To fill you in on my novel progress: I’ve been writing chapter 3 for several days now. It’s going slowly, probably because I’ve been writing in small blocks of time. I’m concerned that my writing time will be further diminished now that I am starting a new job and will need to focus a lot of time and energy on that. Free time for writing will have to be scheduled now, that I know for sure, I can’t let my writing time slip away because this is the most confident that I have ever felt in my ability to actually write a novel.

This leads me to two ideas for future blog posts:
1. My love of reading and writing–how I grew up with it, let it fade away, and have now brought it back into my life.
2. The process of finding time to write, fitting it into your schedule and so on.

I also need to spend some time updating this blog a little bit more and perhaps make posts not solely about writing, but some posts involving books, movies, creativity and the like. That’s a good idea, I should write that down. Oh wait, I just did.

When I begin to read a novel that has a prologue the first thing I usually think is: Can’t we just skip the prologue and get right to the action?

There have been plenty of times I have wanted to skip prologues because I’ve read so many before that were dull and slow. I never felt like they did anything to bring me into the story that was worth my time reading them. I swore that when I started writing a novel I would never write a prologue.

Guess what? I’ve written a prologue.

I’m only into the first chapter of my novel and it’s been sort of slow going as I figure out how I want to tell the story and what information I should be including this early and what I should be saving for later, what narrative mode should I follow and should I show what another character is doing, what are the right and wrong things to do in a first chapter, and so on.

But with all that going on I knew I needed a prologue. Why? Because I felt that there was a scene which takes place in the past, without the protagonist, which I felt really sets the stage nicely for the book’s style and genre. I personally don’t consider this book to be science fiction, but it will contain an element that goes beyond what is scientifically possible in our “real world”. So by those standards it will probably be categorized as science fiction. The protagonist however, doesn’t discover that sci-fi element until maybe chapter 2 or 3 (I haven’t gotten that far so I can’t say for sure). Since he doesn’t discover it in chapter 1, I felt that a prologue was necessary to give the readers a sense of what they were in for before they got a couple chapters in and say, “I hate science fiction, I just wasted my time reading this.”

So that’s why I’m writing a prologue. I should have more to share on my book very soon. Stay tuned.