First Draft vs Final Draft, PART II

My word, here I go giving away words for free. The kind of words in the kind of order that people have already paid good money for.

But it's all for a good cause, I reckon. To explore the changes that an opening of a novel goes through as it's shaped and given greater focus.

I'm currently happy with how this opening reads, but as time passes and as the need for me to position The Money Star more clearly in one genre, I'm getting itchy feet and feeling the need to amend again, to make it either more sci-fi or more heist right from the start.

Enough already. Here's the opening to The Money Star as it now stands.

What the diamond robbers lacked in equipment and experience, they made up for with their desperation and determination.

Simon Remnant was not one of them. But he was acutely aware of their fumbling presence in the jewellers next door to the café outside of which he was toying with a late fried breakfast, feeling every one of his forty-six years following another evening wasted getting wasted.

He had been sitting at the table for nearly two hours, catching the autumnal sun rays that managed to beam between some of central London’s lowest high rises. During that time, he’d been forced to shoot several smiles at the little girl sitting with legs swinging at the next table. She was determined not to take her eyes off him, staring like he was an outcast here in his own neighbourhood. Trying to figure him out. Who was he? What was with his old face and his streaky grey hair? Where were all his friends and why was he pushing his food around his plate like her mother told her not to?

In between glances down Greville Street to the junction with Hatton Garden, Remnant demonstrated his disappearing napkin trick, much to the girl’s fascination and her mother’s consternation. It was a trick he’d perfected while trying to entertain his own little girl some twenty years before.

After another performance, he looked down at a sheet of paper that had held his attention periodically for the past week. What to say, what to say about her? ‘This is the proudest day of my life.’ That was a good start, but was that a word, proudest? Edgar would know.

He looked up to see the girl’s mother pointing out the bits of blueberry muffin her daughter should be eating while berating an absent father on her mobile phone.

A yell from within the jewellers and the sprinkle of a necklace falling on concrete diverted Remnant’s fragile attention. His first thoughts were for the audacity of the raid. Straight in the front door, bold as brass bracelets, middle of the day. They had to be amateurs.