a different opening.

I won't go into all that was wrong with it--little things that added up--but the fix was actually relatively simple. I just made the same events more or less happen to my main character instead of him observing them happen to his friend.

Along the way I saw chances for line edits to clean up and tighten the language, so I'm really chomping at the bit to get to the stage where I can focus on that. Hopefully not more than a couple weeks from now. In the meantime I have about a half dozen spots I need to work on similar to what I was doing this morning.

One downside. My rewrite of the opening ended up adding one to my page count. Thpptt.