July 2006 Best Openings Contest

July 2006 Best Openings Contest

A little later than I intended, but here, finally, are the results of the July BoC. And this time it’s congratulations to Derek who romps home in the clear lead with Lisa and Marilyn second and third respectively.

                                               1st 2nd 3rd Voted Total
Derek Paterson - Of Curiosity And Satisfaction  9   2   0    3     14
Lisa Mantchev - The Girl With Blueberry Eyes    3   2   1    3      9
Marilyn Alm - Outside the Light                 3   0   1    3      7
David Gillon - Warzone                          0   0   2    3      5
Bill Allan - Nightfall                          0   4   0    0      4
Sophia Ahmed - voted only                                    3      3

Your BOC Admin,

David


Index
The Girl with Blueberry Eyes - Lisa Mantchev
Warzone - David Gillon
Outside the Light - Marilyn Alm
Of Curiosity And Satisfaction - Derek Paterson
Nightfall - Bill Allan


The Girl with Blueberry Eyes

      "I brought an apple for you, Teacher."  Vera Violetta had grown it on her bedside lamp and picked it just that morning.
      Teacher accepted it with a puzzled look.
      "It's not everyday you see a striped apple," she said, which was true.  But the shade on the bedside lamp had stripes, so the apple was striped red and white, just like a stick of penny candy.
      "I glued the dew to it myself," Vera said.  It was tricky, getting the silver-white rhinestones to stick, but she'd managed it.
      "Wasn't that clever of you?" said Teacher.  "Now take your seat.  It's time for arithmetic."
      "Teacher's pet," Jimmy Johnson hissed at her as Vera made her way to her seat.
      "Little Miss Stuck Up," said Lizzie.
      "We'll get her at recess," added Min.
      And they did.  They threw rocks and snails and plastic shovels and the crusts off their peanut butter sandwiches.  They hurled curses and clumsy cuss words; Jimmy even threw his shoe.  Vera filled it with jam and handed it back just as the bell rang to go back inside.
      "Blueberry eyes!" they screamed at her as they turned to go.  
      "Stupid head!" Jimmy added and stuck his tongue out; it was purple from tasting the jam.
      Vera didn't follow them inside like she ought.  Instead, she put her uneaten snack of six ruby raspberries back in her lunch pail and trudged home.  The skinny track through the Wood tried to twist her around and put her back in the playground.  

§

Strange. It holds its tone extremely well, but I’ve no idea where it’s going and I’m not certain there is enough here to hold the audience without a hint of that. This takes 2nd place because I admire the writing. DG

This one leaped out at me, and said, "more, please!"
      I did wonder where Vera got the jam to fill a shoe with, though. And I want to know how the kid is going to manage with only one shoe.
      I want to know more about this magickal world. 1st. MA

I liked this but cute quickly became cute overload, it made me cross my bran muffin eyes and stick out my polka dot tongue. Not sure whether I could survive a full length story with this clever stuff. My bad. -dp

Mine - LM

The first and last lines drew me in strongly, as they evoked a sense of magic and purpose. The lines in between lost my interest, I'm afraid. Also, the names Vera Violetta and Jimmy Johnson were a distraction and threw me out of the story. I might read on a little, but if what immediately follows is like the middle portion of this opening, I would stop. THIRD. - SA

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Warzone

      “Please make sure that your seat back is in the upright position, your tray table is stowed away, and that you are wearing your combat body armour and helmet.”
      Not exactly your standard airline announcement, but then we were flying squaddy-class courtesy of RAF Airways.
      I glanced at Aoife and raised an eyebrow, but she was busy strapping herself into a set of body armour that did nothing for her figure. Whatever figure I had was already lost under an ill-fitting set of Desert DPM fatigues. I sighed and pulled my own body-armour over from where I’d stacked it on the empty seat in front of me. I glanced out of the window as I did so, getting my first glimpse of Kabul from the air. A large fire was burning off to the side of our flightpath, which didn’t seem like the best of omens.
      By the time I was strapped into my own armour, helmeted and back into my seat we were on finals into Kabul International, and it turned out the fire was inside the airfield perimeter. We filed down onto the tarmac in the middle of a mix of squaddies, airmen and various unidentified government types and with the smell of burning aviation fuel raw on our throats. Towering flames from a fuel dump someone said had taken a rocket an hour earlier gave the whole area a surreal feeling, like some Bosch print brought to life.

