In a Facebook group I'm in, a recent discussion talked about a used bookstore (I believe) that had bagged up a bunch of books in brown paper sacks, one to a bag. On the outside of the bag was written the first line of the book. Not the title, not the author. Just the first line of the book. They had this brown bag sale, and customers selected books based on that scant bit of information. So... if one of your books ended up in that sale, what would the first line be? Would it grab someone's attention? The first line from my current work is... How about yours?
I have a few. One that's been simmering for about 9 years now starts with Considering the rest of the story is fairly bleh, that might be false advertising, especially towards those who might even be expecting it to be some sort of fairy tale-esque fantasy story with that line uttered by the villain. Also since I only have a few rough drafts of it written several years apart, it might seem odd why I have that line but I always used it as a sort of maypole to communicate what the story's gonna tell you. From another: And I plagiarized this one:
I misread this as "Does your first line smell?" I think that would be good line for a book on selling books, lol.
I like my next line as well, almost enough to use a ; to tag it onto the first. But, I kind of feel a ; on the first line is just going to turn too many people off. "Clicking chess pieces beat out a steady rhythm on the stone table; two pairs of partners danced to the beat." Now that I look at it, I need to change that first "beat" into "tapped" so that I'm not repeating words. That's a bad habit of mine.
Maybe try "Clicking chess pieces tattooed a steady rhythm on the stone table while two pairs of partners danced to the beat." Although, I don't really see anything wrong with a semicolon.
Right, and Simon Fiasco and CheshirePheonix, y'all are writer folk who know your semicolons intimately. Other folk seem a little intimidated by them.
How can you champion a punctuation mark when you can't even type it correctly, sir? And interrobang starts with the ? and ends with the !. (Obviously I came prepared to fight dirty.)
That it may, but it is interchangeable in my opinion as long as you are consistent. At least, it is according to Wikipedia as much as it hurts for me to quote.
Präventivschlag in Deutsch (angemessen, heh)! Wenn ihr dreckig kämpfen wollen, kann ich auch dreckig kämpfen. Edieren: Meine Schreibweise ist Scheiße. Repariert.
