Wednesday 1/3/24
Getting organized and moving systematically--doing what needs to be done, presenting what needs to be presented, and not lurching in a direction because of emotion, but rather proceeding in controlled order--is part of advancing, just as creating is part of advancing, and creating at a certain level.
Yesterday I did some organizing pertaining to links. Today I updated that list of stories. Various works of my fiction have been in front of me, so having done that entry about first sentences, and having shown more typical examples from other writers in that last entry, I thought I'd share some first sentences from some of these works of mine I've been seeing or working on. Quite a contrast, no? How do you even compare? These are just totally different. Someone is doing very different things on a very different level.
Carlene noted the clinking of metal against ceramic, the aqueous variant of a bullet locking into a chamber.
Amara was eight-years-old when she received what she was certain had to be the best Christmas gift ever.
Of fields my father had three.
It was the gull who first noticed that the island had left.
A young woman wakes up at mid-day and leaves her room to make toast, which is all she wants to eat, or what she thinks she should eat, or all that she will be able to keep down.
“How dark does night get?” a baby star asked an older star high up in the heavens, which is what some people call the sky, but only in the evening.
Do you think you’d find that people were open to having a being that lived in their closet and existed nowhere else if it meant them well?
Just to hear her was enough for me.
“She’s back,” the nurse observed.
In the neighborhood where I grew up there was a Big Bob and a Little Bob.
"If you don't see him now, you won't get a chance to see him again," a mother says to her daughter who considers how easily and accurately she could respond by saying, “When did I ever?”
A lot of times when you’re watching porn you’re watching videos of women who are dead.
My husband I leave in bed.
There’s a scientific explanation to why there’s dew on the grass in the morning, but even though someone could explain exactly why it happens, you can probably get away with saying it’s a beautiful mystery and people would weigh the idea in that fleeting way novel ideas are often weighed and agree.
I’m ten feet outside the Prep blue line on the left wing about to receive a pass on my backhand from Aaron Steadman way over by the far side of the center ice circle.
A mouse has saved a fragment of a quill, which was itself part of the feather of a blue jay who is dearly missed by the brood she left behind.
My brother and I drank whisky in galumphing rhythm sitting on the floor in the attic of our mother’s house where we used to sneak away and smoke pot, though the sneaking part never made much sense, given that she was out on one of her dates and couldn’t bust us, save in spirit.
There is no young and there is no old.
My father wasn’t an outspoken man, but he’d become so impassioned upon the telling of some tale—for my father spoke in stories—that you’d notice a surge of blood in the skin around his eyes, though the wisest thing he ever said to me was about listening.
“I could go at any time,” Thomas said, “it’s nip and tuck—just how these things work.”
The people of the town pretended they weren’t looking when a woman went over to another woman at the annual bonfire on the beach somewhere in the middle of October.
I wasn't someone who ever seemed to bleed.
The ghost of Abe Lincoln and the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe were friends.
“Don’t pretend it’s not exciting,” one leaf communicated to another leaf in the manner leaves do, with a tearing of an outer edge, as they each fell from the same tree within a fraction of the same second.
“I just think it’s funny that you think you can help her.”
I want to invent a comic book character who makes people think.
If anyone could feel how much I love my children, they’d never question me, she thinks, no matter the results.
The drops always came out in twos as if the tube of the moisturizing agent—clearly labeled on its sides—had been designed to produce an outcome of pairs.
“You look like a drug addict,” the man says after the woman has finally—a word she italicizes in her thoughts—approaches him outside of the coffee house where she walks back and forth each day, staggers, and sometimes sits.
Counting the man he had watched through the front window of a subway car, Carol Hilloran had seen, or was about to see, three people die in one year.
A dream I’ve had but never harvested is to be a person who has multiple toothbrushes in their home—a considerate surplus of toothbrushes, unopened in their original packaging, handsomely—but not ostentatiously—displayed in a bathroom cupboard on offer for someone who might need one.
Angela, I have loved you since the third grade, and I no longer care who knows it, which, roughly translated—as Ms. Kennshaw might say—really means I don’t care if you officially know it.
The day I met God—and it was just the one—a voice told me he was out back.
“You can’t be an endoscope for Halloween,” she said lovingly.
My aunt Dot has been dead now for quite a few years, though there are some who would say that she was never very much alive.
In just about every instance, the boy doted on his older brother, and rarely questioned what he considered his expertise, but this time, with the mallard plan, he wasn’t so sure.
His wife had worked at jigsaw puzzles like he imagined beavers worked at logs.
It was the “we” part that made Fletcher nervous, more than the reference to a problem.
"I definitely think I can outlast the earth," the child said to her protector.
Close to two o’clock in the morning in a bar and a guy has been there by himself all night, however that adjusts for context, perfectly sober, drinking water with a piece of lemon floating in the glass.
Cantata lived in an attic, but it was no ordinary attic.
The flame motioned and beckoned as the ghost advanced upon it—moved as a flame ordinarily does not, as if it were human and its yellow-infused shadows dispersed limbs of fire.
I decided that if I was to be alone—and I was to be alone—for another Christmas, that I would walk the earth, though that’s not what you call it, even when it’s what you’re doing.
There was a girl who couldn’t cry.
“Look at that,” Eamon said out loud to Eamon.
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