§

Mine. Though the first sentence is actually lifted from the report of a journalist flying into Kabul for real. This is my team of not-quite-human police venturing farther afield than normal and it was surprisingly easy to find a real life pretext to get them out there. DG

It's the novel "airline announcement" on this one. Normally, I'm not interested in most war stories unless I'm also interested in the viewpoint characters. It was kind of a toss-up as to whether this one would be 2 or 3, and it's the fact that I don't really know who I'm following here that made it 3. MA

Interesting, I'd read on. THIRD. –dp

I don't know... this one has all the right elements, but something isn't clicking for me. This isn't unusual, because the military stuff goes right over my head. So thumbs up for effort, but I didn't engage. - LM

Felt strongly like the middle of a story. I thought as I read this that commenting on someone's figure didn't seem a natural thing to focus on in a situation that should be causing major butterflies. I didn't feel the inherent tension in the moment. I didn't quite get drawn into this, although the setting was clear enough. The narrator never seemed involved in the situation. - SA

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Outside the Light

Calgary, Autumn 2280

      Alyssa Collins piled three heavy suitcases into the boot of her rented skimmer, and closed the lid. She picked up a carry-on, her briefcase, and a purse which had been stuffed in the carry-on for her flight; they hadn’t relaxed those strictures in all the years she’d been traveling. Tossing them onto the passenger side of the vehicle, she slid into the driver’s seat and palmed the ID pad. There was no problem: the vehicle had been programmed from the central dispatch to recognize that, at least for this weekend, it belonged to her.
      It took another twenty minutes to get the skimmer into the air, then she crawled at just above stall rate in a swarm as bad as any ground-level traffic jam. The local Air Traffic Control routed her north almost to Red Deer before she was able to take over the controls, and flit west through the scenic David Thompson passage, then south along the Icefields Route toward Snowbound Chalet – her new home.
      Well, almost new. It had been almost a hundred years since she’d last lived here, but she’d been another person then. At least half the intervening years had been spent in the history- and humanity-crowded cities of Europe, or the even more crowded ones of China. So when a job offer to co-manage the medical clinic at Snowbound Chalet found her in Berlin, she’d barely hesitated. Accepting with quite undignified speed, she stayed only long enough to wrap up the most pressing issues of her job at Arvad House, Ltd. before rapidly sorting her personal effects and grabbing the first sub-orbital out of Germany.

§

There’s possibly a little too much detail in that first paragraph, your audience don’t need to know every little thing she’s carrying and where it ends up in the skimmer. Other than that the writing seems competent enough, but I don’t really get any sense of your character. We know she’s jumped at the chance to come up here, but is she tired, exhilarated, nervous, all of the above? In some ways she’s a character-shaped hole at the moment, you need to fill that gap to truly snare your audience. Takes 3rd. DG

Mine. Wrong title. Should be "Outside the Light". MA

Seems a bit info-dumpy but I'm curious as to what's going on with the long-living protag. FIRST. –dp

". It had been almost a hundred years since she’d last lived here, but she’d been another person then." This is the line that grabbed me. The rest I wasn't quite sure what to do with... – LM

All exposition, no tension, and no sense of movement in the opening, despite it being a description of travel. I felt impatient waiting for something to happen. I wouldn't read on. - SA

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Of Curiosity And Satisfaction

