Mike Weedall's Blog

“Rumors abound of people entering this quagmire, never to be seen again. Stories pass down about phantom graveyards that appear and just as quickly vanish. The image of a lost lover’s canoe may drift in the distance.

Ghosts wander and inspire writers like Edgar Allen Poe. Storms build quickly, turning a capricious environment more fearsome. It is marshland gone wild, all matted and impenetrable. Never intended for man, nature rules this place. In 1791, can desperate people be anything other than secondary players if they choose to enter?”

The above is an excerpt from the Prologue in “Escape To The Maroons.” I spoke in an earlier blog how the swamp had to be as much a character in the story as the protagonist.

So, I drafted the Prologue to paint the extreme conditions. What to do with the Prologue soon became one of the many issues I had to resolve as the book evolved. My working process required three years from initiating research to holding the first advanced reading copies in my hands. Many ask how many drafts the book went through. I never kept score, but if you guess more than thirty revisions, I believe it easily exceeded that number.

Of the generous people who looked at early drafts, along with my paid editor, suggestions about the Prologue were all over the board. “You should start with Chapter One and engage the reader immediately with the action.” “Get rid of it. You have more than enough descriptions of the swamp in the story.” “Maybe at the end of the book, if at all.”

In my energy industry career, there were many instances where decisions were not clear-cut. But usually, a consensus would emerge. That never seemed to be the case with the Prologue. So, as the parade of revisions evolved, the Prologue was in, then out, drafted in various formats, then in again, then out.

In the end, I went with my gut. I included it in the very first draft for a reason. From my perspective, readers needed to understand the topography before introducing any characters. The swamp’s extreme environment spoke volumes about the price the self-liberated were willing to pay in their determination to live free.  

This was just one of a myriad of decisions any author must resolve. If you’ve read the book, what do you think about the Prologue? I’d love to hear.

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