Added Scene In Chapter 2

Yesterday I did a fair bit of revision on some of the later chapters in ALDEN RIDGE, and today my wife and I both spent about five hours doing even more on the opening. Most things were just minor wording complaints and a few clarifications with positional scenery description (I expect to have a post on this alone in a few days; that's an interesting topic by itself). However, one large deficiency in my early chapters did surface, and I believe that we came up with a good solution for that.

Essentially, I did a good job of building tension all throughout the first two chapters, but that tension basically fizzled in the third chapter when the danger was not realized soon enough. That danger is realized a few chapters later, but the tension just can't survive that long. The solution that we came up with was to add a new scene to the end of chapter two. This new scene adds a lot of excitement (and action) to the very start of the book, and it also ties together well with the following scenes.

The total that I wrote for this addition to chapter 2 was 1,200 words. I'm not going to update my online excerpt until I've had a chance to revise this new content at least once or twice, but I expect I'll post it sometime within the new two weeks. I'm very excited about this addition--I think it fixes an issue of pacing that I had, and it also improves the tone of following scenes just by its inclusion. Mostly my opening was good, I think, but this was the one major thing that seemed to be missing. It's really nice to figure out a new piece of the puzzle like this.

Now I'm just going to need to re-read all the following chapters, and make small edits where needed to account for this new scene; that's a small price to pay. I hope all your projects are going well!

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