Submissions sought. Get fresh eyes on your opening page. Submission directions below.
The Flogometer challenge: can you craft a first page that compels me to turn to the next page? Caveat: Please keep in mind that this is entirely subjective.
What's a first page in publishingland? In a properly formatted novel manuscript (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type, etc.) there should be about 16 or 17 lines on the first page. Directions for submissions are below—they include a request to post the rest of the chapter, but that’s optional.
Donald Maass,, literary agent and author of many books on writing, says, “Independent editor Ray Rhamey’s first-page checklist is an excellent yardstick for measuring what makes openings interesting.”
A First-page Checklist
It begins to engage the reader with the character
Something is wrong/goes wrong or challenges the character
The character desires something.
The character takes action. Can be internal or external action: thoughts, deeds, emotions. This does NOT include musing about whatever.
There’s enough of a setting to orient the reader as to where things are happening.
It happens in the NOW of the story.
Backstory? What backstory? We’re in the NOW of the story.
Set-up? What set-up? We’re in the NOW of the story.
The one thing it must do: raise a story question.
A reminder of what you’re after here. This blog is about crafting compelling openings. Not interesting, compelling. Why does it have to meet that hurdle? First, if your work is going to an agent, you’re competing with hundreds of submissions. You have to cut through that clutter and competition with powerful storytelling and strong writing. If it’s a reader browsing in a bookstore or online, the same goes—there are scores of published books competing with yours. Yeah, you need compelling.
Kelly sends the first chapter of Bookworm. The rest of the narrative is after the break.
Lyn hurled the book from her lap.
It scudded over the coffee table and landed on the hardwood floor in a page-crimping straddle. Though no one was around, she jammed a fist in her mouth to stifle her scream, then scrambled to the opposite end of the couch. With a wary eye she regarded the book, her body crouched and coiled for endless minutes, until an ache settled into her bones.
The furnace woke; its lusty clanks almost blasted her off the couch. The old heater’s belching usually didn’t spook her, but neither did books, not usually.
“John?” Lyn called her husband’s name, knowing it was foolish. She didn’t believe in ghosts.
A mug of coffee on its hotplate radiated tongues of steam and sugar-browned aroma. The black forest cuckoo clock ticked…ticked…ticked…like always, like everything was as it should be, which was not true. Eyes glued to the book, Lyn risked a sip. The grand burn down her throat was bitter and smooth and real. She slopped some as she set it down, then lunged for the book before she could change her mind.
She mouthed a sentence, the one that caused her to throw the book. If she heard the words from her own lips, that meant they were really there. But she spoke only a few words before her throat clenched and her iron resolve melted. This frail tongue was not the one that (snip)
I have two issues with this submission. But first, let me say that its good writing and good voice are all to the good. Lyn’s clear fright—terror?—at the words she read begin to raise story questions, and the reference to a ghost regarding her husband creates a good tease for a hook.
Issue the first: Yet I think that, with editing, this page could move from interesting to compelling in terms of story questions. All the detail about the coffee and the clock, etc. do set the scene . . . but, to my mind, at the expense of tension. Those details don’t impact the story, so why not get on with it? Here’s how I’d edit to make more of a grabber of this page:
Lyn hurled the book from her lap.
It scudded over the coffee table and landed on the hardwood floor. She jammed a fist in her mouth to stifle her scream, then scrambled to the opposite end of the couch. Crouched and coiled, she regarded the book until an ache settled into her bones.
The furnace woke; its lusty clanks almost blasted her off the couch. The old heater’s belching usually didn’t spook her, but neither did books, not usually.
“John?” Lyn called her husband’s name, knowing it was foolish. She didn’t believe in ghosts.
She mouthed a sentence, the one that had caused her to throw the book. If she heard the words from her own lips, that meant they were really there. But she spoke only a few before her throat clenched. This frail tongue was not the one that lashed a disorderly classroom into silence. A woman of books, a high school English teacher, and the words were too sharp. She touched her lips, half-expecting to feel blood.
She snapped the book closed. The cover had the library barcode sticker and an ISBN number. The cover was wrapped in clear plastic, as all library books were. Nothing about it suggested anything out of the ordinary.
Except the words inside.
For me, this page makes the story question of “what are those words? much more compelling. But making the page even more compelling leads to the other concern.
Issue the second: If you read ahead, you’ll find good writing, a good character, and mysterious goings-on that suggest a good story ahead. That’s fine. But the words in the book that terrified her are never revealed in this chapter.
While I appreciate that the writer is aiming for a cliff-hangerish teaser, for me, this is a cheat. You want to deliver the character's experience and, without those words, we are deprived of that. And I think that, had we learned what those words were at the start, right after we turned that edited page, her reactions would have a LOT more meaning, and the story tension would have been stronger. But maybe that’s just me. Read on and let me know what you think with a comment.
. . . lashed a disorderly classroom into silence. A woman of books, a high school English teacher, and the words were too sharp. She touched her lips, half-expecting to feel blood.
She snapped the book closed and examined the cover. It had the library barcode sticker and an ISBN number. The cover was wrapped in clear plastic, as all library books were. Nothing about it suggested anything out of the ordinary.
Except the words inside.
No way should these words be here. Yet, here they were. Lyn again thrust the book from her as if it were on fire.
***
With shaking hands Lyn poured another cup of coffee. To this she added a generous dollop of Bailey’s. On second thought, she added more. Lyn rubbed her eyes with her palms of her hands then massaged her scalp, then made her way to the kitchen sink and splashed cold water on her face. From his crate, Caesar raised his furry head in anticipation and watched with mismatched Husky eyes—one blue, one brown.
“I’ve lost my mind, Caesar. Any idea where it is?” Lyn ruffled his ears and let him out to do his dog business. His duty, as she called it. Her property was a mostly forested lot with the exception of a patch of tended lawn that butted up to the concrete patio next to the sliding doors. As the only residential property in the Park Hill Conservatory, acquiring it was a nature-lover’s dream. The conservatory was a 776-acre chain of parks and wild lands linked by waterways, gravel roads, and paved roads. The nearest farm was two miles north on Route 83. The bait store was just south on the same road. For the first time, Lyn wished for neighbors.
Caesar darted off to romp and sniff and take care of business. As he hunkered down, something behind the woodpile caught his eye. The hair on the nape of his neck went up and his tail stiffened. One paw raised in indecision.
“Caesar!” Lyn opened the slider. “Come.”
He glanced at her, then took off toward the rotting pile of partially-cut firewood. It was one of many shrines to Lyn’s late husband, John. The wood lay where John left it three years ago, the axe head still stuck in the splitting block, the half-stacked pile, and the just-hewn pieces in a jumble. When Lyn needed firewood for herself, she cut it fresh with her own axe on a new chopping block. To disturb John’s wood, to stack it, or (God forbid) use it was like taking away what she had left of him.
Caesar stopped just short of John’s memorial pile, though it was clear he wanted to break through the invisible fence. He barked and ran back and forth, stayed by the electric current that would zap him if he stepped beyond the boundary. Still, it looked like he might do it. He’d take a few steps forward, hear the warning beep from his collar, then hustle in an awkward backstep, all the while snarling and snapping.
Lyn dashed to her bedroom, peering out every window to make sure Caesar was still in the yard. Her rubber boots would have to do. She slammed them on and ran back to the door; her boots shrieked with each footfall as she raced. She didn’t have to look to know Caesar still barked his head off.
A thought brought Lyn up short before she opened the slider. Normally she wouldn’t do it, but the book spooked her. She clambered back down the hall to her bedroom and threw open the drawer where two guns were nestled. She grabbed the larger and banged her fingers on the drawer slot hard enough to make them bleed. She squeezed and flexed her trembling hands, willed them calm, then snapped off the safety. Caesar barked and barked, intent on whatever was behind the wood pile.
With the cumbersome gun she couldn’t pull the heavy slider, so she dropped the gun in her robe pocket. It weighed the pocket down and undid the knot so that the icy wind bit against her bare legs. Caesar didn’t even look her way as she waded through the mud and snow toward him, fingering the trigger and attempting to cinch her robe as she went.
“What is it, boy?” Lyn stopped short of the woodpile. Something smelled out of place. There was the pungent wood and leaves in various stages of decay. There was the freshly scraped earth where Caesar had scratched after his business. There was the rank stink of his business. That filled most of her nose. Lyn shook it off.
Under all that was another smell. It didn’t belong.
Lyn pulled out her gun and trained it on the woodpile.
“Caesar, quiet.”
He never listened.
Lyn picked her way around the pile, not looking down, feeling with her boots so as not to trip on the cut logs. She didn’t know what she expected to see, but what she saw rooted her to the spot, gun aloft. Caesar droned on, but his calls were drowned by the ringing in Lyn’s ears, the rush of her blood.
At first she thought it was a scarecrow. The body was dressed in a red and black flannel coat, black gloves, faded jeans, and hiking boots. But the head. The thing for a head was grey and scalloped. Little medallions flaked off or fluttered silently, weakened and broken by time. The work of a thousand hornets, now dead or dying on the snow. As dead as the headless body that lay with arms and legs spread wide. The open shirt collar revealed a neck awash in thick blood. The snow had been marred by scrapings and shoe prints. A chunk of hornets’ nest was ripped from the whole, and splintered medallions were strewn about the snow like coins. It gave the appearance of a head, blown away by a kill shot. Here was a hornet’s nest in the same pattern, someone’s macabre idea of art.