      Renfield opened the door in time to see the postman disappear down the winding road, running for all he was worth.  The Master's cardinal rule was never to shit in your own nest, yet the villagers still feared the beat of his leathery wings and the sharp jab of his fangs.  Renfield shook his head and tutted.  There was no convincing such people that they had nothing to fear; indeed, the proximity of the Master's castle ensured they would never be bothered by robbers or werewolves any other threat from without.  Did they appreciate this?  They did not.  Unfortunately it meant that he, Renfield, the Master's faithful butler and all-round dogsbody, would never be invited to the village barn dances where he might meet some plump young maid willing to play footsie.  The sacrifices he'd made since taking up this position....
      He fetched the scroll from the mailbox and sniffed it.  Perfume! And not some cheap rubbish.  A lady's scent! He itched to break the wax seal and sneak a peek.  But the Master would know.  And would punish Renfield by locking the cheese pantry.  That would never do.
      Renfield was about to place the scroll on the hall table, where the Master would see it when he arose from his dreckeinschlafen and came downstairs.  But then he remembered the Old Count's laboratory in the bowels of this draughty fortress.  Renfield hadn't been down there in ages.  There was a machine.  A machine that could see through walls.

§

I like this. The humour is almost understated, but still tells you that this isn’t necessarily going to be the most serious of stories. The writing is fine and if we’re straying close to cliché (Renfield indeed!) then that may simply be because cliché is what will make the humour in this story work. Takes 1st for making me smile. DG

OK, so I'm always a sucker for a twisted point of view. And Renfield was plenty twisted. Locking the cheese pantry? I think I'd want to know where this is going. 2nd. MA

Mine. Kids, don't dreckeinschlafen at home without asking permission from an adult first. –dp

The title alone would put this first in my book, and the intro backs it up. FIRST. – LM

Great opening line. Does he intend to use the machine to read the scroll? I would read on a little, but I think the tension could do with being oomphed up. Have Renfield's need to read the scroll be clear. FIRST. - SA

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Nightfall

      We stood close together in the twilight, the three of us speaking in hushed tones while we avoided looking into each other’s eyes, yet every so often we would glance up at the dark building we'd planned to enter.
      "Sure you want to do this?"  Emily took a deep drag on her cigarette and I wanted to slap it out of her mouth.  She was eighteen.  Didn’t life kill you fast enough?
      "Why wouldn’t we," Jack said.  "We’re here, aren’t we?"
      "Let her talk."  I bumped his shoulder with mine.  Jack was on my nerves, too.  Always had to act tough, super confident, meanwhile he was just another punk-ass college kid, a skinny freshman at that.
      I was the old man of the trio.  I shared a couple of Psych classes with them but I’d been to war.  Got sand in my boots and fired my rifle a couple times.  Now I was pursuing another childhood obsession- -finding out exactly what happened to my dad.  He was among the eight people killed in this house when I was eleven years old.
      "You know I can feel things, Ben.  You both know it."  Emily looked from me to Jack.
      "So what?"  Jack was still acting tough, but his voice had become reedy with fear.
      "Shut up, asshole."  The words came out like a hiss.  "Go ahead, Em."
      "Soon as we got close to this place . . . I saw terrible things . . . murder.
      "We’re going in," I said.

§

This is a nice enough set up, but it threatens the haunted house cliché in spades. I have several horror films running through my head that use almost exactly the same set-up. As I said for Derek’s piece cliché can work for you, but this may be a story where it is best avoided rather than courted. Runs close for 3rd on the general competence of the writing, but ultimately no banana…. DG

Has possibilities, but the style is a little ragged. We know some things about the POV character, but almost nothing about his companions. MA

That's a famous title in Sci-Fi circles, best avoid using it. I'd maybe save the protag's reasons for being here for later dramatic reveal. Just for a second I lost track of who was speaking (in the last 4 lines). Despite this, SECOND. –dp

A little too much backstory for my taste this early in the game, but a valiant effort. ;) - LM

A little confusing, but it does have some tension. The backstory paragraph should be kept for later, I think, as it stopped the flow of the opening. Keep it all action and dialogue and movement. SECOND. - SA

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All story excerpts herein are Copyright © 2006 by the Authors, who retain all rights. The excerpts are uploaded for purposes of critique only, which does not constitute publication.