rewrite fail

The first chapter of a book is critical. It needs to grab hold of the reader by the eyeballs and drag them further into the story. It needs to be The Best Thing Ever Written, or agents won't look twice at it.

So why oh WHY does my beginning stink so much?

I've been working on editing Thistleswitch, getting it up to snuff. I rewrote the Switching Spot scene (which I'm still not uber-happy with) and tweaked a bunch of little things, and fixed all the stupid grammar and spelling mistakes. And, rereading the story, I came to the (somewhat narcissist?) conclusion that I still love it. I'm still proud of it. I still think it's good enough.

Except for the dang first chapter.

Each time I read The Chapter in Which We Become Acquainted with a Number of Important Places and People, I die a little more inside. It just gets worse and worse. And I don't know how to make it better. The good thing is that I acknowlegde that it needs to be changed: one of the things that professional writers always seem to stress is that if you're so attached to what you've written that you think it's perfect, you've got a problem. My problem is that I know very well that it's not perfect, but I don't know how to make it even remotely passable.

The Thistlethought Forest was a peculiar place, even as forests go. It did, of course, have all the ordinary oddity of a forest: the constant hustle and rustle through the undergrowth, the resident yellow eyes that materialized in the darkness, and the spine-tingling feeling that something was always watching your every move; because something often, in fact, was. It wasn’t especially exceptional in the fact that fluorescent purple moss was a common occurrence on the trunks of the trees, or in the fact that those trees, more often than not, could stare at a body as he passed. And there was nothing decidedly distinct about the wildlife that inhabited those trees, for the fire-breathing muskrat and six-legged snake were quite abundant throughout the land, from Mistmurder Woods far to the north to the Silentsigh Grove on the shores of the southern ocean.

No, what made the Thistlethought Forest a particularly peculiar place was the Shift.

Does that cut it for a first paragraph? No; that is probably the wordiest, purplest first paragraph that ever existed. Blegh.

Does it make you want to keep reading? It makes me want to skip straight to the next chapter. Which is what I've been doing for the past week. Which is why the first chapter is still just sitting there in all its craptastic anti-glory.