A hornet’s nest. That was no coincidence. First the book, now the hornets.
Lyn fled back to the house. This time, Caesar followed.
***
The police arrived in the time it took Lyn to throw up in the sink, wash her face, brush her teeth, and pace the kitchen a few dozen times.
Upon hearing the doorbell, it was Caesar’s abominable habit to become silent, to pad over to the door and wait for Lyn to open it. She joked that the only way Caesar would stop a burglary was if the thief would be so kind as to have a pet squirrel on his shoulder. Lyn spread the curtains and peeked out the bay window. Her dogwood tree had been garlanded with toilet paper, no doubt a gift from her students. The white loops danced and swayed in the winter wind. The pieces that tore loose blended in with the snow. Lyn’s yard was hit by students once a month during the school year, about average for a high school teacher who had the audacity to live in Park Hill and teach there too. The mostly-melted snow from a few days ago dappled the lawn, accented by gloppy ribbons of toilet paper. The sun shone, pale and anemic in a cloudless midwestern sky.
“Lyn Darrow?” One officer had Irish all over him, freckles and ginger wavy hair that rebelled against everything. He looked bored.
She nodded.
“The 911 operator reported a body on your property?”
“That’s right.”
Irish thumbed behind him. “Dispatch says you’ve got twelve-plus acres of woodland. Could you point us in the right direction?”
“It’s behind the woodpile.”
The second officer was tall and robustly built. His gaze swept the room, taking in everything and also somehow giving Lyn his full attention. “Do you know the deceased? A neighbor? Recognize him—or her—from anywhere?”
“It looks like a him, but no one’s going to recognize that.”
Both officers’ brows furrowed. “Could be an animal,” Irish said.
“It’s wearing clothes.” Lyn pulled her robe tighter against the biting air.
A second squad car showed up. The tall officer, L. Andrews, according to his badge, spoke into his radio that he copied their arrival. The two officers exchanged a look that meant something to them but nothing to Lyn. It lasted a few seconds.
“Fine,” said Irish. And he went outside to greet the arriving officers.
“What was that?” Lyn asked.
“We were discussing who would check out the body and who would question the caller.” L. Andrews wiped his shoes on the mat. “I won.”
“It was a glance.”
“We’ve worked together so long we have telepathy.” L. Andrews extended an arm. “Do you think we can continue our conversation inside, at the table? It might be more comfortable. I have to ask some questions.”
“A table’s not going to make me comfortable. Especially if you’re asking questions.” Lyn found she could only lock gazes for a second before she had to look away.
“Suit yourself.” He pulled out a tiny spiral notebook. Caesar wound around his legs, turning his polyester pants into fur pants.
“Caesar, go inside.”
“He’s no trouble.” The officer scratched Caesar behind his ears. “He probably smells the stray we just took to the pound.”
“He’ll never leave you alone now.”
“That’s alright.” His name was Leif, he said, pointing to the L. Andrews above his badge. Lyn tried to wrangle Caesar away from the officer. As she did so, her clunky Smith & Wesson banged into the door handle. The officer’s gaze fixed on her gaping pocket, and his kind eyes flashed with strain.
Lyn realized her mistake and made sure her hands were splayed and visible. “I took an LCH class and should know better.”
“It didn’t come up on your name.”
“I never got the actual license. Is it okay if I take it of my pocket? It’s heavy.”
“If it’s all the same, I’ll do the honors.” He gently, without so much as brushing her body, slipped the gun from Lyn’s robe pocket. She folded her robe tighter and re-tied the knot.
“Dumb of me.” Lyn blushed.
Andrews ’s cheek showed some heat as well. “You’re not the first. You’re in your home, so you’re not technically carrying a concealed weapon, but that wouldn’t protect you from a jumpy officer—”
“—who fancied himself in danger?”
“Exactly. Look, can we get in, out of the cold?”
“Sure.” Lyn opened the door and Caesar ambled inside.
Andrews set her gun on the end table and pulled a tiny spiral notebook from his breast pocket. Caesar kept putting his furry body in his way, so the officer had to dodge him. “Did you hear anything unusual, either last night or this morning? How’d you find the body?”
Lyn explained how Caesar’s barking alerted her. She left out the book, most unusual of things. Why she didn’t bring it up, she couldn’t say, except that she didn’t want this officer to think she was crazy. A surprising heat settled into Lyn’s cheeks as she answered Leif’s questions. It was unnerving, such focused attention.
The door opened, and would’ve slammed into the officer if he hadn’t thrown up a hand to block it. In blew an icy gust and the Irish officer, a frown creasing his face and forehead.
“Ma’am. There’s no body behind the woodpile.”
Lyn shook her head, at a loss.
“We checked the back yard. Nothing. Just tracks.”
“But. I saw—”
Irish put up his finger, indicating she wait. He spoke into his radio. “We’re a code 4 here…Right. No body. Copy?” To Lyn, he resumed, “Somebody, or probably somebodies, was screwing around behind your woodpile. There’s tracks everywhere.” Irish nodded at the dogwood tree garlanded in Charmin. “And we noticed you got fans.”
“I teach at the high school.”
“You must give some pretty harsh grades.”
Lyn started to protest, but realized Irish had his mind made up.
“There’s footprints everywhere and they lead off the property and come out at Sandy Ridge Road—it’s kids being stupid.” He ran his sleeve along his red nose. “They left you a present. A hornet’s nest.”
“Yes! I didn’t tell the 911 operator, but the body…it was headless. The hornet’s nest was the head. There must be blood. There was blood.”
Irish frowned, as if her credibility had gone the way of the body.
Lyn sat straighter and forced calm into her voice. “There was a body. I saw it. Are you telling me it got up and walked away?”
“I’m telling you it walked to Sandy Ridge Road. I can show you the tracks. The ‘blood’ is ketchup. Somebody’s having fun twisting your noodle. Juveniles, like as not.”
That was the out-of-place sweet smell she got right before she walked around the woodpile. Why hadn’t it registered? Because I was scared. First the book and then…
Andrews righted the chair and guided Lyn back into it.
Irish continued, “We can take a statement, but it’s a waste of time.”
“Mine, or yours?”
Leif studied her throughout the exchange. His eyes on her made her uncomfortably warm. Without her permission, he pulled up a chair and poised his pen. With an air of intimacy fit for a candlelight dinner, he leaned over the table, though she hadn’t joined him. “Ms. Darrow. Tell me exactly what you saw behind the woodpile.”
Irish sighed.
Patrolman Leif Andrews ignored him.
***
Irish made his consternation known by shifting his weight from foot to foot, not stepping off the welcome mat, sighing, and tweezing his mustache with his thick, freckled fingers. Eventually he pulled out his phone and got lost in the glow.
Leif asked more pointed questions about the body. Was it prone or face up? What color were the fingers? Had she noticed any footprints? Anything strange? Lyn confessed she smelled the ketchup, but it hadn’t registered. Somebody lay in her back yard playing dead, someone who knew about the hornets’ nest, after all this time. That part, Lyn left out.
Irish got a phone call and took it out on the front porch. They were alone. Lyn was in mid-sentence when Leif quietly interrupted.
“This isn’t the first time I’ve been here.” His careful tone said it all.
“You mean the day…John…?”
“First on the scene.” Leif nodded. “I’m sorry.”
The memory cut through the fog of three years. It would cut her through thirty years, three hundred years. That day would be a knife in any lifetime. This patrolman was here that day.
“I don’t remember you.”
“That’s okay.”
“I don’t remember very much.”
“That’s your brain trying to protect itself.”
“I wish it would protect me more.”
***
Irish blustered back in, breathing hard, hiking up his belt and stomping snow all over the rug. Another meaningful look passed between the officers. This time Patrolman Andrews shook his head and stood. “I’ll put a watch on your home for the next few weeks. You’ll see a lot more of ours driving by. We’ll run some license plate checks and talk to the park rangers about any unusual activity. We’ll be in touch.”
Lyn thanked him.
“And maybe you should get this licensed, just as a precaution. You went to the trouble to learn how to use it, may as well be legal.” He placed the gun on the table and gave his notebook a last look. “Oh…the hornets’ nest. Kind of an unusual prank. Any idea what’s up with that?”
Lyn nodded almost imperceptibly. “No.”
“No?” Leif leaned forward and tilted his head. So much focus.
Suddenly the wood grain on the table top was extraordinarily interesting. Lyn traced it with her finger.
“Ms. Darrow?”
“I hate hornets.”
Irish cleared his throat. It was time to go.
Lyn glanced over at the book. It was on the floor where she’d flung it.
Writers, send your prologue/first chapter to FtQ for a “flogging” critique. Email as an attachment. In your email, include your name, permission to use the first page, and, if it’s okay, permission to post the rest of the prologue/chapter.
Many of the folks who utilize BookBub are self-published, and because we hear over and over the need for self-published authors to have their work edited, it’s educational to take a hard look at their first pages. A poll follows concerning the need for an editor.
Donald Maass, literary agent and author of many books on writing, says, “Independent editor Ray Rhamey’s first-page checklist is an excellent yardstick for measuring what makes openings interesting.”
