Okay, bored enough after all (it's wet, it's miserable and the kids were up to midnight and are tired.) Coming from the awesome, opening lines thread, let's see what agents are up against.... and whether the start matters when you've read a few.
Below are some openings of books (I've referenced them at the bottom). All are published, some are sff, some aren't (it was whatever I grabbed on my way to the computer). Read them, one after the other, without a break, and let me know which hooks you and why, and which didn't. Remember, these are all published.
1. Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.
They were gentleman-magicians, which is to say they had never harmed any one by magic -- nor ever done the slightest good. In fact, to own the truth, not one of these magicians had ever cast the smallest spell, nor by magic caused one leaf to tremble upon a tree, made one mote of dust to alter its course or changed a single hair upon any one's head. But, with this minor reservation, they enjoyed a reputation as some of the wisest and most magical gentlemen in Yorkshire.
2. I have never been what you'd call a crying man.
My ex-wife said that my 'nonexistent emotional gradient' was the main reason she was leaving me (as if the guy she met in her AA meetings was beside the point). Christy said she supposed she could forgive me not crying at her father's funeral; I had only known him for six years and couldn't understand what a wonderful, giving man he had been (a Mustang convertible as a high school graduation present, for instance). But then, when I didn't cry at my own parents' funerals -- they died just two years apart, Dad of stomach cancer and Mom of a thunderclap heart attack while walking on a Florida beach -- she began to understand the nonexistent gradient thing. I 'was unable to feel my feelings' in AA-speak.
3. It's nothing. An injectable. A prick. No hospital involved. Like a booster shot with added boost.
Just keep telling yourself.
The corporate line shushes through the tunnels on a skin of seawater, overflow from the tide drives put to practical use in the clanking watery bowels of Cape Town -- like all the effluent in this city. Like me. Art school dropout reinvented as shiny brand ambassador. Sponsor baby. Ghost girl.
4. Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert.
Drunk, but no longer bleeding, she pushed into a smoky cantina just after dark and ordered a pinch of morphine and a whiskey chaser. She bet all of her money on a boxer named Jaks, and lost it two rounds later when Jaks hit the floor like an antique harem girl.
5. The tall and dour non-com wore Imperial dress greens and carried his communications panel like a field marshall's baton. He slapped it absently against his thigh and raked the group of young men before him with a gaze of dry contempt. Challenging.
6. That year at Christmas time, every morning dawned laced with frost under leaden skies. A bluish hue tinged the city and people walked by, wrapped up to their ears and drawing lines of vapour with their breath in the cold air. Very few stopped to gaze at the shop window of Sempere & Sones; fewer still ventured inside to ask for that lost book that had been waiting for them all their lives an whose sale, poetic fancies aside, would have contibuted to shoring up the bookshop's ailing finances.
"I think today will be the day. Today our luck will change," I proclaimed on the wings of the first coffee of the day, pure optimism in a liquid state.
7. I wish I had a boyfriend. I wish he lived in the wardrobe on a coat hanger. Whenever I wanted, I could get him out and he'd look at me the way boys do in films, as if I'm beautiful. He wouldn't speak much, but he'd be breathing hard as he took off his leather jacket and unbuckled his jeans. He'd wear white pants and he'd be so gorgeous I'd almost faint. He'd take my clothes off too. He'd whisper, "Tessa, I love you. I really bloody love you. You're beautiful" -- exactly those words -- as he undressed me.
8. The Phurnacite factory in Abercwmboi killed all the trees for two miles around. We'd measured it on the mileometer. It looked like something from the depths of hell, black and looming with chimneys of flame, reflected in a dark pool that killed any bird or animal that drank from it. The smell was beyond description. We always wound up the car windows as tight as tight when we had to pass it, and tried to hold our breath, but Grampar said nobody could hold their breath that long, and he was right. There was sulphur in that smell, which was a hell chemical as everyone knew, and other, worse things, hot unnameable metals and rotten eggs.
9. Perhaps I should start this story with my escape across the border in the company of a beautiful woman? Or I could begin with the image of myself picking up pieces of human flesh in a small room in a Greek taverna, retching and gagging as I wrapped them in a shirt and stuffed it in my suitcase. (That was a turning point. There's no doubt about that.) Or, then again, it might be better to begin with something more spectacular, more panoramic: the Machine itself perhaps, the robot Messiah, preaching in Tirana to the faithful, tens of thousands of them clutching at its every word?
1. Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
2. 11.22.63, Stephen King.
3. Moxyland, Lauren Buerkes.
4. God's War, Kameron Hurley.
5. The Warrior's Apprentice, Lois McMaster Bujold.
6. The Prisoner of Heaven, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
7. Before I Die, Jenny Downham
8. Among Others, Jo Walton.
9.The Holy Machine, Chris Beckett.
I'm out of time, but hopefully that's enough to get the picture. One after another, it becomes hard to keep concentrating and they need to really grab you to keep at it. For what it's worth, 5, 6 and 7 did what was needed for me and I kept reading, the others I gave them all a few pages more -- or one of them 120 pages more -- before I gave up on the book.
