#Writers Page 1 of your book: “Open,” say’s me! – Part 1a

Why do I think a two-part blog post on the opening of your book is worth posting? Just how important can the first page be?

The power of the opening line or paragraph cannot be overstated. These are the first words a reader will see, so that paragraph can serve many purposes, like introducing the world, characters, or plot while giving readers an attention-grabbing taste of your writing.

http://authornews.penguinrandomhouse.com/what-our-editors-look-for-on-an-opening-page/

That answer is from What Our Editors Look for on an Opening PageBy Phil Stamper-Halpin/July, 2016 on Penguin House Publishing’s website. The emphasis is mine. The “cannot be overstated link” should take you to “53 of the Best Opening Lines in Literature.” If not, try this version of the link: https://goo.gl/SsgfhH. 

Since the goal of most writers is to have their book published, it makes sense to pay attention to what publishers have to say about what they look for in the books they accept.

This blog post gives you a chance to “play along” by writing an opening based on an opening line. I’ll provide. But first, see how another blog post “Why Editors Focus on Page One” (https://www.janefriedman.com/why-editors-focus-on-page-one/)deals with this issue. This was posted on June 10, 2013 by Darcy Pattison.

Here’s an opening from the memoir Breaking Night by Liz Murray.  

I have just one picture left of my mother. It’s 4 x 7, black-and-white, and creased in different places. In it, she is seated slightly hunched, elbows touching knees, arms carrying the weight of her back. I know very little about her life when it was taken; my only clue is written in orange marker on the back. It reads: Me in front of Mike’s on 6th St. 1971. Counting backward, I know that she was seventeen when it was taken, a year older than I am now. I know that Sixth Street is in Greenwich Village, though I have no idea who Mike is.

What do you know about the story from just this much text?

Place: New York City
Time: 1986
Tone/Mood: Reflective, remembering, possibly nostalgic
Point of View: First-person narrator 16-years-old, assumed to be female
Content of text: It’s about a black and white picture of the narrator’s mother.
Genre: Mystery. Who is Mike? Why is there only one picture of her mother left?
Audience: Young Adult/Teen to Adults

Is there any place where the reader is confused? No, it’s clear.

Is there an information dump? There is a lot of information here, but it doesn’t feel like a dump—yet—because we are also getting a feel for the character of the story. That gives the author some leeway to put in lots of information, while still keeping everything balanced.

The articles referenced above echo the same message. 

How well do my books fare on the list from Darcy Patterson’s article?

I’ll answer the questions for one sample and you can do the same for the second sample.

Sample 1.

INSECTICIDE – A Science Fiction Thriller

Among the hundreds of trillions of stars in the tens of billions of galaxies in our universe, there are millions of planets. All have a history. Few have records of their existence. Bafwique is one of those few.

Cor’a of Bafwiquefrom 

Early History of The Reunited Planet

Interlude 1

In the Recent Past

Intergalactic Alliance

Intelligence Report

IAC3Date: **/**/**.**

Subject: Planet #Da-586.0-GMC-boo0E

Local Designation: Blue Planet

Partial Transmission intercepted by surveillance probe ******** 

Do you have a report?

Yes, Sir. The blue planet, *** one we’ve been approach*** for several light years, we **** a preliminary report on *** *iomass and species composition.

Good work***artic***rly from this distance. Those **difications to the scanners you developed ...

Translated by universal translating software 

developed by the Intergalactic Alliance

3   Dates on all Intergalactic Alliance reports are from the Intergalactic Alliance Calendar (IAC) and are redacted as part of the Author’s permission to access their databases. IAC protocol mandates truncating/redacting most documents, as is this Intelligence Report, when they are declassified.

The clicking sound echoed through the ship, although the crew couldn’t “hear” it. Organisms without ears don’t hear in the human sense. In spite of that, the Captain turned toward his Science Officer as she approached.

