Are you as stunned as I am that we’re already weeks into 2017? I figure the beginning of an all-new year is a great time to share our all-new first lines! I love seeing what you all are working on, so jump in and share the first line—and ONLY the first line—of your current work in progress. Fiction, nonfiction, children’s book, whatever. Let the sharing begin!
Here’s mine:
His first breath of freedom in fifteen years was made even sweeter by the sure knowledge that retribution was at hand.
How Self-Publishing Has Changed Authors
Sheriff Justice Gareau ducked around the corner of the Esperanza train depot, hoping he hadn’t been spotted by the woman who’d stepped off the train.
Love or money or crime? I know, it’s love isn’t it….or infatuation.
Maybe a little bit of all three. LOL!
With a final snip, another layer of guilt fell into Yarrow Fenn’s lap amid the soft folds of wool from her loom.
She’d escaped!
Yashmea laid his calloused hand on the polished oak railing of the Lodge, closed his fiery eyes, and breathed deeply.
The lights went out as the last worker left the building, and the clinic was cast into darkness except for one small light in the intensive care unit.
She did not have a name, none of them did, but once, when she was small, she almost had a friend.
Love it. I’m hooked.
Me too! I would read this book just to find out what happened next.
Thanks! 🙂
LOVE IT!!!
Really an awesome opening!
Thanks! Working on the first book I’ve truly attempted, since the short stories I wrote as a kid don’t count. My imaginary friends didn’t talk to me for a xouple of weeks. It was lonely…
So, thanks for the kind words!
(And, no, she still doesn’t have a name. On purpose. 🙂 )
“Katryl saw him as soon as the last indistinct line of the shore melted into the horizon and the world became ocean as far as she could see.”
This is the starting line of Book 3 of an epic fantasy series I call the Firewing Chronicles.
…and the world became ocean as far as she could see…
I really like that!! 🙂
Karen, I love your line, and the ones above are wonderful, too. Here’s mine:
In a lifetime of strange things Matty had seen his father do, this was the strangest.
Oh … I haven’t seen that one yet. Looking forward to it!
“Sierra Jane cowered on the front steps of her apartment building, clutching a stuffed bunny to her chest.”
Already want to slap some adult.
Rupert’s mother had always wanted him to get ahead in life, but was nonplussed when her boy became Henry VIII’s Lord High Executioner.
Nice!
Thanks, Jon!
“My grandmother couldn’t read books, but she could read coffee grounds.”
This is fun, Karen. Thanks for asking us to share. Your first line is about to burst!
I love this!
Thank you!
My day began tailing some bum two-timing his wife, and ended with a half-million bucks and a dead body in the trunk of my car.
I’ve had days like that.
Literally laughed out loud.
Good line. Indeed.
Thanks, Nora!
Get a head? Executioner? LOL! What a great line. Is this a comedy?
Thanks, Louise! Romantic comedy, actually.
I think that’s one I’ll have to read.
She thought he was bluffing at first.
The phone beside his bed woke him at 3:00 a.m. on Monday.
I held a plastic bag with Ramen noodles in one hand and a key in the other that no longer unlocked my apartment door.
Intriguing. So many questions now beg to be answered.
Thanks, Wendy!
I’ll brave a share.
Angels rode on clouds like these.
I like it. Non-fiction?
Thank you! No, actually. Fiction. Has a lot of supernatural elements in it.
Katie Dennis stepped from the seaplane onto its float with her knees still shaking.
“Death stalks you today. Twice he will miss. The third time…”
This is the beginning of my second novel in the Light in the Empire series that I hope to have in market in April.
Sleep is good. Catching a killer is better.
First line for a story I haven’t even really thought about yet.
I get those, too, flashes of stories that don’t yet have quite enough to build on. I save them. Just in case. 🙂
Denial is a demon–I’m sure of it, yet how hard we try to hide the signs and symptoms something’s wrong.
(Memoir)
Blessings ~ Wendy
Powerful, Wendy!