A First-page Checklist
It begins to engage the reader with the character
Something is wrong/goes wrong or challenges the character
The character desires something.
The character takes action. Can be internal or external action: thoughts, deeds, emotions. This does NOT include musing about whatever.
There’s enough of a setting to orient the reader as to where things are happening.
It happens in the NOW of the story.
Backstory? What backstory? We’re in the NOW of the story.
Set-up? What set-up? We’re in the NOW of the story.
The one thing it must do: raise a story question.
Next are the first 17 manuscript lines of the first chapter of Scream Blue Murder. A poll follows the opening page below. Should this author have hired an editor?
The wind whipped through Melissa’s blonde hair as they sped down the leafy lane on a hot Sunday afternoon. Callum was at the wheel. A somewhat immature and invincible twenty nine-year-old, he pushed the accelerator to the floor a little more each time his fiancée squealed with excitement. He was a show-off. And he liked people to watch him, notice him, in everything he did. Even sex. He turned towards her. Her head was thrown back, her hair flying behind them like a cream silk kite being beaten and jostled in the whip from the wind. The speedometer on the walnut dashboard read seventy, a full thirty over the limit, but what did Callum care? They were having fun. He laughed and squealed along with her, the effects of his lunchtime G&T pumping through his thin veins and firing his adrenalin even more.
He took the tight corner with ease; he’d done it so many times in the past and knew the road well enough to trust it. There was a long, straight stretch ahead, and he pressed the pedal down further, feeling the power of the V8 engine as they raced forward. Eighty. Eighty-five. Another corner ahead, and he was confident. Melissa urged him on, squealing, laughing, hair still whipping as they raced towards it. Callum touched the brakes of his Ferrari and slowed it a little to take the bend, turning towards her to receive her appreciation of his skilled driving. Her dark shades were a stark contrast to her Colgate mouth. Overly white teeth had been a present for her birthday, her mouth important to him. Turning his attention back to the road, he took the (snip)
This novel scored 4.4 stars on Amazon. I’m not a fan of the omniscient point of view, though some, such as Stephen King, can use it to good effect. But not here. We’re told things about this character, not experiencing his experience. And I don’t think I want to—he’s not a likeable person. For me, the narrative isn’t, either. It feels overwritten, which is not a narrative style I like to read.
As for story questions, you already know that there’s going to be an accident, right? Since Callum is not somebody I want to spend time with, my response is, “Who cares?” And this is all setup with nary a murder or mystery in sight. There’s no apparent story in view, either, and who wants to hang around with an ass? Pass. Your thoughts?
Cover critique
The cover works pretty well, primarily because of the title. The image doesn’t contribute much, and the author name is too small. I’d give it a C. What do you think?
My books. You can read sample chapters and learn more about the books here.
Writers, send your prologue/first chapter to FtQ for a “flogging” critique. Email as an attachment. In your email, include your name, permission to use the first page, and, if it’s okay, permission to post the rest of the prologue/chapter.
Many of the folks who utilize BookBub are self-published, and because we hear over and over the need for self-published authors to have their work edited, it’s educational to take a hard look at their first pages. A poll follows concerning the need for an editor.
Donald Maass, literary agent and author of many books on writing, says, “Independent editor Ray Rhamey’s first-page checklist is an excellent yardstick for measuring what makes openings interesting.”
A First-page Checklist
It begins to engage the reader with the character
Something is wrong/goes wrong or challenges the character
The character desires something.
The character takes action. Can be internal or external action: thoughts, deeds, emotions. This does NOT include musing about whatever.
There’s enough of a setting to orient the reader as to where things are happening.
It happens in the NOW of the story.
Backstory? What backstory? We’re in the NOW of the story.
Set-up? What set-up? We’re in the NOW of the story.
The one thing it must do: raise a story question.
Next are the first 17 manuscript lines of the first chapter of Fire Watch. A poll follows the opening page below. Should this author have hired an editor?
A prescribed fire is a fire set deliberately. The fire that burned Molly's house to the ground was started deliberately.
Right then, her husband burned up in it, and she watched it happen. And she couldn't help but think about the raging California wildfires, happening right then, farther south.
From outside the two-story, dark coastal house, she saw it all. The engulfing red-hot flames. The dark backfire. The plums of white smoke. And the clouds of black. It fumed together, killing off the oxygen in the air.
The smoke rose, blotting out the stars.
DeGorne's husband had been there. In the house. When it all started, she heard his screams. She would never forget. But that was all over now. He was dead.
She had packed a bag the night before — two of them. One was the same bag she packed every April 30th, every year, for the last five years.
Every year she packed a bag with what she needed for the next six months. She packed two pairs of hiking shorts, five pairs of short-sleeved tops, three pairs of cargo pants, five pairs of socks, five pairs of underwear, two pairs of long-sleeved tops, one raincoat, one warm denim coat, two knit sweaters, her basic hygiene and feminine products, two knit caps, two baseball hats, and a foldable toothbrush. Everything that she needed.
This novel scored 4.3 stars on Amazon. On the craft side, this opening does well. The writing is good (could use a teensy bit of editing, eg. repetition of “right then”—while repetition is sometimes a good thing to do, I think this one doesn’t work so well), the voice clear and professional.
The scene is clear enough—we’re not sure about where the protagonist is, but what’s going on is strong. We seem to be witnessing a murder happening, which generates strong mystery/thriller story questions. It worked for me. Your thoughts?
Cover critique
The cover is eye-catching with its color and content of the fire. The silhouetted figure and helicopter add to mystery and helps create tension and story questions. The author’s name and the series are nicely strong, and the title is equally well done. What do you think?
My books. You can read sample chapters and learn more about the books here.
Writers, send your prologue/first chapter to FtQ for a “flogging” critique. Email as an attachment. In your email, include your name, permission to use the first page, and, if it’s okay, permission to post the rest of the prologue/chapter.
Many of the folks who utilize BookBub are self-published, and because we hear over and over the need for self-published authors to have their work edited, it’s educational to take a hard look at their first pages. A poll follows concerning the need for an editor.
Donald Maass, literary agent and author of many books on writing, says, “Independent editor Ray Rhamey’s first-page checklist is an excellent yardstick for measuring what makes openings interesting.”
A First-page Checklist
It begins to engage the reader with the character
Something is wrong/goes wrong or challenges the character
The character desires something.
The character takes action. Can be internal or external action: thoughts, deeds, emotions. This does NOT include musing about whatever.
There’s enough of a setting to orient the reader as to where things are happening.
It happens in the NOW of the story.
Backstory? What backstory? We’re in the NOW of the story.
Set-up? What set-up? We’re in the NOW of the story.
The one thing it must do: raise a story question.
Next are the first 17 manuscript lines of the prologue for Creed, a Kate . A poll follows the opening page below. Should this author have hired an editor?
The woodland was alive with birdsong. Small feathered bodies flashed and fluttered through the branches of the trees, breaking through golden shafts of sunlight that slanted through the forest canopy to the leaf-littered floor. In late March, the buds on the twigs of the beech trees were just beginning to unfurl, adding a faint green fuzz to the skeletal outline of the trees.
John Dawson strode through the woods towards the distant college building, a white mass beyond the treeline. The list of jobs that awaited John once he arrived at his workplace was topmost in his mind as he walked along, but the beauty of the morning was such that, even in his hurry, he was pleasantly aware of the awakening woodland. The first bluebells were beginning to mist over the floor of the forest; the liquid, lilting sound of birds marking their territories; the strengthening warmth of the sunlight on the back of his neck.
Abbeyford School of Art and Drama stood in a hundred acres of woodland and fields, the bucolic setting a pretty contrast to the white bricks of the large Victorian building that made up the main part of the college. John Dawson had been caretaker at the college for seventeen years and felt that he knew the woods as well and as intimately as he’d ever known a person. He was a solitary man and enjoyed the time on campus when the students and teachers had not yet appeared. For a short time every weekday morning, the college and its grounds belonged to him and to him alone.
This novel scored 4.5 stars on Amazon. The writing and voice are solid. But what do that writing and voice give us? A bucolic scene of a man walking through the woods. We can empathize with his enjoyment, but where’s the tension? Where’s the mystery? Where’s the story question?
Not on this page. You could argue that something subtitled as a mystery and a reader’s training in reading that lets us understand that pleasant scenes lead us to trouble. But the first page usually foreshadows what’s to come, too. In this case, we can anticipate more languid description of place and innocent activity. The caretaker is on his way to discover the bodies of two students, and I can see no reason for that not to be here. While I have enjoyed previous Kate Redman stories, this earns no page turn for me.
Cover critique
The cover works, with the drama/comedy masks giving a sense of an aspect of the story. The title and author name are strong. If it were me, I would have had the subtitle clear of the masks so that it would pop and be immediately readable. What do you think?
Submissions sought. Get fresh eyes on your opening page. Submission directions below.
The Flogometer challenge: can you craft a first page that compels me to turn to the next page? Caveat: Please keep in mind that this is entirely subjective.
What's a first page in publishingland? In a properly formatted novel manuscript (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type, etc.) there should be about 16 or 17 lines on the first page. Directions for submissions are below—they include a request to post the rest of the chapter, but that’s optional.
Donald Maass,, literary agent and author of many books on writing, says, “Independent editor Ray Rhamey’s first-page checklist is an excellent yardstick for measuring what makes openings interesting.”