Place: Somewhere in space
Time: ??, probably doesn’t matter
Tone/Mood: A bit of tension, but nothing stands out as the prevailing mood.
Point of View: Third person. Additional information is provided by a cited reference source
Content of text: Space explorers.
Genre: Science Fiction
Audience: Young Adult/Teen to Adults

Is there any place where the reader is confused?I don’t think so. The sample ends with an obvious plot point set up.

Is there an information dump?The information provided leaves the reader wondering about what will happen next.

It’s okay if you don’t agree with me, although I hope you do, at least in the answers to the two questions at the end. 

Now it’s your turn. I chose this sample because it’s the same genre as INSECTICIDE.

Sample 2.

The Observers – A Science Fiction Odyssey

The Observers - Prologue

Let the Games Begin

THE BURST OF laser fire scorched the wing of the Glieseian spacecraft as it made its retreat.  The two Glieseians inside the craft breathed a collective sigh just before their communication system crackled to life.

“I know you two under-bodied, oversized-brainiacs can hear me, probably without this comm setup,” Haa-Ringg growled. “If you think you’re lucky I missed you with those laser shots, think again! That was a warning. Come poking around our planet again and we’ll vaporize you. 
”Zerpall, the ship’s pilot, stole a quick glance at Mxpan, his Supervisor, in the seat beside him. Mxpan’s two large eyes stared straight ahead, oblivious to the pilot’s action. Zerpall skillfully manipulated the ship’s controls with his tiny, trunk-like arms, replacing the random zigzag pattern he had been employing during their escape with a more direct trajectory toward his home planet.

“If you, or any of your brainiac buddies, return to TauCeti, rest assured there will be no close misses of the craft in which they will die—vaporized in the vacuum on space—with no survivors to mourn the loss of their pitiful lives! Remember, we have your DNA.”

There was a sharp click. Sepulchral silence crept in and filled the void.

“I don’t think our mission ended well,” Zerpall offered after what he felt to be an appropriate interlude.

“Your gift of understatement is legendary,” Mxpan retorted.

Place:
Time:
Tone/Mood:
Point of View:
Content of text:.
Genre: Science Fiction
Audience: 

Is there any place where the reader is confused?

Is there an information dump?

You’ve seen two examples and evaluated another. It’s your turn to write your own opening. 

1. Select any of the following versions of the prompt below. All versions have the same focus. There is a difference in degree.
2. Write the rest of the opening to a story.
3. Any genre.
4. Write 150-750 words.

The front door wasn’t latched.

The front door was open.

The front door wasn’t closed tight.

The front door was ajar.

“The front door’s open.”

I wrote an opening to the bolded prompt below. I’ll post it in a blog post on Saturday, April 6.

First line. The front door was open.

• What’s next?

You write the action. My first version is 361 words.

• First version?

I’ll explain in the next #Writers post.

The next blog focuses on another aspect of this topic. At the end of that post, I include the opening to a second story in a different genre. 

SEO: book opening, opening line, set the stage, introduction

Follow me on Twitter: @CRDowningAuthor and Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CRDowningAuthor

My website is: www.crdowning.com

I'd appreciate your feedback on Blogger!

#Nostalgia. One-Lane, Two-Way Tapers on Vacations

Foldable Paper Road Maps. These were the GPS of sorts in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s when my family drove cross-country. This photo reminded me of several "issues" with those maps. Stay tuned for "The Dreaded Folded Map Fail" later this summer.

While driving the other morning, I experienced a traffic break known as a "One-Lane, Two-Way Taper.” [It took me a long time to find that term.] A huge truckload of drywall was being downloaded at a construction site. The truck took half the width of the street.

A worker at the hood end of the truck held a sign with “SLOW” on one side and “STOP” on the other. STOP was facing me.

He was peering intently toward the rear of the truck where an associate held a similar sign. Cars were edging past the truck at low speed. I’m guessing that the SLOW side of that side was facing oncoming traffic.

