Over the weekend, I forced myself to sit down and write essentially two days straight. It was incredibly tiring--mentally but also physically, in that my shoulders remained stiff even on Monday. I cleaned up much of the Prelude opening but started running into trouble with the second half--the last scene between Rory and Rhys before her death.
The general advice I've seen from literary agents and editors is to cut out prologues completely. I suppose the Prelude counts as a prologue, but thus far I've been reluctant to kill off this darling. I am especially fond of the opening scene in Ecstasia. I would be more willing to part with the last playground scene, but then I run into the problem of how to set up certain events in the future. Moreover, I kept a bunch of the poetic imagery I wrote in the past but was having a much harder time reworking the dialogue--especially since it's a scene that occurs after all the crazy stuff blows up, and I still hadn't really thought about how Rory would feel about Rhys after all the crap she goes through. Would they have reconciled and tried to recover a strain of friendship? Would the brokenness have been irreparable, so much that their conversations would turn chilly and cold?
Anyways, so when I realized I'd run into a hindrance I didn't know quite how to tackle yet, I decided to skip and presumably return to the beginning later, once I had a better sense of the overall final product. I started working on the Overture and essentially deleted everything from the original draft I'd written six years ago, minus the Madame Butterfly scene. (Damn, it's been a long time!) I wasn't doing too bad--managed to write about six pages (roughly 2,500 words). But then I took a break Sunday evening, and when I went back to reread it objectively on Monday, my angry perfectionist kicked in and made me miserable.
I've read enough essays and advice to know that the first rule of first drafts is to not be afraid of shitting all over the page... but sigh, it really does eat up at your confidence. I read somewhere that when Joss Whedon writes screenplays, he writes all of his favorite scenes first. Maybe I should just do that instead.
