General agreement over here; I very much like the way the main scene runs, and I do understand your desire to have the reader know before Anna does. I'm just not sure it's necessary. Because frankly, I'd rather you showed me, through her reactions, why I should care about the guy who's just been shot at the beginning. I think I'm trying to say that, if you paint it properly, the poignancy of the situation (or irony) will come to me through her, rather than through a faceless narrator. And as a reader, I prefer it that way.

Argh. Not certain I'm being clear. Pinched nerves on both sides of my neck and the pain is clouding things.

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This may be crazy talk, Susan, but have you thought about writing the prologue from the point of view of the shooter?

Something like, "A scouting party of Brits (whatever the slightly offensive French nickname would have been at the time), dragoons by their gaudy fur-trimmed blue uniforms now muted with with dust, rode over the hill....

"He sighted his rifle at the tallest of the officers, a blond captain. 'I bet the ladies like him,' he thought as he pulled the trigger."

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Ginger, I like that idea. I may try it that way. (Which means I'd have to have the French at pretty close range, because IIRC they didn't have much in the way of rifle-armed sharpshooters in their infantry, and you can't aim a standard musket with anything like accuracy over any kind of distance, and here I am rambling and research-dumping in the way I can't in the book itself.)

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OK. Here are a couple of rambling thoughts. Feel free to discard, obviously.

If the prologue is meant to add poignancy or empathy or anything else to Anna's later thoughts about the shooting? Then, to me, as a reader (not as an editor), the scene is too brief, too impersonal. I'm not talking about descriptions, or writing style; it tells me nothing that is going to add to anything later. If you want me to care later, it's far too detached. Knowing the set-up, I can read it as is, say OK, read on, and will presumably come to the moment when Anna is informed of her husband's death. But because you've already salted it with a very short and extremely impersonal description - we have no reaction from the troop other than surprise, nothing to indicate whether they liked the captain, or loathed him, or gave a damn about him - I, as the reader, am now detached.

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OK, OK, I'll take it out, though I'll toss it in my deleted scenes and drabbles file rather than delete it altogether, just in case I decide to go back to it. But, dammit, I hate it when I think I'm being brilliant and it doesn't work. Feels entirely different than when something needs work because I wrote it while feeling blocked and dull.

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Yes, definitely keep it to hand. The concept is a damned good one; it's all about the execution in terms of what purpose you want it to serve.

And sweetie, I had to dump close to seventy pages of "Weaver" because Ruth Cavin convinced me that my lovely 1817 scenes really dragged the book down. And she was right, damnit.

But taking it out and rewriting it entirely modern makes it a better book.

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One of my writing books says that if a scene appears absolutely brilliant, then it's got a higher chance than normal of being deleted later

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Thanks, Deb, for making clear what I was trying to say.

And I think you should hold onto it, too, Susan. There will most likely be a place --even a need--for it sometime.

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One of my writing books says that if a scene appears absolutely brilliant, then it's got a higher chance than normal of being deleted later

I'd say that's true when I'm deliberately showing off as I write, but most of the time when something comes to me in a flash of inspiration and I think, "Wow, that's GOOD," it really is. Which is why I'm still feeling a little pouty about my prologue--it was a total flash of inspiration experience.

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WOOT! First review of Famous Flower of Serving Men is in. From Kirkus Reviews:

A mournful French ghost haunts a London theater.

Small-scale theatrical producer and actress Penny Wintercraft-Hawkes is surprised and thrilled to learn that she has inherited a beautiful London theater from distant French aunt Marie-Therese, who attended Penny's recent productions of three classic French tragedies. The unused Bellefield's prime location has Penny dreaming of a less nomadic existence for her troupe. When she visits the building, she notices a pervasive foul smell but isn't disquieted until the odor's gone on her next visit. Meantime, Penny's longtime lover, traveling musician/sometime contractor Ringan Lane, agrees to help with needed renovations. On their first visit together to the Bellefield, Penny hears muted French voices. Ringan does not, but when he's thrown roughly from a ladder after a more insistent auditory assault, the couple is uncomfortably reminded of their encounter with ghosts the previous year (The Weaver and the Factory Maid, 2003). A little digging unearths the story of Eleanor, the Bellefield ghost. Still, plans for the inaugural production, Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis, proceed apace until Penny gets in hot water with investor David Harkins when he learns that she's kept Eleanor from him. When workman Ray Haddon dies of a fear-induced heart attack, Penny knows she must release the ghost.

Welcome darker undertones expand the range of the debut's refreshingly offbeat sleuthing, more focused this time on unraveling an academic puzzle than exposing a killer.

Publication Date: 11/17/2004
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's Minotaur
Stage: Adult
ISBN: 0-312-33387-0
Price: $22.95
Author: Grabien, Deborah

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