Absence makes the art grow stronger

Baby didn't look quite as I'd hoped when I lifted her Kindle blanket so I decided to do some additional work.  As with any child, it's very hard to know when to stop interfering and let them be. Each time I go back and read something I've written there is a word or phrase that still niggles.  Sometimes it's because I've become overattached to a metaphor and I'm going to shoehorn it in whether its right or not; sometimes the pace is wrong, or the word not quite accurate enough. 
But absence makes the art grow stronger. After a couple of weeks I finally downloaded and read my own book as a new reader would. I read the first page and knew I had to fix it.  Luckily with e-books you can make changes and then upload again.  I spent two night playing with words, paragraphs and rhythms until it felt right.  It's the first page after all, it's got to grab the reader and give an immediate sense of the book's style and mood.
You might think that to have got to the stage of publication and not sorted the first page was somewhat remiss but I assure you, that page had been worked and reworked more than a hundred times - and that is the problem.  Like a piece of pastry it had become overworked and grey. It had lost it's spring and I'd lost the ability to see it.
The new beginning I hope, has the reader actively involved with the earthquake along with the character; in the first edition the reader was watching along with the character which I think was less effective.  If you have bought it already and want to read the new beginning use "Look Inside" feature on Amazon. (And by the way this is about the fifth version of this post, having found numerous changes were required when I looked at it this morning.)

It's a Miracle

This is from a collection at the Wellcome Foundation - fantastic place on the Euston Road full of marvels. Exhibition on until February of ex-votos - Mexican paintings to thank various Holy Beings for prayers answered. This mother prayed to St Francis for her son to return home and he did - as he looks dressed for Studio 54 we might well ask where he has been...
Some wonderful  prayers though...
"In the middle of my suffering I invoked with intimate truth at the core of my heart the Powerful Queen of the Mexican Nation, Our Mother of Guadeloup who cured me..."

Two fantastic film clips, one from a man who rescued a woman from the earthquake of 1985 by using his back as a leverage point for a crowbar to raise a concrete door, and he survived without breaking his back. Very moving witness to human courage. And from the sublime to the ridiculous a woman invoked Senor de Villaseca because she couldn't make round tortillas.  Her prayers were granted and she made an entire basket full of them and called all her family to witness it.