The Lost Prologue

The Lost Prologue

Sometimes you just pick something floating in the air.

I have been involved in a nine 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 worked on 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…