When the last car in the queue passed the sign holder at the rear of the truck, he flipped his sign around. “My” sign holder did not move.

Once the final car cleared my sign holder, he looked at me and flipped his sign from STOP to SLOW. We exchanged friendly waves as I inched forward.

On the return trip, the setup was the same. The event was not.

As I approached the STOP sign, a black coupe pulled around me and zipped up to the sign and its holder. The holder came close to smacking the car with his sign when the driver attempted to pass—while a car was coming from the other direction.

The sign holder moved along the side of the car until he could flash STOP in front of the windshield.

When SLOW appeared, the sedan did more than creep past the drywall truck. As I passed the sign holder, I shook my head. He shook his and shrugged. A voice from the sidewalk made a derogatory comment about the driver. 

I continued home.

When I was growing up, my family drove to Fort Wayne, Indiana at least every-other summer. This was before air-conditioning in cars, so we usually left San Diego about 10:00 p.m. to “get through the desert before it gets hot.”

ASIDE

I saw this while walking my dog one day. It's similar to the window A/C unit I describe below.

One summer my dad checked out a "window air conditioning unit" from the naval station he was stationed at. It was a metal can with a hole down the center. There was a vent that pointed down inside the car when the unit was in place.

You filled the can with water. One person held the unit in place when another person rolled the front seat's passenger window up until it was tight against the vent. A pull-chain acted as the on/off switch.

Once the car was moving, outside air funneled through the circular opening at the front of the unit, passed through a linen cloth and entered the car. When passengers complained of the inside temperature, 

• the person sitting in the front passenger seat pulled the chain. 
• Water from the can soaked the linen cloth. 
• The air passing through the wet cloth lost heat as the water evaporated. 
• Cooler than when it entered the can, air blew down on the passengers.

That process was the theory.

Reality 

1. Pulling the chain released too much water for the linen to absorb, so the chain puller got drenched. 
2. At best the temperature drop was 5-degrees, not overly refreshing when the air temperature is 105-degrees.

My dad never checked out another window unit.
END OF ASIDE.

The desert we were trying to foil stretches from the eastern side of the Laguna Mountains to at least the Texas border. Leaving at night from San Diego saved us about six hours of heat. Let me illustrate the ineffectiveness of the "leave at night" strategy. 

I remember waiting five hours in Grants, New Mexico, for the only gas station to open. We ended up paying an exorbitant price for two tires. The heat of the asphalt melted the glue that held the recapped rubber tread on two of our tires. That gas station was the only source of tires until Albuquerque.

We traveled Route 66. We stayed in motels with separate cabins in the shape of teepees. We ate at places named EAT. We visited “The Thing,” and “The Meteor Crater” in Arizona and Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.

Right vintage for the car, but we always had Chevy station wagons.

Our motels always had a swimming pool.

During the second half of our four-day drive, we went through the countryside where winter weather was an issue. They did most road repairs and construction in those areas in the summer. We experienced some l-o-n-g One-Way, Two-Lane Tapers similar to the one described above.

In the days before cell phones, I remember my dad turning off the car and telling us to get out and stretch our legs. He leaned against the front fender and talked to the sign-holder for several minutes.

When the last car allowed to travel our direction reached our sign holder, the driver of that car handed the sign holder a red rag. Our sign holder kept the rag until there was a “natural break” in the line of cars he’d stopped. The driver of the last car he allowed through returned the rag to the other sign holder and reversed the flow of traffic.

My high school linebacker coach, Bob Bass (brother of Tom, a former Chargers coach), told us of a summer job he had in college. He was a flagman on a road construction crew. His job was to stand at the beginning of a line of pylons and wave a precautionary red flag. He waved the flag in an arc that showed the drivers they were to keep outside the pylons.

