A Few Words on the Prologue
Posted by mgnann on April 7, 2009
I’ve got a new page up. Titled, Prologue, it’s pretty self explanatory, but I do want to give some insight on it.
Ideas for a prologue have been bouncing around my head for a while now. The current first chapter has gone back and forth from being a prologue to it’s place now, Chapter 1. Who knows where it will end up. I wrote this one because I am doing a lot of work outlining the end, preparing to write the book’s conclusion. And I know, I know, I keep saying, “I’m writing the end!”, but it is continually more work than I expect.
Because the end is very derivative of the actions that take place in this new prologue, I needed to know what happened before the story. So I gathered up the few notes I had about The Time Before and jotted a quick outline. Since Bayon Vothginga and the Flush have been plot devices hosted in my mind for a long time, I had an idea about the events that I wanted to occur, but as always, once the writing starts, new ideas find their way in.
The story in the prologue takes place a few hundred years or so before the rest of the book ( I haven’t quite figured out the time line to my own story), and I’m a little conflicted about how much I like it. It rushes quite a bit. Seriously, the whole thing could be turned into a short story of it’s own. But once I started fleshing it out for my own purpose, I realized it was a really informative piece. As someone who hasn’t read the complete work, you can’t know how much information is dropped in that seven page prologue.
I think once the book is complete, readers will love going back to this prologue, whether it makes it past the final cut or not, because it is chock full of name drops, foreshadowing, and set up. In my omniscient view of the story, it’s a really fun read. I think it will become a serious gem for anyone who gets a look at it before the book comes out.
