Word count: 63979 | Since last entry: 278 | This month: 6932 After considerable wailing and gnashing of teeth, I’ve decided the next thing I will write is a new first chapter. Currently titled Chapter Zero, it will become the new Chapter A and all the other lettered chapters will move one down the alphabet. It replaces the Prologue (since writing the original Prologue, I have learned that some readers skip Prologues and some editors don’t like them), uses some of the same text, and serves many of the same purposes: to introduce the aliens, the Platforms, and the rest of this future world. The major difference is that the new Chapter Zero is focused on Jason rather than Sienna, and Jason is engaging in dangerous, self-directed physical action at the beginning of the book rather than passively taking direction from Sienna. In the new chapter, Jason takes the ferry to the Seattle Platform on the day after Cedar Point. He’s just broken up with Clarity (the continuation of the scene shown in flashback, from Clarity’s PoV, in chapter 5) and is setting out to do some damage. At this point he doesn’t know exactly what he’s going to do, but he’s going to break some rules and do some things he never would have done before (and by “before” I mean both “before this point in his life” and “in the previous draft”). He’s grieving and angry in equal measure, looking to hurt the Taurans as badly as they’ve hurt him. However, I’m not completely sure what he’s going to do either — I have some ideas, but I need to sleep on them. I hope this will make him a better character for the whole rest of the book. If nothing else, it gives me an opportunity to work in some physical description of the Taurans (and Jason’s emotional reaction to them), which is lacking from the current early chapters. Not a productive day at all — less than 300 words and most of them rewritten rather than new — but I kept my resolution to write something every day. More tomorrow.