Friday, January 15, 2010

KEEP THOSE FIRST LINES COMING!

Our "First Line Contest" to win a free copy of Jeff Herman's Guide to Book Publishers, Editors, & Literary Agents is steaming right along! We have been having a ball reading your submissions! Such imagination, wit and variety proves the written word is still alive and well.

So continue sending in your fabulous first lines--deadline is next Friday, January 22. And just to inspire you, here's British novelist Mo Hayder's ("the U.K.'s Thomas Harris) favorite first line, featured in an interview posted today on Shelf Awareness www.shelf-awareness.com.

The opening line of Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess. "It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."

"Woah," said Ms. Hayder. "Now there's a sentence that does the work of an army in terms of plot and characterization and pacing."

OK, see if you can top that one!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

With three days left to the summer of '68, I still had a chance to be a hippy but I doubted my boss would give me the rest of the week off.

Unknown said...

Too bad I missed this - first line contests are always fun and I could use that book.

Mine would have been:
Bacon, waffles and Johnny Cash in the morning.