Opening Lines

No, I'm not talkin' pick-up lines, although I DID catch the finale of some reality show called "The Pick-up Artist." Man, is there NOTHING I won't watch on TV? Has anyone seen that Chain of Love show? How about Sharon Osborne's charm school for the Rock of Love skanks? I'm tellin' ya, if these shows are broadcast throughout the world, it's no wonder we're hated far and wide.

Anyway, the title of this blog post refers to author Karen Tabke's annual "First Line" contest. Best to go to the site to get instructions, rules and regs if you wanna enter, but in a nutshell, you post your opening line next week. One sentence. One (hopefully) HOOK-Y sentence, that makes the cut to the next round. If so, the following week, you add a second sentence. And so on and so forth. Strikes me that if you wrote an entire novel with that much concentration on each sentence...well, can you imagine?? (Yeah, you'd probably slit your wrists.)

But it's a fun contest to watch...and I'm thinking of entering with my WIP. The prize? Five lucky finalists get to send their first 20 pages to Amy Pierpont, a Senior Editor with Grand Central Publishing.

As Jeff Probst would say on Survivor, "Worth playing for?"

Uh, yeah. DUH.