• One day, he was doing his job. Things were going well . . . until one car didn’t move over when the driver first saw the flag. No matter how hard my now desperate coach waved his flag, the car didn’t swerve. In fact, he had to dive off the road into a patch of stinging nettles to avoid being hit by the car.
• After he recovered his senses, he handed the flag to his boss and walked over five miles back to the closest phone booth. He never even picked up his final paycheck.
• He learned later when another summer employee brought him his check what happened after he dove into the nettles.
• That day the crew had been sandblasting temporary lane lines off the now finished roadway. When the car blew past my coach and continued on, it ran over a dozen pylons. As it passed the man working the sandblaster, he strafed the side of the car as it passed.
• The driver didn’t file a complaint even though the driver’s side of his car was bare metal when he got home.

SEO: nostalgia, travel, road construction, summer vacations

Follow me on 

Twitter: @CRDowningAuthor

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CRDowningAuthor

My website is: www.crdowning.com

Email: crd.author@gmail.com

My Blogs

Life as I see it. Topics rotate between those of general interest to lovers of life,  authors, teachers—probably you, too.  Posts on Tuesdays and some Mondays.  http://crdowning-author.blogspot.com/?alt=rss

My Christian Context. Posts M/W of discussion questions. Thursdays - Timeless Truths. Fridays - Expressions of Faith. https://mychristiancontext.blogspot.com/  

I'd appreciate your feedback on Blogger!

#Writers. A Review of ProWritingAid

In September of 2018 I bought a 2-year license for ProWritingAid PREMIUM. My cost at the time was less than 50¢ per week for the PREMIUM package. I've used it extensively since then. That's better stated as I've used parts of it extensively since then. I use the program an average of three days each week.

   I used the free version of Grammarly religiously until they cut back what the program did for free. I still use Grammarly's Chrome Extension for online writing. This post i being checked by tha eXtension asI write. Below is a screenshot of what that extension caaught in these paragraph. I like the extension and will continue to use it.

Clicking on the red circle with "5" in the middle opens the text allowing you to scroll down to each marked error. Alternately, you can hover your mouse over each red underline to open a drop-down menu of options.

ProWritingAid PREMIUM offers more options for checking your writing than Grammarly PREMIUM offers.

The Review
The options for evaluating your writing is impressive. As you can see in the screenshot below, I don't use many of the features. My goal of this software is to point out issues I know I have problems with. Before going to press, I send all my “chapter books” as my granddaughter calls them to a professional copy editor.

   Tied for my biggest complaint is the pitiful highlighting used by ProWritingAid. The top screenshot below is from Hemingway. The second is the same text in ProWritingAid. These two programs are apples and oranges, I'm comparing only the highlight feature.

Hemingway.

ProWritingAid

   Hemingway's highlighting is better than ProWritingAid's. I miss items underlined in yellow every time I use ProWritingAid.
UPDATE!
I emailed my complaint about their highlighting to ProWritingAid on March 9. I got the following on March 11. I'm impressed with the speed and content of their response.

Reading level is important. I try to keep my writing below the 6th-grade level in Hemingway. The Hemingway sample above rates the text at Grade 5. Below is the report I can generate in ProWritingAid for reading level.

This report provides an explanation of how the reading level is calculated and gives the scores from several sources available on the Internet. Flesch-Kincaid is a common report used by schools. The score is the same as Hemingway's since Hemingway rounds their score to a whole number.

   While I don't need all the information, providing multiple views of readability is a plus.

Speaking of reports, ProWritingAid offers a plethora!

Each icon across the top is a link to a report. I apologize for difficulty in reading the names under the icons.

   I don't use most of the reports. They serve no useful purpose for me although I can see the value of each. Below is a screenshot of the grammar report. It is concise and clear. I'm not sure why spelling and grammar are linked in this report.

   PREMIUM ProWritingAid includes a downloadable desktop version. I don't like it as much as the online version. Neither version maintains the formatting of the uploaded text.  Neither do Grammarly and Hemingway. 

Losing formatting while using the program ties poor highlighting for my biggest complaint.

