Welcome to another installment of fellow blogger Stevie Turner’s Open Book Blog Hop. If you’d like to participate, click here. Her prompt for this week is: ‘Prologues and Epilogues. Yes or no?”
In my opinion, it depends on the story. My young adult novel in progress, Why Grandma Doesn’t Know Me, has no prologue. But I felt it necessary to tie up loose ends with an epilogue.
On the other hand, The Red Dress has a prologue that provides the back story through dialog. Since I was able to bring the story to a satisfactory conclusion in the last chapter, I decided I didn’t need an epilogue. So, to whet your appetite, here’s an excerpt from my prologue.
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“Oh, Eve, don’t tell me you’re going to work on that creative writing assignment now instead of going to the homecoming dance.”
In her dorm room at the University of Colorado, Eve Barry was staring at the blank piece of paper in her typewriter, waiting for her poised fingers to produce something. She sighed and ran her fingers through her long, black hair as she turned to her roommate, Charlene Tucker, who was fresh from the shower, clad only in a black terry–cloth robe, her dark, wet curls plastered to her head.
“I’m really not interested in going to the dance, and this assignment’s due Monday. I went to the game this afternoon.”
“Yeah, wasn’t that awesome? We creamed the Wyoming Cowboys.”
“Wait a minute! You’re from Wyoming.”
“Yeah, but I’m in Colorado, now, and we have something to celebrate. You really should come to the dance. I know you don’t have a date, but I’m sure Alex wouldn’t mind if you came with us.”
***
Eve isn’t just being a goody two-shoes, doing her homework instead of going to the homecoming dance. She has an underlying reason for not wanting to go. If you want to know what that is, I suggest you read the book.
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By the way, for those of you who use the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled, The Red Dress is available for download from their site here. No matter how you read it, please be sure to review it wherever you can. That goes for all my books. Thank you for stopping by. Stay safe, happy, and healthy.
New! The Red Dress
Copyright July 2019 by DLD Books
Twenty-five years later, Eve, a bestselling author, is happily married with three children. Although her mother suffers from dementia, she still remembers, and Eve still harbors the guilt for giving the dress away. When she receives a Facebook friend request from her old college roommate and an invitation to her twenty-five-year high school class reunion, then meets her former best friend by chance, she must confront the past in order to face the future.
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My Corner 
Thanks for the shout-out, Abbie. To be fair, the blog hop is run by P.J MacLayne, not myself.
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Ooopse, sorry about that. I didn’t know this. Thank you for enlightening me.
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No worries, Abbie, I’m just glad you can contribute to the posts no matter how you get here!
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Hi Abbie, thank you for this interesting post. I enjoyed your extract.
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Thank you. I appreciate your comment.
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Thank you, Patty, for reblogging.
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It’s been said that many readers skip prologues these days, but maybe that’s their loss. I felt my novel, “The Bright Side of Darkness,” needed a prologue to plunge readers into the action. If some readers start with the first chapter, they’ll manage to figure out the story. But they’ll miss some depth and passion.
PROLOGUE
There’s nothing a damn bit bright about sunshine when you’re seventeen and you see it from the wrong side of a jail cell window. It isn’t that I’m moping for my lost freedom or anything. I wouldn’t give a half a crap for my life anymore now that the crew is scattered to the four winds, and all I have left of Daisy is her parting note in the waistband of my jeans and a wilted dandelion dangling between my fingers. But it seems to me that the Man Upstairs could have marked my downfall with a terrific thunderstorm or at least a few nasty black clouds out of the west. When there’s a war or a funeral or some other sad thing going on in the movies, the sky usually turns dark and ugly, and the rain pours down in buckets. The longer I stare at the square of sunlight streaming through the tiny window of my cell and stealing across the floor, the lonelier I feel. August 27, 1986, is slipping by the same as every other hot, heavy day, and I’m the only one in the world who knows that nothing will ever be all right again.
It hasn’t always been this way. I ought to have known better than to believe I could reach out and snag a piece of paradise, but for a little while I had it on my fingertips. Breaks are hard to come by for kids from the projects, though, and sure enough, all I ended up with at the last second was empty hands. I’m doing my level best to hold off a flood of memories, but my mind keeps drifting back to the sweltering summer evening when the chain of events began that shattered my world into a zillion pieces. First thing tomorrow morning, some juvenile court judge will decide if my life is worth rebuilding. Maybe he’ll have better luck with my future than I did with my past.
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Great minds think alike, don’t they? If you skip the prologue of The Red Dress, you’ll figure out the story eventually, but you won’t get the whole scoop. Thank you for sharing an excerpt from your prologue.
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My prologue sets the first part of my novel as a flashback, which readers will miss if they skip it.
I’ve downloaded “The Red Dress” from Bard. I’m looking forward to reading it, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. Maybe this summer when my daughter is out of school.
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Summer would be a perfect time to read it. That’s when most of the action takes place. I hope you enjoy it.
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A great example, setting the scene in a natural way, hinting at what’s to come.
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I agree. Thank you for reading and commenting.
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It really does depend on the story itself.
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I agree. Thank you for reading and commenting.
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