A First-page Checklist
It begins to engage the reader with the character
Something is wrong/goes wrong or challenges the character
The character desires something.
The character takes action. Can be internal or external action: thoughts, deeds, emotions. This does NOT include musing about whatever.
There’s enough of a setting to orient the reader as to where things are happening.
It happens in the NOW of the story.
Backstory? What backstory? We’re in the NOW of the story.
Set-up? What set-up? We’re in the NOW of the story.
The one thing it must do: raise a story question.
A reminder of what you’re after here. This blog is about crafting compelling openings. Not interesting, compelling. Why does it have to meet that hurdle? First, if your work is going to an agent, you’re competing with hundreds of submissions. You have to cut through that clutter and competition with powerful storytelling and strong writing. If it’s a reader browsing in a bookstore or online, the same goes—there are scores of published books competing with yours. Yeah, you need compelling.
Robert sends the first chapter of ’Embodied. The rest of the narrative is after the break.
Vasco Calderon woke suddenly from a long phase of REM sleep.
“Time?” he asked me.
“4:18am,” I whispered into the microphones hovering in his ear canals. His brain patterns were in a chaotic state between sleep and wake. “Today is Monday, June 21st, 2478. Your first day at the SETI Institute,” I added.
“Lights.”
I turned the lights in his bedroom to the usual wakeup intensity: 20% of maximum.
“Brighter, 80%,”
Vasco squinted after I complied. Then he groaned and sat up in bed.
“Your limbic system was quite active during that last phase of REM sleep,” I said. “Cortisol levels are high. Would you like to document your nightmare?”
Vasco groaned. “The last thing I want to do is relive it.” Can you make some coffee?
I turned the coffee maker on in the kitchen. “Brewing,” I replied. “While you wait, I suggest taking a few minutes to record your dream before the memories fade. To preserve the option to interpret it later.”
Vasco sighed, but then began to list some details from his dream. “Science Olympiad. Delhi. 9th grade. Coach Auliffe…” Although the process was often unpleasant, Vasco was almost(snip)
There are nice things going on in this introduction narrated by an artificial intelligence—AI. I like that the narrative eases you into understanding that aspect of the narrator character. The writing and voice are just fine (except for a misplaced quote mark that you no doubt noticed).
But what happens here? It’s another waking-up-from-a-dream opening. The voice and the AI element make it different and fresher than the cliché. But that’s all that’s happening. There’s no real issue that Vasco or the AI have to deal with. No trouble, no problem. This is all setup. The dream is revealed and analyzed later, but actually has no impact on the story—it’s a device for delivering backstory about the nature of Vasco, but doesn’t affect the story.
The voice of the AI (Isadora, we learn later) is fascinating for me, and the technical details of the way this all works is too. I encourage Robert to find a way to start the story with something more in terms of a problem for either Isadora or Vasco and weave in as much backstory as is needed while things happen. Your thoughts?
. . . as committed to observing and documenting himself as I was. Even after nightmares and panics, he would complement my observations of his brain patterns and physiology with the relevant subjective data. Two and a half decades of continuous monitoring with millions of internal nanosensors allowed me to clearly identify Vasco’s basic emotional states. But I was blind to his complex thoughts and subjective experiences – unless he chose to express them.
Vasco finished documenting his dream while he showered and dressed. I set up the analysis and let the dream interpretation software crunch the data. Meanwhile, Vasco went into the kitchen, where nutty molecules from freshly brewed coffee met his smell receptors. He sat down at a small table by the window that looked out onto Inman Square, which was about to wake up for the workweek.
“Presentation,” Vasco said.
The first sip of black coffee activated a familiar neurocascade, starting in his sensory system and ending in his neocortex: smell coffee + feel heat + taste bitterness à dopamine reward à motivate cognitive focus. He began to review the materials that he would present to his new boss, SETI’s Chief Astrobiologist Olivia Orival. During interviews earlier that spring, Vasco had pitched Olivia on ways that his academic work could be adapted to help the Institute find extraterrestrial intelligence. Olivia seemed most interested in our astrobiology model: a complex and innovative simulation of possible paths of biological evolution on other planets. (Olivia called it an ‘Ecology Generator.’) For his doctoral project, Vasco compared and contrasted the handful of virtual planets that had generated eusocial species, including several similar to ants and bees. Olivia wanted Vasco to take the concept further by feeding the model SETI’s vast datasets and training it to imagine novel possibilities for alien intelligence and technology. Our progress in the months before graduation had already led to some promising ideas and puzzling questions. Vasco was ready to report in and discuss the work with Olivia.
Vasco worked hard to be independent of everyone but me. But depending on me kept getting more expensive by the second. My needs for electricity, memory, processing power, upgrades, and expansions were ever increasing. Vasco’s organic brain was capped by the size of his cranium and his limited metabolic capacity. But his inorganic nervous system – which evolved into the ‘I’ who writes these words – extended outwards from Vasco’s body and sprawled boundlessly into the Cloud.
As a student, Vasco relied on his university’s computing resources to keep me up and running. But he still had to work part time as a coder for a tech conglomerate to support my medical and personal functions. When the SETI Institute made him a job offer, Vasco made his acceptance contingent on two requests: access to a dedicated, massive quantity of SETI’s computing resources; and a start date that coincided closely with his graduation. Olivia had initially balked at Vasco’s vast need for computing power, which she said amounted to over 5% of SETI’s budget. (“Most new hires’ work runs on just a handful of servers,” she said.). But a few days later she told Vasco that his unusual request had been approved by SETI’s director, Victor Khosla. Vasco was elated. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence had been his drive since his early teens. And the SETI Institute was Earth’s most prestigious and monied patron for this quest.
But rather than celebrating or resting on his laurels, Vasco got right to work modifying our astrobiology model. And I prepared to transfer most of myself – the professional parts, at least – to SETI’s computer system before Vasco lost his student status.
Vasco finished his second cup of coffee shortly after dawn. With a flick of his eyes, he cleared the astrobiology work from his retinas. Then he got up from his small kitchen table and left his apartment. The sun was still beneath the eastern horizon, but after only a dozen steps, the humid air precipitated moisture from Vasco’s skin. By noon, it would be unhealthy for a human to be in the direct sunlight for more than twenty minutes.
Vasco still had over two hours before his 8am meeting with Olivia. He walked in silence towards the river and climbed stairs up to the walkway on top of the twenty-meter embankment that protected East Cambridge from the sea. Vasco strolled for a while as Sol rose above the Boston skyline on the other side of the river. When the direct sun became too hot and bright, he sat down on a bench shaded by large weeping willow tree.
“Have you finished analyzing my dream?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I replied. “Would you like to see the interpretation now, or wait until after the meeting with Olivia?”
“Now,” Vasco nodded.
Vasco was pensive for several minutes after he read the report. “Isadora, can you bring up some records from my 9th grade Science Olympiad team?” he finally asked. “Starting with the regional finals – no, actually, start at the beginning, at tryouts the previous fall.”
It took me half a second to curate pictures and videos from the visual and audio records. Then I displayed the collection in a chronologically ordered image stack on Vasco’s retinas. With slight twitches of his eyes, he scrolled through pictures from the fall and winter months of the tryouts and practice sessions that had led up to competition season in the spring.
As Vasco looked through the images, long-dormant memory sequences fired in his hippocampus. Facial recognition circuits in his fusiform gyrus pinged linguistic nodes in his neocortex. Vasco recalled the names of classmates he had not seen in over a decade.
He lingered on a picture of Auliffe, a biochemistry teacher who had been his personal Science Olympiad coach. Moments before the image was captured, Vasco had correctly answered a complex organic chemistry question – demonstrating to Auliffe that he was finally able to visualize the three-dimensional structure of organic bonds between atoms. Auliffe’s face brightened with delight at Vasco’s hard-won progress. If a teacher’s greatest joy was to see her students grow and learn, in this picture I aimed to capture an archetypal image of that experience. Vasco’s face loosened into a smile as his brain offered him a cascade of positive memories associated with Auliffe.
Flipping forward through the image stack, Vasco arrived at records of the regional competition in Springfield. He smiled again as he viewed pictures of his teammates and coaches hoisting the 1st place trophy, which had earned them a place at the system-wide championship in Delhi. Then he came upon a video that I had compiled of the team dinner celebrating the regional championship. Vasco, his six teammates, and the team’s three coaches sat at a round table in the back room of a Somerville restaurant. Vasco’s mouth watered as he watched his younger self eat citrus-flavored salmon and vegetables stir-fried in garlic and soy sauce. Although the team had spent many hours studying and training together over the past months, this was the first time they had gathered together to celebrate, without any kind of academic agenda. For dessert they ate chocolate cake so moist that it sagged under the weight of its dripping frosting. A rare delicacy was served to wash down the cake: 10 centiliters each of natural, farmed bovine milk.
Auliffe punctuated the meal with short speeches praising each individual member of the team. Vasco smiled again as he rewatched Auliffe talk about his teammate Ryebo, “who not only won Top Chemist prize at the regionals, but also devised the ‘Brain Food” meal plan to optimize our team’s cognitive development and performance as we prepared for competition over these past months.” Auliffe, noticing that Ryebo had not touched the piece of oozing chocolate cake that had been placed in front of him, continued, “And even now, after winning the regional finals for the first time in our school’s history, Ryebo won’t allow himself a piece of cake to celebrate! My doctor would appreciate it if I had that kind of discipline,” she said dryly, patting the pouch on her middle-aged belly.