   I sometimes upload unformatted text. More often, I copy/paste the corrections back into the original file or make the correction there instead of in whichever writing tool I'm using.

The Bottom Line

I upload every piece of writing to ProWritingAid before it goes public. 

(I made 15 changes based on the review of this post. I did one copy/past of my online fix and had to resize the text. Other changes were made here, not copied from ProWritingAid.)

One more thing...

There's a good chance that some grammar will be marked wrong in Grammarly or ProWritingAid and not be marked wrong in Word. Decide which grammar standard you prefer and stick with it. If possible, add your choice for a grammar rule to the program you choose to use if their version of the rule is out of alignment with your choice.

I like the program because

1. It points out habitually used style and wording that often should be another style or wording.
2. It causes me to look at wording around highlighted regions.
3. It's fast.
4. It gives alternative style and wording options.

I don't like

1. That it removes most formatting from the text.
2. The miniscule highlighting coloring.

So
I recommend this program. I don't consider it essential, but I use it all the time. I'm getting my money's worth. You can too if you look for a sale price.

Follow me on Twitter: @CRDowningAuthor and Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CRDowningAuthor

My website is: www.crdowning.com

I'd appreciate your feedback on Blogger!

Almanac. Why my California ballot is soooo large. Part 5 - (the rest of) The ANSWER!

The first four blog posts in this series provide significant background for this final post on the topic. If you did not read them, or if you did and want to review, here are links to each.

https://crdowning-author.blogspot.com/2019/01/almanac-why-my-california-ballot-is.html

https://crdowning-author.blogspot.com/2019/01/almanac-why-my-california-ballot-is_27.html

https://crdowning-author.blogspot.com/2019/02/almanac-why-my-california-ballot-is.html

https://crdowning-author.blogspot.com/2019/02/almanac-why-my-california-ballot-is.html 

In the spirit of full disclosure, what you are about to read is tempered in tone and altered in content from what I'd planned before I did the research presented in the first four parts to this series. I did not remove the poison sacks from this snake, but I milked them before composing this final post.

Initiatives: True Democracy or Bad Lawmaking?

https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre1990081700

This is an excellent article from 1990. I encourage you to read it. It is less biased than anything else I read about this topic.

Opening Statement

Far too many issues in California are decided by initiative ballot proposals. Propaganda pollutes the mailers from proponents and opponents of nearly every proposition as initiatives are known in California.

In the latest election, then Governor Brown renamed the proposition on the ballot calling for the repeal of a special gasoline tax he instituted. He removed the words "gas tax." The phrase "road repair and transportation funding" replaced it in the title.

Elected California legislators are content to allow ballot initiatives in far too many cases.

Results of the 11 propositions on the Calfornia State ballot in November 2018. (From https://abc30.com/politics/election-2018-results-of-all-11-california-propositions/4441437/ )

On Election Day, California voters approved or denied 11 different propositions, which included regulations on dialysis centers, repealing the 2017 gas tax and wider local authority on rent control. See how the propositions fared below: 

PROPOSITION 1: YES Authorized bonds to fund specified housing assistance programs. Get full details on this proposition here. 

PROPOSITION 2: YES 
Authorized bonds to fund existing housing program for individuals with mental illness. Get full details on this proposition here. 

PROPOSITION 3: NO 
Authorized bonds to fund projects for water supply and quality, watershed, fish, wildlife, water conveyance, and groundwater sustainability and storage. Get full details on this proposition here. 

PROPOSITION 4: YES 
Authorized bonds funding construction at hospitals providing children's health care. Get full details on this proposition here.

PROPOSITION 5: NO 
Changed requirements for certain property owners to transfer their property tax base to replacement property. Get full details on this proposition here. 

PROPOSITION 6: NO 
Eliminated certain road repair and transportation funding. Requires certain fuel taxes and vehicle fees be approved by the electorate. Get full details on this proposition here. 

