First Line Roundup
Jun. 23rd, 2010 06:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
valarltdAt JessWave's, they're talking book openings. I find I don't write a "reach out and grab you" first sentence.
So, here are some first sentences, with first paragraphs under the cut.
On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Old joke. It wasn’t that funny fifteen years ago. But, on the internet, nobody knows you’re a werewolf. New joke. And it still isn’t that funny.
It was Cooper-Young, so of course anything went and nothing was unusual. The little gift store hadn’t made it, so now they were washing the old sign off the front window to the drifting smells of food from the half-dozen
restaurants on the block. Jars of herbs and roots, strings of myrrh, incense sticks and cones had replaced the fair-trade trinkets and local artisans’ works and all stood ready for their opening in the morning.
It is thirteen miles by interstate from the insane asylum in Danvers to Route 113, which takes the traveler into the ancient city of Newburyport. The old coast road through Innsmouth, Rowley and Ispwich is longer, older and much narrower. The sprawling Boston metroplex sends out squamous suburbs, growths that threaten to swallow the whole of the state. Already, the twisting streets and oddly uniform houses creep down Highway One to Providence and up Route Three to Nashua. The world seems very small and urban and hardly the place for fear and the unnameable. The Space Age and Information Age have both come and gone.
She dreamed of greenness. Her pregnancy rode badly in those early days and she craved vegetables. She ate ravenously of her garden: spinach, kale, chard, and endless lettuce. But the garden of Gothel, over the
forbidding wall, tempted her with the jade of mustard leaves, the peridot of cabbages and, most of all, the emerald of rampion.
There it lurked, hulking atop a low rise, half hidden by overgrown tress and out-of-control weeds. Old Baptist Hospital with its wide lawns, iron fence and empty windows, loomed at the intersection where Pauline ran into Crump, a photographer's dream of light and shadow.
Doctor Damian Castel’s recall of faces was the stuff of campus legend. It was said he could identify anyone he’d ever seen, remember how he knew them and a little about them. Rafael’s recall was not legendary and he forgot that bit of trivia about his freshman composition professor on the night he decided to rob the World AIDS Day charity dinner and memorial.
Ken cruised through the Mojave, windows down, Creedence blaring from the 8-track, running on the last dregs of the hash. He'd see how long he could hold out before he needed to score. Once, he'd been clean for two
whole months. Then the nightmares were back and so was the pipe.
Val watched the private jet until it vanished from sight. Something big was going on, what it was he didn’t quite understand. He knew his lord was in bed until the doctor said otherwise. He knew Tanis had gone to live with David. Now, Steven and Nick--his sweet Niccolo--were headed to Italy, to Benta’s Compound.
There had always been a Phantasmagoria.
Somewhere, in the dim, dead remains of the past, it began with a juggler in Babylon or a dancer in Crete, a snake charmer in Memphis or an acrobat in Palmyra. One by one, they came together and the Phantasmagoria took on its own life.
It was with modest trepidation and a good deal more brazenness on a fine April day in 1923, that I approached the New York office of Edward Francis Kilsby, Lord Withycombe, renowned flying ace of the Great War and adventurer extraordinaire. For myself, I was barely twenty-two and the ink had scarcely dried on my journalism degree from the hallowed halls of Dartmouth.
So, here are some first sentences, with first paragraphs under the cut.
On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Old joke. It wasn’t that funny fifteen years ago. But, on the internet, nobody knows you’re a werewolf. New joke. And it still isn’t that funny.
It was Cooper-Young, so of course anything went and nothing was unusual. The little gift store hadn’t made it, so now they were washing the old sign off the front window to the drifting smells of food from the half-dozen
restaurants on the block. Jars of herbs and roots, strings of myrrh, incense sticks and cones had replaced the fair-trade trinkets and local artisans’ works and all stood ready for their opening in the morning.
It is thirteen miles by interstate from the insane asylum in Danvers to Route 113, which takes the traveler into the ancient city of Newburyport. The old coast road through Innsmouth, Rowley and Ispwich is longer, older and much narrower. The sprawling Boston metroplex sends out squamous suburbs, growths that threaten to swallow the whole of the state. Already, the twisting streets and oddly uniform houses creep down Highway One to Providence and up Route Three to Nashua. The world seems very small and urban and hardly the place for fear and the unnameable. The Space Age and Information Age have both come and gone.
She dreamed of greenness. Her pregnancy rode badly in those early days and she craved vegetables. She ate ravenously of her garden: spinach, kale, chard, and endless lettuce. But the garden of Gothel, over the
forbidding wall, tempted her with the jade of mustard leaves, the peridot of cabbages and, most of all, the emerald of rampion.
There it lurked, hulking atop a low rise, half hidden by overgrown tress and out-of-control weeds. Old Baptist Hospital with its wide lawns, iron fence and empty windows, loomed at the intersection where Pauline ran into Crump, a photographer's dream of light and shadow.
Doctor Damian Castel’s recall of faces was the stuff of campus legend. It was said he could identify anyone he’d ever seen, remember how he knew them and a little about them. Rafael’s recall was not legendary and he forgot that bit of trivia about his freshman composition professor on the night he decided to rob the World AIDS Day charity dinner and memorial.
Ken cruised through the Mojave, windows down, Creedence blaring from the 8-track, running on the last dregs of the hash. He'd see how long he could hold out before he needed to score. Once, he'd been clean for two
whole months. Then the nightmares were back and so was the pipe.
Val watched the private jet until it vanished from sight. Something big was going on, what it was he didn’t quite understand. He knew his lord was in bed until the doctor said otherwise. He knew Tanis had gone to live with David. Now, Steven and Nick--his sweet Niccolo--were headed to Italy, to Benta’s Compound.
There had always been a Phantasmagoria.
Somewhere, in the dim, dead remains of the past, it began with a juggler in Babylon or a dancer in Crete, a snake charmer in Memphis or an acrobat in Palmyra. One by one, they came together and the Phantasmagoria took on its own life.
It was with modest trepidation and a good deal more brazenness on a fine April day in 1923, that I approached the New York office of Edward Francis Kilsby, Lord Withycombe, renowned flying ace of the Great War and adventurer extraordinaire. For myself, I was barely twenty-two and the ink had scarcely dried on my journalism degree from the hallowed halls of Dartmouth.
