Let's start at the very beginning. Again.

Lately, I've been revising the first page or two of my novel. The main character's voice needs to come through hrough earlier, but too much exposition on the first page would slow things down, but this main character isn't a big talker, and certain information needs to be explained early on to avoid confusion among the fairly early readers who are its intended audience. You know, the usual balancing act.

I've read my beginning many, many times. That makes it easy to look at a sentence and think it is the only way it can be. A realization that there's a quicker, clearer, or more interesting way to say something that page has been saying for months feels like a whoa sort of discovery. Of course, if I move sentence A, I have to remember that readers no longer know the necessary background information for sentence B, even though they do in the parallel universe where that page reads the way it used to.

It's a fun game. I just can't do what I did while playing Anomia by the river last night and keep getting distracted by the sunset.