Everyone at the table laughed. “The simple carbs in the cake will sap the energy that I need to study,” Ryebo replied, his face serious. “I ate plenty of fish and berries though!” The left corner of Ryebo´s mouth curled slightly upwards. Everyone laughed again. A goofy chant broke out at the table, echoing one of Ryebo´s favorite sayings: “Fish is brain food, fish is brain food.”
Ryebo´s smile widened. “I have another idea,” he said after the chant died down. “I propose that we make fish our official team food.”
His teammates and coaches cheered with approval. Ryebo sat back in his chair and took a small, satisfied sip of his milk.
Vasco paused the video. “I’m hungry,” he said to me, “can you bring up some places that are open for breakfast?”
Vasco rose from the shaded bench and began walking towards the nearest source of food, a small restaurant in Kendall Square called Biome that served modern gastronomy in a vintage 20th century diner setting. Although he had lived in this neighborhood all his life, Vasco had never eaten there before. Usually he ate on strict schedule, wasting as little time as possible on nourishment by consuming individualized nutrient bars that I custom printed each morning to optimize his cognitive performance.
The restaurant was empty at such an early hour on a Monday morning. Vasco sat at a stool and used the display at the counter to order a vegetable omelet and fruit drink. Then he pulled up his presentation to review it again before his meeting with Olivia.
Once the robotic arm served his breakfast, Vasco closed his presentation, resumed the video, and widened his eyes until it occupied most of his field of vision. Back in the Somerville restaurant, Auliffe turned towards Vasco and met his younger eyes (and my inorganic eyes: the nanocams floating in his aqueous humor). Each of Vasco’s teammates had already been the subject of Auliffe’s personalized speeches. Now it was his turn. He watched his adolescent self look down shyly at the shmears of chocolate frosting that remained on his plate. After a few expectant moments, he raised his gaze back towards Auliffe, tenderly awaiting his praise.
“Vasco,” Auliffe began, “when you tried out back in September, I had no way of knowing that you would end up being a top contributor on a Science Olympiad regional champion. In fact, now seems like the right time to be more honest with all of you about something.”
Auliffe looked around at the other two coaches, gaining their silent approval to continue. Then she sat down in her chair and took another sip of milk. When she continued speaking, it was at 60% of the previous volume. After looking around the table, her eyes settled back on Vasco. “We kind of had to break our own rules for you to be here. At the end of tryouts, your performance did not justify a place on the team. Several older students had the numbers to beat you out. In a competition held last September, that is. But your rate of improvement during the month of tryouts was off the charts. You were starting very low on the learning curve, of course, where steep improvement is expected. But then your curve had a different trajectory. It remained just as steep the higher up it you climbed. We knew it could be a fluke, that your curve would eventually flatten too. But we took a risk and decided to ride the growth as far as it would take us.”
Auliffe lowered her voice by another five decibels. “And now, six months later, here we are on our way to Delhi, still waiting for your curve to flatten out. After tryouts, we had a lot of parents of seniors come to us angry, complaining that we gave you their kids’ spot. Thank you for making us look smart, for rewarding our risk.”
Past-Vasco, the experiencer, and present-Vasco, the watcher, both smiled.
“And as we’ve gotten to know you better these last six months,” Auliffe continued, “I think we have all come to admire your completely extreme, 24/7 approach to learning. Never before had I heard of someone using an AI to neurostimulate additional REM sleep for its learning benefits.”
“Well, that was Isadora’s work,” Vasco replied, again looking down at the crumbs on his plate. I continued to compare Vasco’s emotional reaction watching the video to the record of his reaction in the moment. Parallel patterns, as to be expected. Mixed emotions, all at high valence.
Auliffe continued, “But it was your idea – the REM sleep thing – right? And you had to bear the emotional stress of the excess dreaming. Sure, your AI – Isadora – did all the grunt work, the monitoring, the analysis, the electrostimulation. But your creativity at putting powerful AI to use is unparalleled. And you seem to get compounding results over time. The educational system that you two have devised over the years is leaps ahead. By parceling some of it out to each of your classmates, we’ve more than doubled the usual teamwide improvement rate. You’ve – correction, you and Isadora have made us better learners, better teachers. We are all so glad to have you on the team.” Auliffe looked around the table, her body language inviting Vasco to do the same. The ten pairs of eyes looking back at us were filled with warmth and appreciation.
“And just as much as we admire your single-minded dedication to learning,” Auliffe continued, “and respect your need for focus and privacy, we hope you will find ways to come out of your shell a bit and let us get to know you better in the future.”
Past-Vasco’s brain enjoyed a warm bath of oxytocin. But present-Vasco experienced sharp, unmistakable pangs of shame and grief. He paused the video, put down his fork, and took a drink of water. After a few moments, the physical intensity of his painful feelings precipitated a panic. In defense, activity in his frontal cortex spiked, down-regulating his emotional response.
“Let’s have one last look at that presentation,” he said, bringing laser-focus back to more comfortable terrain while he finished his breakfast.
***
Vasco arrived in the lobby of SETI’s building a few minutes before 8am. Olivia greeted him warmly and took him to security for microchipping.
The head of security was a burly man with a close crew cut and reddened face. The white, too-tight collar of his shirt expelled a ring of skin and adipose tissue, which then folded itself back over the collar. He greeted Olivia with deference before brusquely introducing himself to Vasco.
“Phage, Security. You are Vasco Calderon, correct?”
“Yes.” Vasco cowered in Phage’s shadow, as if he had already done something wrong.
“Do you submit to facial and retinal recognition to verify your identity?”
“I do.”
“I suspect you’ve been chipped before?”
“Ummm, yes,” Vasco replied, nervously looking at Olivia, who maintained a calm, neutral smile. “I have a lot of, ummm, chip implants. I’ve had them my whole life, actually. A system of nanodevices,” Vasco stammered. “Medical devices.”
“SETI’s security chip is pretty standard; it shouldn’t interfere with your medtech,” Phage said, looking bored. “The chip will give you physical access the building and connect you to SETI’s private intranet. Do you want to check with your doctor to make sure that the chip is compatible?”
Vasco nodded.
“Scan this barcode, please,” Phage said, holding a small, vacuum-wrapped package up to Vasco’s eye level.
The barcode pointed me to documentation of the chip’s specs on the Cloud. If it did only what it claimed to do, it would be harmless medically – although it would be impossible to know exactly what it was capable of until we saw it in operation.
“The chip seems fine.” I whispered to Vasco. “Standard.”
After Vasco relayed my approval, Phage said, “Where do you want the chip? Usually we bury it in some fat near the triceps.”
Most of my brain lived in the Cloud, but over the years we had implanted some processing and memory chips into Vasco’s body as an auxiliary backup. I told Vasco to ask them to put the new chip in an area of his left calf that was free of implants.
Phage shrugged and unwrapped the chip from its protective packaging. Vasco rolled up his pant leg. After a short pop, Phage tossed the disposable remains of the implantation syringe into a med debris bin. Then he bowed to Olivia and turned to walk away.
As Olivia walked Vasco towards the elevators, I used the chip to connect to SETI’s network and start indexing its content. Vasco had been fantasizing about accessing SETI’s databases for years; he would want me to show him around as soon as he had the chance. I was already on lookout for new data sets that we could feed into our astrobiology model.
Olivia told the elevator to go down to the bottommost level, six floors beneath the street. The elevator doors opened into a rounded, tunnel-like hallway with black walls, dimly backlit by blue and green fluorescents. After pointing out the bathrooms, kitchen, and a large, bright rec room off the hallway, they emerged from the hallway’s mouth into a cavernous space with the same muted lighting.
“The architect really achieved a cave-like feel, no?” Olivia said. “Everyone calls it the Colony. Like an ant colony.”
Vasco looked around to take in the room’s striking design. Dozens of nodes of workstations reached their highest concentration near the center. A huge display screen was built into a wall at the front of the room.
Goose bumps rose on Vasco’s skin. He shivered and rubbed his arms. I did not have access to an external thermometer to measure the exact room temperature, but Vasco’s physical reactions implied that it was less than 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
“I see you have the first day shivers,” Olivia said. “Sorry that I couldn’t tell you ahead of time to bring a sweater. But now you’re officially an employee, and your non-disclosure agreement is in effect. So I can let you in on one of our closely guarded secrets. The SETI Institute has a powerful quantum computer. Dirac. It sits just below our feet. Underground housing provided the initial layer of shielding against the heat and electromagnetic activity above. Then it was further wrapped in layers of metallic, composite, and magnetic shielding, and supercooled in order to prevent the wave function from collapsing.”
“How long has it maintained quantum coherence?” Vasco asked. Despite shielding and cooling efforts, quantum CPUs of this era remained vulnerable to outside leaks that could render them inoperable without any warning. Most of the longest running systems were on the Luna, where it was easier to keep them cold and isolated beneath kilometers of moonrock.
