Stuck - since October

I am still struggling horribly with attempting to rewrite the start of my 'new' de Brencourt story, which was pretty obviously unsatisfactory even to me as soon as I had got it typed up :-(
meibruges read the chapter for me, and her feedback only confirmed my immediate impression that the opening passage simply is not working -- it completely fails to grab the reader, and the story does not come to life until the dialogue starts. This is unfortunate for two reasons: firstly that I normally pride myself on my abilities to write backstory and can't work out what has failed in this case, and secondly because I was actively using this section to drop in certain elements which will be significant later on, but in a manner that feels natural and that ideally the reader will overlook at the time....( Read more... )