Throwing it out there...

Well, there's a scene I thought that I wouldn't show anyone until the entire book was finished. It's Scene Zero, the Very First Scene (not chronologically), the one where I started writing this whole entire business. As much as anything in the story could be, this scene is my darling, my baby. It's also a fairly climactic scene. It was my little nugget to hoarde and treasure, and think to myself any time I posted anything else for anyone to read "Yeah, but wait till they read this!"

For all the snippets and excerpts and exercise threads, I danced around this scene. I've revised it, refined it, and the process is still ongoing. It hasn't been through my New Year's reworking-mill yet, but it will be. But still I didn't plan to show it to anyone until the very end, when I started getting critters and beta-readers to look at the whole book.

But you know what they say about "best-laid plans"... A certain discussion/thread has begun in a certain section of the Compuserve forum. I thought it would be fun to participate. "I can trim a little section off," I thought, "Give them a little taste." Well, I read over the scene (and got caught up in it again, even with an eye to revision I'd find myself halfway down the page not paying attention to anything but what was happening in the scene) and I couldn't find a good place to snip it. "I like this part, but - oh, that little bit is great, I need to leave that on there, too..." Finally, I took the main chunk of action and posted it all. There's more to the scene, before and after. But this is the heart of it, and now my baby is out there in the world where people can see it and what if they don't like it as much as I do?

I know this is part of being a writer, and it would have come to this point eventually. Hopefully people will like the scene (there's been good reaction to the one I posted as a January X, which I was also a little nervous to post). And any comments can only make it better in the end, even if it means abandoning parts that I'm really fond of. But still. More than ever before I feel exposed, and a little breathless waiting for people to comment on it. OTOH, what if they don't comment? What if it doesn't have enough of an impact for them to say anything about it? That would be worse.

Anyway, I guess we'll see how it goes.