Can't quite seem to leave "well enough" alone...

It's not an altogether bad thing--this uncontrollable compulsion to tinker with words. The more I tweak them, the better and richer the whole thing seems to get. But the changes had been getting smaller recently. A word changed here and there, rather than wrenching paragraphs from one location to another, or cutting entire sentences only to replace them again (although not always in the same form they held before). Let chain saw, more chisel.

A few weeks ago, though,  I declared the manuscript finished. I printed it and sent it off to a publisher in delirious hope that they would see in it what I do. That an editor would find Emily and Lizzie's stories compelling and publishable. That someone would send me an email declaring nothing less than complete and utter devotion to the idea of bringing my story to print and putting it out there for all the world to read

(Yup... I'm that delusional!)

Anyway, once it was printed and mailed, I put the manuscript safely away--saved in countless clouds throughout cyber-space--and did my best to let it rest.

Until yesterday.

Reading through email and minding my own business, an idea for a new opening scene flashed across my mind, and I pulled my manuscript down from the clouds, and went back to work.

It was surprisingly easy to rebuild the opening of chapter one--allowing for just a taste of "in medias res" (or for all you "LOST" fans--a flash-forward)--and I think it worked. Now I want nothing more than to send this page off to the publisher who now hold my manuscript and ask her to replace that first chapter with this one. But I'll just have to wait and see what happens.

In the meantime though, I'm wondering if I should just keep tinkering or go back to leaving "well enough"...truly alone!

But if you're curious, here is that new opening to chapter one...at least as it looks today!

Chapter One

~∞~

In a way, I recognized it even before I saw it—as if time had paused in its passage. Past, present and future warped into a single strand, its ephemeral fibers shivering down my spine.

Loosing the twine with curious fingers, I lifted the lid. Inside lay a muddle of loose papers, envelopes bound up with ribbon, and several timeworn volumes. Almost without thinking I reached for one, removed it from its shelter, and pressed open its yellowed pages. Written in a distinctly feminine hand, it began with a date—March 29, 1858.

My heart began to pound.

Laying it aside, I took up another of the books, then another. Dates begin to diverge: August, 1861. January, 1882. May, 1868. Despite the disparity in times, the handwriting appeared the more or less the same.

1858… more than a century before I was born.

Regardless of its absurdity, a single thought crossed my mind—

“You were waiting…for me?”