PROPOSITION 7: YES 
Conformed California daylight saving time to federal law. Allows legislature to change daylight saving time period. Get full details on this proposition here. 

PROPOSITION 8: NO 
Regulated amounts outpatient kidney dialysis clinics charge for dialysis treatment. Get full details on this proposition here. 

PROPOSITION 9: On July 18, 2018, Proposition 9 was removed from the ballot by order of the California Supreme Court. It would have divided California into three separate states. 
PROPOSITION 10: NO Expanded local governments' authority to enact rent control on residential property. Get full details on this proposition here. 

PROPOSITION 11: YES 
Required private-sector emergency ambulance employees to remain on-call during work breaks. Get full details on this proposition here. 

PROPOSITION 12: YES 
Establishes new standards for confinement of specified farm animals; bans sale of noncomplying products. Get full details on this proposition here.

In the previous election, Californians voted against allowing a wealthy individual to manipulate aspects of ownership/use of property he owned to his advantage--although that's not the way they worded the proposition. That should never have been on any statewide ballot. Because of the process in place in California, all it took was enough signatures and the requisite fees to get it on the ballot.

As in years past, I spent several hours groping my way through mailers and state published "information" about propositions this year. In the state published documents, each proposition was accompanied by "ANALYSIS BY THE LEGISLATIVE ANALYST." I put most of my stock in those. 

Ultimately, voters have a way to know the current situations addressed by many propositions. While it's hard to argue with decreasing the level of confinement of farm animals (Prop 12), I don’t know how many farms were abusive or how many must realign their practices to meet the new law even though their animals were not excessively confined.

This hybrid of representative and direct democracy frequently results in immediate court cases filed by the losing side. It's not uncommon that the court system overturns the "will of the people."

Elected legislators should study proposed laws and vote based on what they think is in the best interest of their constituency and/or the state as a whole--probably in that order. 

Too often, voting is based on party affiliation or what a legislator sees as most beneficial to her/his future in politics. The recourse of voters to such shenanigans is to "vote the scoundrels out." As shown in the text below from https://ballotpedia.org/Incumbents_defeated_in_2018_congressional_elections, re-election is more common than non-re-election by a significant amount. Not too many scoundrels are voted out, even in a contentious year as was 2018.

In the 2018 midterm elections, 378 U.S. House incumbents and 30 U.S. Senate incumbents ran for re-election—representing 87.1 percent of the seats up for re-election. With one race involving an incumbent pending, 38 incumbents—two Democratic House incumbents, four Democratic senators, 31 Republican House incumbents, and one Republican senator—lost their re-election bids.

For more information about the new members of the 116th Congress, click here.

HIGHLIGHTS

This was the lowest number of U.S. House incumbents seeking re-election since 1992.

This was the highest number of U.S. Senate incumbents seeking re-election since 

   2008.

Seventeen percent of U.S. Senate incumbents seeking re-election were defeated, 

   including four Democrats. This was the highest percentage since the 

   2014 midterm election when 21 percent of U.S. Senate incumbents were defeated, 

   including five Democrats.

At least 33 U.S. House incumbents—or 8.7 percent—were defeated in 2018. This was

  the highest percentage of incumbents defeated since 2012, when 10.2 percent were 

  not re-elected.

Final Comment

Elected legislators should study proposed laws and vote based on what they think is in the best interest of their constituency and/or the state as a whole--probably in that order. We should demand term limits at all levels to prevent 40-year legislators, many beholden to special interests, from dictating results of proposed legislation to meet their ideas of what “the voters need.”

I know the first sentence repeated from earlier in the post. I bolded and colored red my final decision.

Hmmm.

That final decision sounds a lot like what the earliest elected "politicians" in America did. See Part 1 for details. Maybe it's time for our government to go back to the future!

Follow me on Twitter: @CRDowningAuthor and Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CRDowningAuthor

My website is: www.crdowning.com

I'd appreciate your feedback on Blogger!