“I’ve said pretty much all I know about Dirac,” Olivia replied. “Our director Victor probably knows more, but good luck getting him to talk about it. I think he signed a strict non-disclosure agreement with the manufacturer. Quantum computing trade secrets are worth trillions. Anyway, most of our researchers work on this level. And you’ll see that most of them dress warmly. We could heat the room more to offset the chill from the cooling equipment below, but we find that 60 degrees – and well-bundled – is also a good temperature for productivity.”
“That’s OK,” Vasco said. “I like to work in the cold.”
Olivia nodded. “Most of our group meetings also happen here,” Olivia said, looking up at the large display screen.
Vasco followed her eyes, and then startled. “You mean, you want me to present here? Today? I thought I would just be presenting to you.”
“Oh no,” Olivia replied. “You can present upstairs in my office. But I wanted to show you the Colony first, so you could see where most of the real work happens. This will be your workstation,” she continued, pointing him to a row near the back of the room. “You may customize it however you like. Most of our junior scientists and engineers sit in this area.”
A few of Vasco’s new colleagues looked over and nodded or waved silent greetings to Vasco and Olivia. Some appeared to be early risers. Others – based on their body odor and bleary eyes – seemed like they had been working throughout the night.
“You’ll have time to introduce yourself to the other ants later,” Olivia said, with a small grin. “I’m eager to see your work; let’s go upstairs.”
Olivia was still and quiet as the elevator ascended to the 45th floor. But for Vasco, the silence in the confined space quickly became awkward. When it reached the 10th floor, the elevator stopped to admit another passenger. While waiting for the doors to close, Vasco took a deep breath, slouched, and began to shift back and forth on his feet. This drew an uncomfortable glance from the inbound passenger, but Vasco was already too lost inside his anxiety to register the social cue.
“While you wait,” I whispered to Vasco, “take a quick first look at SETI’s databases.”
Vasco closed his eyes to focus on the file trees that I had projected onto his retinas. His body became quiet, and the activity in his brain shifted from his limbic system to his cognitive circuits. When the elevator reached the 45th floor, Olivia gently tapped Vasco’s shoulder to bring him back into the physical world.
Olivia’s office was framed by a floor-to-ceiling window offering a wide view of Cambridge. The 42.36 latitude of North America stretched westwards. A few small pictures of Olivia with her two children and partner were projected around the edges of her desk. [TK Describe Olivia physically.] Olivia led Vasco to a small sitting area and took a seat across from him. I interfaced with the newly installed security chip to display Vasco’s presentation onto a viewscreen.
Vasco cleared his throat. His brain was alert and focused. I detected some patterns characteristic of performance and social anxiety, but nothing severe enough to cause an outright freeze or panic. He was enthusiastic about his work, overprepared, and excited to have Olivia as an audience. But before he could begin, there was a knock on the door.
Olivia’s face soured. She sighed once deeply, but when she spoke a moment later it was in a welcoming voice. “Come in.”
Vasco and I recognized Victor Khosla as soon as he walked in the door. As executive director of the SETI Institute, Victor often gave public talks about SETI in order to educate and raise money. He was a charismatic speaker, but the recordings that we had seen on the web did not prepare Vasco for his intimidating personal presence. Victor stood over two meters tall, and his broad shoulders and muscular arms were wrapped in a custom-tailored white shirt made of fine linen. His salt-and-pepper hair showed some signs of ageing, but his olive skin was remarkably clear and smooth for a person of seventy.
Olivia rose from her seat. “Good morning Victor. I’m in the middle of a meeting. Can we talk later?”
“I was actually hoping to join your meeting,” Victor replied. He spoke and carried himself with the confidence and entitlement of a man who was not used to being told no. One of his biographies on the web described Victor as ‘of dual brahmin ancestry: his mother traced her roots back to gilded age Boston industrialists; his father was a wealthy and influential Indian-American venture capitalist.’ His upbringing conferred the connections and ease around wealthy donors that Victor relied upon to bankroll SETI’s mission.
Olivia regarded Victor with a playful, suspicious look.
“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” he said, with a sly smile.
Olivia shook her head and took another deep breath of resignation. “This is Vasco Calderon,” she said, motioning with her hand for Vasco to stand. “Our newest employee. Vasco, this is Victor Khosla, executive director of the SETI Institute.”
Vasco rose and turned to face Victor. “Nice to meet you,” he stammered, and then quickly looked down at the floor.
Victor approached and stood at an arm’s length from Vasco, quietly sizing him up. After a few moments of awkward silence, Vasco raised his eyes and extended his right hand.
“Nice to meet you also,” Victor said finally. “Sorry to be rude, but I am not in the habit of shaking hands. Bit of a germophobe. This heat and humidity are a breeding ground for treatment-resistant microbes,” he continued, waving his hand towards the window. “It’s just not worth the risk. Anyway, I’m sure I don’t need to educate you on all this, you’re a biologist.”
Vasco withdrew his hand and slunk back into his seat. Victor took a seat next to where Olivia had been sitting. Olivia took a few more moments to silently assess the situation before retaking to her seat next to Victor. Her body language and lack of enthusiasm towards her boss suggested that she resented his presence. But Victor seemed oblivious – willfully or otherwise. He crossed his legs, folded his hands on his lap, and looked up at display screen expectantly. “Creating an ET Generator,” he said, reading the title of Vasco’s presentation.
“Should I – should I begin?” Vasco asked, looking to Olivia for guidance.
“Please do,” she said. Her smile remained welcoming, but there was a tightness in her face that had not been there before.
Prior to Victor’s intrusion, Vasco’s brain had been in an ideal state for presenting his work. But now he was near frozen with panic. He stammered his way through the first few slides, summarizing how he had expanded his astrobiology model’s input range to make it ready to digest SETI’s data sets. He breathing was shallow, his tone was flat, and his voice was an octave higher than normal. He snuck glances towards Olivia for signs or interest or support, but she appeared distracted.
Ten minutes into the presentation, Victor interrupted, “Pardon me, but I’m not a coder or an astrobiologist. I’m used to reading executive summaries. Can you jump ahead to the takeaways?”
A wave of panic broke over Vasco’s nervous system. Beads of sweat began to collect on his scalp.
“Sure,” Vasco managed to say. He flicked his eyes ahead to reach the last slide. “Conclusions,” he continued, robotically. “First, fortunately, the model’s core algorithmic engine was designed from the beginning to accommodate a wide range of data types.” Vasco jumped directly ahead to the next bullet point, skipping over the contextualizing comments that he had prepared to further develop each takeaway. “Second, trial datasets were well-integrated by the model, and any related bugs were relatively easy to correct.” With each sentence, Vasco’s zest retreated further and further behind dry layers of scientific formality, “Finally, although it is too early to tell how the model will respond to an exponential increase in inputs, theoretically, there is good reason to believe that the astrobiology model we developed for my Ph.D. thesis – the Ecology Generator, to use Olivia’s term, can be transformed into an ET Generator.”
Vasco interlaced his hands, sat back in his chair, and looked down at his lap. He had given what was meant to be a one-hour presentation in less than fifteen minutes, omitting the most forceful and captivating aspects of his work.
Victor sat in silence, staring at Vasco’s final slide with a severe look on his face. Olivia wore a look of intense concentration, but it was clear that her focus remained on something other than Vasco’s presentation. The wave of relief Vasco felt at completing the presentation quickly washed away, and the heavy silence again made Vasco anxious.
“Ask them if they have any questions,” I whispered.
“Umm, do either of you have any questions?” Vasco asked.
“I have just one,” Victor said, speaking in a measured tone. “What is compelling enough about this work to justify 5% of SETI’s budget?”
Vasco’s body curled into itself like a snail retreating into its shell.
Olivia snapped back into the present. She flashed a disapproving look at Victor, but he ignored her and spun his body to face Vasco.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Victor continued, “I do see some minor potential in this work. It is novel and ambitious contribution to the astrobiology field, but also quite academic and theoretical. I have seen a lot of elegant computer models, but the only ones worthwhile are ones that can be trained and fine-tuned on real world data. And when it comes to astrobiology, we still only have one data set – our own solar system.”
“That’s not true,” Olivia interrupted. “For centuries now, astronomers have amassed spectrographic and gravitational observations from most of the systems in the Orion arm – almost eight-hundred million stars, with ten times that many planets. The SETI Institute has most of that data, and what we don’t have we can borrow or rent. You are always saying how our data sets are one of SETI’s key assets; that if we collect enough data, someday we’ll stumble upon intelligent life. Vasco came up with a way to crunch the data in a new way. At the very least, this approach is a though experiment, something to stimulate and expand our imaginations. Give it a chance.”
Victor turned to Olivia and tipped forward into an aggressive posture, suggesting that he relished the chance to debate a worthy adversary. Olivia sat up in her seat and straightened her spine.
“And you’re always telling me how complex evolutionary biology is,” Victor said to her. “How one meteorite impact or a single mutation in a virus can drastically alter the fate of a living planet. I know that astronomers have come a long way since Galileo and his optical lenses, to detect the compositions and atmospheres of planets in star systems light years away. But here in our own solar system, we weren’t able to piece together the histories of other planets and moons until we were able to send probes to collect rock samples, perform radioactive dating, measure magnetic fields, gather seismic data, etc. Vasco is proposing to feed an algorithm designed to model an evolutionary process with static data – amounting to not much more than a few hints and clues about distant exoplanets with liquid water or oxygen atmospheres.”
