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I'm trying to find out if I can make a buckwheat flatbread without any binder -- just olive oil and water, no eggs, no starch. Because the line for the grocery store is still down the block and the pantry is getting bare.

So I've got Simon & Garfunkel on long play and the lights low and I'm slogging my way through writing.

***

I finally managed to get the novel started and, no, it isn't going swiftly yet. First scenes are a huge pain. There's so much you want to get in front of the reader -- yet you also don't want to frighten them off.

It is a real balancing act giving them just enough so they feel just grounded enough to want to keep reading. So they have a sense of a personality and a situation and a conflict.

That's why flash-forwards and fake beginnings and pre-titles scenes are so common. You start with Dirk fighting for his life against enemy frogmen in the hulk of a sunken nuclear submarine. Then the next three chapters are him doing paperwork in Washington as you work your way up towards the real plot.

One of the classic ways of starting badly is to open on your character doing nothing in particular on some unmemorable day, as if even she knows the adventure hasn't started yet.

An almost as bad way of starting, though, is in the middle of a firefight, when you don't know who anyone is and don't give a rats ass who wins.

Both are especially annoying because both can be fixed in a sentence. Have her on her way to an important job interview. Now she has a goal and the reader can't help but be emotionally invested. Show one of the random soldiers committing an act of chivalry. Or one of unnecessary savagery. Now the reader has stakes. They have an opinion on who they hope will win and who will fall.

Of course these are stopgap. What the writer really wants to do is to get the reader involved in the main story. In the character they will be spending time with and the conflict inherent to them. I've read a few too many thrillers-with-history in which the opening chapter is all about de Saville the reluctant Conquistador and his struggle to escape the massacre. You get invested in this character and his story but his only purpose is to get his head knocked off by a war club so the Scepter of Montezuma can get lost in the cave. Next chapter we're in the office of Richard the really boring and we sort of wish we could have stuck with de Saville.

***

My sister finished the book and she had fabulous notes. She really clicked with the character, even liking the way she could be "kind of annoying sometimes." Cool. Plus she thought my protag was a badass.

Best yet, she really groked on the uneasy balance between an Indiana Jones adventure and a respect for real history...going so far as saying my protag has a "shameful fascination with Atlantis." I like. That's a way of looking at it that is new and fresh and gives me ideas.

So I have some confidence in getting through the next one.

It is just going to be several days more as I do draft after draft, trying to find which things I need to have in the first chapter and which can be left for later. To find which things work and which things turn out not to be right for the book.