New 1st chapter for "Takeover."

I wrote a brand new first chapter to "Takeover." A little bit of action, a bit of foreshadowing, a lot of scene-setting. Anyone coming from "Deadfall Ridge" would be able to settle in comfortably. It's a fairly conventionally written beginning.

That was the easy part.

Now I need to transition into the original story without losing any readers. I'm not going to be able to get away completely from the original structure--which was an experiment. If the reader is willing to go along, I think it works. But it does ask the reader to keep reading until the plot kicks in--which is a lot to ask these days.

I did it the way I did because I wanted to be completely character driven and as realistic as I could make it. It is a epistolary novel, that is, each chapter is told as a first person account by a different character. It was a challenge to tell a story through the subjective lens of individual voices, and the narrative had to be supplied by the reader. I don't think it was a bad idea and I came close, but in the end, I'm not sure I had to skill to pull it off. About halfway through I kept the epistolary structure but imposed much more narrative to the story.

So now I'm going back and overlaying the narrative over the first half. By necessity, because it wasn't written into the first draft, this is somewhat flat telling the narrative, which isn't all bad, and it probably better than the scattershot epistolary nature of the first version.

I might be able to move and consolidate a few chapters so that the character shifts aren't too wrenching.  I'm going to try to organize the first few chapters around Hart Davis--the protagonist of "Deadfall Ridge"--as much as possible. Then use Granger and Nicole before I finally give way to the myriad of other--new--characters.

It's difficult, but it feels worth doing. It was also very intimidating, but getting the first chapter done is a big step forward.