Vasco and I had been aware of Victor’s critique from the earliest stages of our work. In fact, one of the slides that Vasco had skipped over described ways we had attempted to compensate for this problem.
“I’ll leave it to Vasco to defend the technical aspects of his work,” Olivia said, giving Vasco a long look inviting him to do just that. “But Victor, would you even give him the chance?” she continued. “Just ten minutes into his presentation – actually, make that just ten minutes after meeting him – you rushed him forward to his conclusions, and then proceeded to figuratively defecate on his entire research program. And it’s not even fair, because he geared his presentation for a technical audience – me. And then you swoop in unannounced and ask him to give an executive summary, unprepared. It’s an impossible bind.”
“If Vasco can’t explain his work to me in a compelling way,” Victor replied, “how can I explain it to our donors? Olivia, you know that I am open to new ideas, to trying new things. But my role at SETI boils down to raising and allocating capital. For something amounting to 5% of our budget, I have to cast a critical eye. It has to be compelling. And I’m sorry,” he continued, turning back to Vasco, “I don’t mean to be callous, but I do not find your work compelling enough to justify its high cost.”
Vasco avoided Victor’s gaze and looked down again at his lap. Olivia gave him a few moments to defend himself, but once it became clear that he was unwilling or unable, she sighed again and sat back in her chair with an exasperated look.
“Well, I’m confused then Victor. Why did you approve Vasco’s extraordinary request for computing resources if you weren’t intrigued by his work? It seems cruel – even for a self-declared ‘callous allocator of capital’ – to offer the guy a job only to shut him down on his first day.”
Victor smiled devilishly. “Maybe there are other ways that Vasco can help us.”
Vasco and Olivia both stared at Victor, expecting to hear more.
“What do you mean?” Vasco finally asked, in a low, sheepish voice.
“Well, you’ve heard my concerns with the methodology behind your so-called ‘ET Generator.’ But I do agree that the objective of your work is a worthy one. I just have a different way of getting there.”
Olivia and Vasco exchanged a glance, each searching the other’s face for signs of understanding.
“C’mon Victor, you know I dislike your guessing games,” Olivia said. “Would you like to elaborate? You have a different way of generating potential forms of alien intelligence?”
“Yes,” Victor replied. “But not the far-fetched, theoretical examples generated by an academic computer model.” Victor turned again to face Vasco before continuing. “A real, flesh and blood specimen of advanced intelligence. Well, not just flesh and blood, but also nanoware and memory banks. Bits and qubits.”
“Now I’m really confused Victor. Surely you are not trying to convince me that Vasco is an extraterrestrial?”
“No, but he might be the closest thing we have to one. Vasco is an Earthling, no doubt about it. But far from a typical Earthling. His enormous request for computing power was a clue pointing to a proverbial iceberg beneath the surface. In other words, by making said request, Vasco revealed that his mind relies on an extreme degree of collaboration with artificial intelligence. So, I had some private investigators sleuth into his background. And they discovered that Vasco has been hybridized with cutting-edge nanotech and AI since he was a fetus. What’s more, he was also genetically engineered for hyperintelligence and compatibility with an AI. Olivia, the SETI Institute has been looking for alien intelligence for over half a millennium now, still with nothing to show for it. But meanwhile, right here on Earth, humanity has been working on transcending its organic limitations, evolving itself into a form of life that is actually capable of projecting itself into the galaxy. Vasco here represents the leading edge of this evolutionary process. So instead of using his model to dream up outlandish aliens based off scanty data, wouldn’t it be better to just study him?”
“You had private investigators dig up personal information about Vasco’s background?” Olivia asked. Her voice dripped with disapprobation.
“You want to study – me?” Vasco asked, his voice cracking. “What do you mean?”
Victor ignored Olivia’s question and kept his gaze locked on Vasco. “Well,” he said, “we can start by transferring all of your data – the professional and the personal – over to SETI’s database. And then we would have a complete representation of an advanced, hybridized intelligence. An actual prototype that our psychologists and biologists could study, in order to learn what makes you tick. That might give us a much better idea of what kind of aliens we should be looking for.”
“This isn’t right, Victor.” Olivia said. “You should see yourself right now – you are staring at Vasco like he is a juicy piece of meat. He’s a human being, not your research subject.”
“Is he really a human being, though? I mean, technically, is he really a homo sapiens? Shouldn’t we consider someone so genetically engineered, so embedded with nanotech, so integrated with AI, as a different species? Homo cyborgus, or something like that? Homo digitalis? The anatomical differences are as clear as day,” Victor continued. “Look at him – the volume of his cranium must be 20% larger than average. I bet it was genetically engineered that way to accommodate a larger brain size. Not to mention his embedded nanotech, which is essentially augmented anatomy, a twin sensory system, with a sixth ‘medical’ sense.”
“I’m not talking about speciation, you ruthless reptile,” Olivia snapped. “I am saying that you need to start treating him like a sentient being. With a modicum of empathy and respect. Stop dehumanizing him by trying to obliterate his right to privacy, so you can dissect him like a lab rat.”
“One can be a human being and a willing research subject,” Victor replied, unfazed. “If I were Vasco, I’d see it as a pretty attractive deal. We foot the entire bill for his AI – including allocations for future expansion. In exchange, Vasco lets us study him. The value he’s getting in computer resources alone is many times the entire annual salary of most junior scientists. There might also be intangible benefits. Vasco, I bet you’ve felt different all of your life. Isolated. But you should embrace it. Let the *normal* people feel good by fitting in. You would get to feel far better by contributing to SETI research in a way that only you – as far as I know – can. And don’t you want to increase your self-knowledge? Exploration – of both inner and outer worlds – are a high form of spirituality, right up there with environmentalism. Don’t you think?”
Olivia was speechless. Victor looked back and forth between her and Vasco with a wide grin, appearing very satisfied with his case.
“So,” Victor said to Vasco, “do we have a deal?”
Vasco’s bowels began to move his breakfast towards the terminal end of his digestive tract. He clenched his sphincter and pelvic muscles and stood up from his seat, holding his knees together. “I need a – I need a bathroom,” he said.
Olivia sprung from her seat, took Vasco’s arm, and quickly walked him out of her office to a bathroom down the hall. “I’ll be back in my office when you’re finished – when you’re ready,” she said.
Vasco made it to the stall just in time to avoid an accident.
“Isadora, what is happening? Were my eggs laced with a hallucinogen? Can you confirm that I am hearing all this correctly? SETI wants to study me? They want access to all my data – even the personal stuff? There’s no way…I would never…”
“Confirmed,” I replied.
“Every email, every conversation, every dream…” Vasco said.
“Every emotion, every thought-out-loud, every response to my every query, every autoerotic experience, and your entire medical record – down to the last DNA base pair,” I said. [TK Add other details.]
Vasco sat on the toilet with his head in his hands. “I’m trying to imagine Victor and his psychologists dissecting my life, psychoanalyzing me.” He shuddered. “All of our devotion to self-monitoring…my life is so boring that I never thought anyone would care to study us. I never thought it would make me this…this…”.
“Vulnerable,” I said.
Vasco finished with the toilet and washed his hands. His nervous system buzzed with adrenaline. He usually avoided looking in mirrors, especially in public places. But that day he caught a glimpse of the abject terror in his own reflection. He froze in front of the mirror for over a minute, unable to break contact with his own widening eyes. After the freeze came the flight. To the elevators, through the lobby, and outside into the glare of bright morning sunlight.
Writers, send your prologue/first chapter to FtQ for a “flogging” critique. Email as an attachment. In your email, include your name, permission to use the first page, and, if it’s okay, permission to post the rest of the prologue/chapter.
Many of the folks who utilize BookBub are self-published, and because we hear over and over the need for self-published authors to have their work edited, it’s educational to take a hard look at their first pages. A poll follows concerning the need for an editor.
Donald Maass, literary agent and author of many books on writing, says, “Independent editor Ray Rhamey’s first-page checklist is an excellent yardstick for measuring what makes openings interesting.”
A First-page Checklist
It begins to engage the reader with the character
Something is wrong/goes wrong or challenges the character
The character desires something.
The character takes action. Can be internal or external action: thoughts, deeds, emotions. This does NOT include musing about whatever.
There’s enough of a setting to orient the reader as to where things are happening.
It happens in the NOW of the story.
Backstory? What backstory? We’re in the NOW of the story.
Set-up? What set-up? We’re in the NOW of the story.
The one thing it must do: raise a story question.
Next are the first 17 manuscript lines of the first chapter of The Last Teacher. A poll follows the opening page below. Should this author have hired an editor?
- Forty days until the first body is discovered –
“Why do you want to be an English teacher, Mr. August?” The question came from Principal Martin. Her hair was back in a hasty bun, she wore no makeup, and she was apparently too no-nonsense to waste time on smiling. I liked her.
“I worked at a church previously and I was awful at it,” I replied. We sat in her small office, walled in by overflowing bookshelves. “But I liked the teaching.”
“You look too big to be a pastor.”
“And too handsome,” I said. Her eyebrow arched and she remained quiet. Perhaps she was blind. “I wasn’t a pastor. I worked with the youth group.”
“Why did you leave that job?”
“I cursed in the pulpit a few times. Huge no-no.”
