Gods of Monsters Wow

Hi there! Want to read the original first chapter of DREAMS OF GODS & MONSTERS? Well you can! You just have to jump through one of three very simple hoops!

Original first chapter? What's that mean?

The hardest part of writing a book for me is getting started. I can't move forward into the meat of the story until I get the beginning right, and so I usually I spend a ridiculously long time trying out openings. The first chapter is the first big hurdle, but I don't really feel like things pick up speed for me until I've written the entire first act.

In the case of DREAMS OF GODS & MONSTERS, after a lot of brainstorming, I thought I had figured out my opening, my way into the story. See, it's the reader's way in, but mine too. I can't write the book till I find the right door that lets me inside. I thought this was it, and I really enjoyed writing this chapter. I won't say anything specific about it, you can read it, but you can begin to sense from it a couple of things.

It would have taken the story in quite a different direction from the get go, and it starts in a different time and place. See, I was trying to pick up the story where DAYS OF BLOOD & STARLIGHT leaves off. After the epilogue, that is, which is basically: the eve of battle, with the combined forces of the Misbegotten and the chimaera about to return to Earth to take on Jael. I had devised a plan involving Karou and another character to get them to Jael, but there was a problem.

When I tried to write it, I found I was having to backfill all that had happened between the last chapter of DAYS and the epilogue. Basically: the combining of the two armies in the Kirin caves. That was a pretty big damn deal, and I was trying to SKIP IT. What I realized is that I had to back the book up and overlap the ending of DAYS to show how it had gone down, because it was hugely important.

Then, later, the new character, Eliza, took on a much greater role in the story than I'd originally planned, so the first chapter ended up being hers.

Some writers are able to continue through a draft even if they have a niggling feeling they haven't nailed the opening yet, but I can't. So I'm like some kind of madwoman in the early days, trying out a bunch of different things and tossing them out.