Thank you, dear Karen. 🙂
Kids fall and hit their heads all the time, and then they move on.
Mine didn’t.
I’m twelve years old and pretty tough.
Sir, your opening promises so much in so few words.
Great!
Love that line Karen, it hints at so much. Lots of intriguing lines here.
Surely Rose’s most well-to-do parent, who drove the white Escalade and wore Louis Vuitton shoes, could make an effort to pay the two hundred dollar tuition for her daughter Camille’s ballet classes this month.
Margaret Smith hated stairs, narrow and steep, spilling into the men below.
This has potential! I can see the spotlights, the smokey atmosphere, her sequined outfit.
Or is she an army nurse stepping off an ambulance bus?
Thank you, Nicola. Your comments helped confirm I’m on the right track. Setting is 1890 mining town in her father’s saloon.
Absolutely beautiful!
To suffering there is a limit; to fearing, none — the words terrified Alisa Petrenko, because they were not true.
Desperately wanting something to be true cannot make that thing true.
Torren Daniels knew if he knocked on the door and she answered, it might kill her soul once and for all, but he didn’t have a choice; not really.
Nia stood waist deep in the water gazing ahead at the towering ivory river steps descending into the pristine river.
“Mine Own!” Mother’s cry rang the cave walls.
My first line in the sixth book in my Candy Cane Girls series is this:
“Adopt!”
September wasn’t supposed to be as hot as the middle of July in North Georgia but the sweat dripping down my face told me something different.
Fun! And there are some TERRIFIC first lines in this feed!
I write biblical fiction. On the book I completed just before Christmas about “The Fourth Wiseman” it begins with the other wise men making fun of him:
“You can’t just buy the Garden of Eden.”
In the book I am beginning this week, it opens in Antioch, Syria in the first century. This is the first line:
“Hurry, Stephen, they’re crucifying Abraham.”
(Not THE Abraham, a namesake centuries later)
This, from my just-begun WIP:
When Dr. Sally Rhodes, a Freudian psychologist, fell in love with Stephen Rasher, who had just earned his doctorate in theology, she found herself in a paradox.
Let the groaning commence.
Love reading all your lines. Some have me so intrigued, I want to read them NOW!
This is one I hope to have finished and to my editor in the next two weeks.
“Did you hear we had another theft last night?”
“It was a drag when that hippie kid drowned.”
When Leah Swanson made plans for her twenty-fifth birthday, dying was not on her immediate to-do list.
AND
Keeping secrets was bad. Keeping secrets from family and friends was a recipe for disaster and the one Gretchen kept close to her heart would never see light of day.
This was fun!
Hi Karen:
Here’s my first line:
The movie “The Second Best Marigold Hotel” opens with the elderly character Evelyn Greenslade (Judi Dench) trying to sign up for internet service on what was her late husband’s account.
While that does not seem particularly inspiring as I read it here, all of my chapters in “Suddenly Single: A Practical Guide to Maintaining Your Household When Your Spouse is NLA” begin with a story. I decided to begin the financial chapter with Judi Dench’s tale of woe.
Space was cold and vast.
Fiction? Sci-fi? 🙂
“Sold!”
The auctioneer’s cry jarred Stella. A gust of wind off the mountain spat grit in her face. She rubbed her eyes with with the heels of her hands, as if by doing so she could erase the awful realities of the day.
It was a truth universally taught in the monastery that the first step toward darkness was the easiest. And the most dangerous.
Love this.
Oh, you guys, these are grand! Well done!
breathtaking!! So thankful for the talents God gives.
Once there was a beautiful young princess named Jiang who lived in a far away land and was very lonely.
This is a FUN thread.
Lex Sands swung the ax with force and decapitated his victim.
Anna Cray hated trains, the coal smoke, steam, and shrill whistle, that is until today.
— Tell me how to make it better. I’m not sure if it is enough to grab the reader.
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.
Quintus was only seven the day he decided to win a crown.