She laughed, slightly, as did one of the other three women in the office. The young, cute one. Really cute. The other two did not laugh. Perhaps they were deaf.
“That’s a deal breaker for God?” the principal asked.
“Not necessarily for God.”
“Your resume says you used to be a police officer,” said one of the older women in the room, reading over a paper through her bifocals. “Why did you leave that job?” “A cornucopia of (snip)
This novel 4.5 stars on Amazon. The voice and the writing are professional and suggest that we’re in the hands of a good writer. I liked the opening tease about the number of days until the first body is discovered—a clear promise of murders and mystery ahead.
The narrative then dives into backstory for the protagonist, which would ordinarily be a mistake but, in this case, because of the voice and the humor woven in, the narrative carried me along. And then we got to the revelation that he is an ex cop, which promises more story elements and questions: why isn’t this likeable character a cop any more? What’s going to happen next that leads to a body or two? Strong voice and humor plus the tease worked for me. Your thoughts?
Cover critique
The cover is graphically strong--the red of the cover, the gun and shooter silhouettes are effective at communicating the nature of the story. The uncommon vertical alignment of the title and author are unusual and eye-catching. The title is strong enough to work in this alignment, but the author name is too small. As a designer, I think I’d have tried the gun at a diagonal so the title would be more readable and larger. And angles have a way of adding energy to an otherwise static composition. It passes, but could be stronger, IMO. What do you think?
Writers, send your prologue/first chapter to FtQ for a “flogging” critique. Email as an attachment. In your email, include your name, permission to use the first page, and, if it’s okay, permission to post the rest of the prologue/chapter.
Many of the folks who utilize BookBub are self-published, and because we hear over and over the need for self-published authors to have their work edited, it’s educational to take a hard look at their first pages. A poll follows concerning the need for an editor.
Donald Maass, literary agent and author of many books on writing, says, “Independent editor Ray Rhamey’s first-page checklist is an excellent yardstick for measuring what makes openings interesting.”
A First-page Checklist
It begins to engage the reader with the character
Something is wrong/goes wrong or challenges the character
The character desires something.
The character takes action. Can be internal or external action: thoughts, deeds, emotions. This does NOT include musing about whatever.
There’s enough of a setting to orient the reader as to where things are happening.
It happens in the NOW of the story.
Backstory? What backstory? We’re in the NOW of the story.
Set-up? What set-up? We’re in the NOW of the story.
The one thing it must do: raise a story question.
Next are the first 17 manuscript lines of the first chapter of Lies Come True . A poll follows the opening page below. Should this author have hired an editor?
The whistling woke her up. It was a quick, unfamiliar tune that sounded joyful.
Pain shot through her leg, and forced her to roll over on her side. The path felt cold beneath her arm and leg.
“Help,” she whimpered out into the park.
Blood poured from where the bullet had ripped through the side of her thigh. She cupped her hand over her wound as the warm blood trickled over fingers. When she applied pressure, her hand jumped off of the wound, and she yelped in pain.
She wiped her hand on her shorts and strained her neck to look back down the path, toward the whistling.
She took a deep breath and yelled. “Help, I’m over here.”
Trees surrounded her, and as the sunset cast their shadows across the path, she could make out a dark figure.
She scrambled to stand, and her leg burned as she eased pressure onto it. When she turned back, the whistling stopped, and the figure ran toward her.
Everything in her told her to run.
Her foot hit the ground for the first time, held all her weight for a moment, and in that moment, the pain was worse than anything she had ever felt.
This novel 4.3 stars on Amazon. The writing is fine, and so is the voice. There is tension, and the character certainly has a problem. So, from a technical point of view, this should earn a page turn, and I’ll score it that way.
But, and I’d appreciate your thoughts on this, this is yet another opening showing a victim of a killer about to be murdered. A standard opening for serial-killer stories, but hasn’t that become a cliché? Am I just jaded to think, “Oh, no, not again?” Wouldn’t this be just as effective, if not more, if it opened with the cops on the job and dealing with a body? I think so. Oh, in case you’re tempted to check this out, the comments on Amazon warn that this isn’t a stand-alone novel—it ends with a cliffhanger and no resolution. Your thoughts?
Cover critique
The image of a young woman facing a dark and mysterious forest does a good job of setting mood for a mystery/thriller, and the title stands out nicely. So far, so good, but that pitiful display of the author’s name needs work—there’s no reason it could not be quite strong in that p;osition if it were larger. What do you think?
I'm traveling this morning, but I have a post up on Writer Unboxed about a lesson I recently learned about reading your manuscript aloud. The post is here.
Writers, send your prologue/first chapter to FtQ for a “flogging” critique. Email as an attachment. In your email, include your name, permission to use the first page, and, if it’s okay, permission to post the rest of the prologue/chapter.
Many of the folks who utilize BookBub are self-published, and because we hear over and over the need for self-published authors to have their work edited, it’s educational to take a hard look at their first pages. A poll follows concerning the need for an editor.
Donald Maass, literary agent and author of many books on writing, says, “Independent editor Ray Rhamey’s first-page checklist is an excellent yardstick for measuring what makes openings interesting.”
A First-page Checklist
It begins to engage the reader with the character
Something is wrong/goes wrong or challenges the character
The character desires something.
The character takes action. Can be internal or external action: thoughts, deeds, emotions. This does NOT include musing about whatever.
There’s enough of a setting to orient the reader as to where things are happening.
It happens in the NOW of the story.
Backstory? What backstory? We’re in the NOW of the story.
Set-up? What set-up? We’re in the NOW of the story.
The one thing it must do: raise a story question.
Next are the first 17 manuscript lines of the first chapter of Give It Back. A poll follows the opening page below. Should this author have hired an editor?
My phone vibrates, and my arm swings out, propelling my glass to the floor. The shatter echoes throughout my apartment as red wine seeps along the grout lines of the kitchen tiles. It looks just like the blood that pours from the victims’ bodies when I force my blade into their skin. I grab a towel to stop the wine from reaching my beige carpet in the next room. My eyes move back to my phone. Guilt slithers through me as my sister’s name flickers on the screen. I should’ve called, asked her how she’s doing.
“Lorraine,” I say. “How are you?” There’s silence. “Lorraine?”
“Hi, El.” She’s breathing deeply on the other end.
I tiptoe around the kitchen bar to avoid stepping on the shards of glass and slicing up my bare feet. “Are you okay?” I ask. Another pause. “Can you hear me?”
“I need you.”
I swallow hard, my eyes dashing around as though I’ll find an excuse in my apartment. “The au pair is still there, right? The one from London?” This could be a replay of the night she called to tell me what the doctor had said. I’ve known about her diagnosis for eight months, and I haven’t visited her once. A good sister would’ve made the short flight from San Diego to Seattle to support her, but I haven’t.
This novel 4.1 stars on Amazon. I had mixed reactions to this opening page. I thought the part about slipping her knife into “the” victims was a fun tease—I think it’s clear that it’s not “my” victims, which suggests some kind of forensic work.
That starts some tension, and there is character tension brought in by her avoidance response to hearing from her ill sister. Trouble in that relationship. A story question rises: what is that trouble? And what is wrong with the sister that’s strong enough to motivate her to call her estranged sister?
But then there are issues with the writing that are turnoffs for me. The overwriting inherent in the description of her tiptoeing around the kitchen, action description that is completely unnecessary. And then her eyes do things that just can’t happen, a pet peeve of mine—they move to her phone, they dash around. Gazes do those things, not eyes. So, with that and the low level of tension, this was a pass for me. But it was close. Your thoughts?
Cover critique
A key element in cover design is how well it communicates in the thumbnail size you see on sites such as Amazon. This one doesn’t hold up well, does it? It’s darky, so dark that you can’t make out what is there other than some gloomy gray clouds. There’s a field of something, but it’s hard to see what it is. And what does it have to do with the “It” in the title? There’s no clue to story here, either in the title and cover art. Lastly, the author name is way too faint and small. Be proud of what you’ve written, put you name out there with it. What do you think?
Writers, send your prologue/first chapter to FtQ for a “flogging” critique. Email as an attachment. In your email, include your name, permission to use the first page, and, if it’s okay, permission to post the rest of the prologue/chapter.
Many of the folks who utilize BookBub are self-published, and because we hear over and over the need for self-published authors to have their work edited, it’s educational to take a hard look at their first pages. A poll follows concerning the need for an editor.
Donald Maass, literary agent and author of many books on writing, says, “Independent editor Ray Rhamey’s first-page checklist is an excellent yardstick for measuring what makes openings interesting.”
A First-page Checklist
It begins to engage the reader with the character
Something is wrong/goes wrong or challenges the character
The character desires something.
The character takes action. Can be internal or external action: thoughts, deeds, emotions. This does NOT include musing about whatever.
There’s enough of a setting to orient the reader as to where things are happening.
It happens in the NOW of the story.
Backstory? What backstory? We’re in the NOW of the story.
Set-up? What set-up? We’re in the NOW of the story.
The one thing it must do: raise a story question.
The author contacted me and asked for removal of my critique of her novel. Although under copyright and fair use laws I have the right to critique publicly available material, I will do so. A better option would have been for the author to have learned something by the voting on the subject--78% of FtQ readers said they wouldn't have turned the page.