Below are some openings of books (I've referenced them at the bottom). All are published, some are sff, some aren't (it was whatever I grabbed on my way to the computer). Read them, one after the other, without a break, and let me know which hooks you and why, and which didn't. Remember, these are all published.
1. Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.
They were gentleman-magicians, which is to say they had never harmed any one by magic -- nor ever done the slightest good. In fact, to own the truth, not one of these magicians had ever cast the smallest spell, nor by magic caused one leaf to tremble upon a tree, made one mote of dust to alter its course or changed a single hair upon any one's head. But, with this minor reservation, they enjoyed a reputation as some of the wisest and most magical gentlemen in Yorkshire.
2. I have never been what you'd call a crying man.
My ex-wife said that my 'nonexistent emotional gradient' was the main reason she was leaving me (as if the guy she met in her AA meetings was beside the point). Christy said she supposed she could forgive me not crying at her father's funeral; I had only known him for six years and couldn't understand what a wonderful, giving man he had been (a Mustang convertible as a high school graduation present, for instance). But then, when I didn't cry at my own parents' funerals -- they died just two years apart, Dad of stomach cancer and Mom of a thunderclap heart attack while walking on a Florida beach -- she began to understand the nonexistent gradient thing. I 'was unable to feel my feelings' in AA-speak.
3. It's nothing. An injectable. A prick. No hospital involved. Like a booster shot with added boost.
Just keep telling yourself.
The corporate line shushes through the tunnels on a skin of seawater, overflow from the tide drives put to practical use in the clanking watery bowels of Cape Town -- like all the effluent in this city. Like me. Art school dropout reinvented as shiny brand ambassador. Sponsor baby. Ghost girl.
4. Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert.
Drunk, but no longer bleeding, she pushed into a smoky cantina just after dark and ordered a pinch of morphine and a whiskey chaser. She bet all of her money on a boxer named Jaks, and lost it two rounds later when Jaks hit the floor like an antique harem girl.
5. The tall and dour non-com wore Imperial dress greens and carried his communications panel like a field marshall's baton. He slapped it absently against his thigh and raked the group of young men before him with a gaze of dry contempt. Challenging.
6. That year at Christmas time, every morning dawned laced with frost under leaden skies. A bluish hue tinged the city and people walked by, wrapped up to their ears and drawing lines of vapour with their breath in the cold air. Very few stopped to gaze at the shop window of Sempere & Sones; fewer still ventured inside to ask for that lost book that had been waiting for them all their lives an whose sale, poetic fancies aside, would have contibuted to shoring up the bookshop's ailing finances.
"I think today will be the day. Today our luck will change," I proclaimed on the wings of the first coffee of the day, pure optimism in a liquid state.
7. I wish I had a boyfriend. I wish he lived in the wardrobe on a coat hanger. Whenever I wanted, I could get him out and he'd look at me the way boys do in films, as if I'm beautiful. He wouldn't speak much, but he'd be breathing hard as he took off his leather jacket and unbuckled his jeans. He'd wear white pants and he'd be so gorgeous I'd almost faint. He'd take my clothes off too. He'd whisper, "Tessa, I love you. I really bloody love you. You're beautiful" -- exactly those words -- as he undressed me.
8. The Phurnacite factory in Abercwmboi killed all the trees for two miles around. We'd measured it on the mileometer. It looked like something from the depths of hell, black and looming with chimneys of flame, reflected in a dark pool that killed any bird or animal that drank from it. The smell was beyond description. We always wound up the car windows as tight as tight when we had to pass it, and tried to hold our breath, but Grampar said nobody could hold their breath that long, and he was right. There was sulphur in that smell, which was a hell chemical as everyone knew, and other, worse things, hot unnameable metals and rotten eggs.
9. Perhaps I should start this story with my escape across the border in the company of a beautiful woman? Or I could begin with the image of myself picking up pieces of human flesh in a small room in a Greek taverna, retching and gagging as I wrapped them in a shirt and stuffed it in my suitcase. (That was a turning point. There's no doubt about that.) Or, then again, it might be better to begin with something more spectacular, more panoramic: the Machine itself perhaps, the robot Messiah, preaching in Tirana to the faithful, tens of thousands of them clutching at its every word?
1. Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
2. 11.22.63, Stephen King.
3. Moxyland, Lauren Buerkes.
4. God's War, Kameron Hurley.
5. The Warrior's Apprentice, Lois McMaster Bujold.
6. The Prisoner of Heaven, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
7. Before I Die, Jenny Downham
8. Among Others, Jo Walton.
9.The Holy Machine, Chris Beckett.
I'm out of time, but hopefully that's enough to get the picture. One after another, it becomes hard to keep concentrating and they need to really grab you to keep at it. For what it's worth, 5, 6 and 7 did what was needed for me and I kept reading, the others I gave them all a few pages more -- or one of them 120 pages more -- before I gave up on the book.
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Possibly because a boyfriend of that sort wouldn't be a bad idea. Ha.
