Nathan Bransford - The Forums

Here's mine:

"The display above the chalkboard continued to draw Clara’s attention away from her Algebra problems."

It's nothing special, but I hope it's conflict-y enough as a starter (but not in the whole car-chase and bombing kind of way).

Well, I've read all of the opening sentences, and must say I like them all.

I have two of my own. The first is from my current WIP: Thistledown: Genesis.

I became aware when the first of my six brains activated.

The second is from Nella and Cicero, a finished novel.

One year after daddy’s death – one year after finding him cold and stiff beside me in the bed we shared - I decided to take on the task of putting away his personal possessions.

I hope I'm not stepping out of bounds with the latter opening sentence...

This is my first post. I just joined last night.

I'm new here, so grain of salt time. I'd keep reading on both, but in the first I wavered on whether "became aware" meant "became cognizant of the activation" or "became conscious...period"--which you most likely clear up in the second sentence...or maybe it was just me altogether. 2nd one's creepy in a good way. Chills up the spine. :)

Here's the one for my 2nd novel...currently in Eternal Edit:
Deep within a non-descript patch of Florida Pine Flatwoods, somewhere mid-state, a traumatized man stepped from the cab of a large, green-camo’ed pick-up truck.

Kinda embarrass to show it, but here goes.

Here's my first sentence:

"The room was gray, gloomy, void of any other colors."

Wow, there are some great first lines in here and I think I would continue reading most of them.

Here is mine:
Blinking did not make the darkness lighter.

From WiP, revised from an earlier version:

He is gone now, dead and buried and beyond caring for the manner of his death.

ivanpope wrote:It is my job to remember.

Gawds, I wish I'd thought of that.

Some really great stuff!

This is from a short story I'm working on, and I've purposefully left off the end quote because the character continues speaking after the period.

His father used to say to him: “It’s the dreams that make your head so large, Hjalmer.

Reeking of decayed vegetation, bonfire, junk food and with foliage of sorts sprouting from the pocket of his tatty motorcycle leathers, Stephen Mycroft-Jones strides through the Recently Published section in Foyle’s the bookshop in London, steps up the access ramp, turns right and is hurriedly up close to the young woman sitting un-enquired at the Information Desk where, as politely as he can, he says, ‘Excuse me miss, would you mind checking to see if my trouser's are undone?’

Still may change, but right now:

"Each type of substitute teacher had its own special weakness, and Jacob Wonderbar knew every possible trick to distract them."

Painful, Nathan, painful. But only because I used to be a substitute teacher. :)

This is cheating because it's two sentences, but as you can see the first isn't much without the second:

Paradise Valley is a wild and pristine country in Boundary County, Idaho. Its glens and meadows are strewn with bearberry bushes and sagebrush shrubs; its hills and mountainsides choked with Douglas Fir and Lodgepole Pine, their evergreen boughs springing forth from the hillsides like emerald whiskers roughening the chin of a slumbering elder god.

There are a couple of different versions where it is 3 sentences or even just 1 (bad) and others where the whiskers are described as decaying or decomposing (because, you know, green whiskers?). Still a WIP so I'm not sure how it will end up.

All of the opening sentences presented on this page would keep me reading on. Specially Matt's because I like bits of description like that.

One more from me, from an early and different version of the Thistledown story - named Nel and the Guardian:

The Collector hovered over a grey haired woman, who, though large in size, strode with ground eating strides down a path winding through a grassy meadow.

Gatoweh—Autumn—1779 by the whiteman’s calendar—midday by the sun’s position, but twilight for the Iroquois people, dusk for a centuries-old way of life.

Okay, heck, I'll give this a spin.

For Quill's line above, I'd say 7 or 7.5 only because of the punctuation. I dislike the fragmentation. With different punctuation, I'd say 8 easily, possibly 9. I like the immediate indication of trouble ahead. I like the tone, so I'd continue.

My first line, adult fantasy novel:

They made me on a rainy night like this one in the city-dome of Roytvald.