July's First Friday Thread: The First Chapter of The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard
My new book, The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard, isn't published for a few months, but for my paid subscribers, here's a special sneak peek at the first chapter. Let me know what you think!
If you follow me on social media, you might have seen that I’m spending two weeks at the beach on vacation in our brand new house that we’ve been building for at least the last two years. It’s so wonderful to finally be spending some quality time here and I intend to enjoy every minute of it. I’m taking a couple of weeks off writing so I can think about how to approach the next draft of The Secret Life of Marie-Madeleine but I don’t want to neglect this newsletter.
So I thought it might be fun to share the first chapter of The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard with you. I think this is possibly one of my favourite first chapters I’ve ever written – next would be the first chapter of The Paris Secret. Those two first chapters have something in common in terms of the way they were written, and I think perhaps that’s why they’re my favourites.
Ordinarily I would say that my first chapters are the most rewritten chapters in my books. You want to grab the reader’s attention from the outset, which means they have to be some of the strongest sections of the novel. But with Astrid Bricard (and The Paris Secret too) the first chapter came to me almost in its entirety in some kind of amazing stream of words – like the muse was gifting me an almost perfect chapter.
Before that stream of words arrived, all I knew was that the first chapter had to take place in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles in France, because the book is partly set at the Battle of Versailles in 1973 – this was a fashion battle between the French and the Americans for the title of couture capital of the world. First chapters should take place somewhere evocative and incredible and the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles seemed to fit the bill exactly. I also knew that if I was going to call a book The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard, then we needed to get the titular “disappearance” into the story pretty quickly, otherwise readers would be disappointed.
But I had no idea how to write it, until the muse intervened. Sometimes she appears at just the right time – and she never comes when you want her! I always say that the muse gifts me one thing per book – which means there’s one character or scene or chapter or twist that comes easily and perfectly. The rest of the book is hard, hard work.
And in this book, she gave me two gifts. The character of Hawk Jones, and this first chapter.
I did change a few words here and there and I revised some of the sentences, but the bulk of the chapter is exactly as it came to me in a rush of handwritten scrawl. I knew when I was scribbling it down that it was THE chapter that would open this book.