Fun fact: The person who thought of the last contest we had (Be an Agent for a Day), is now a client of mine: hello Jim Duncan! Also, the person who won the contest before that (The 2nd Semi-Annual Stupendously Ultimate First Paragraph Challenge), is also now a client: hello Natalie Whipple!
We’ve also had three finalists, Stuart Neville, Terry DeHart, and Victoria Schwab go on to be published/soon-to-be-published authors respectively.
In other words: NO PRESSURE.
(Bonus fun fact: I didn’t actually call the inaugural first paragraph challenge “stupendously ultimate,” it was actually “largely indispensable,” which throws into doubt whether this could properly be called the “third sort-of-annual.” We’ll just agree to forget that part, hmm?)
Now then!
It is time. Time to test your paragraph against… other first paragraphs. Time to see if your sentences can wage successful word combat in order to defeat other sentences and emerge victorious on a field of battle.
Oh, and there are prizes. Let’s start there.
The GRAND PRIZE STUPENDOUSLY ULTIMATE WINNER will receive….
1) Their choice of a partial critique, query critique, or phone consultation
2) A very-sought-after galley of THE SECRET YEAR by Jennifer Hubbard, which will be published by Viking in January:
3) A signed THE SECRET YEAR bookmark
4) The envy of their rivals
5) The pride of a job well done
6) I think you get the picture
The STUPENDOUSLY ULTIMATE FINALISTS will receive….
a) Query critiques
b) A signed THE SECRET YEAR bookmark (assuming you live in a place that is reached in a reasonably affordable fashion by the postal service no offense forraners)
c) Pride. Lots of pride.
On to the rules!!
I) This is a for-fun contest that I conduct in the free time. Rules may be adjusted without notice, as I see fit, in ways in which you might find capricious, arbitrary, and in a possibly not fully comprehensible fashion. Complainants will be sent to the Magister, and trust me, you don’t want to get sent to the Magister (who’s been watching True Blood? This guy)
II) Ya hear? Angst = prohibited.
III) Please post the first paragraph of any work-in-progress in the comments section of THIS POST. Do not e-mail me your submission. The deadline for entry is THURSDAY 4pm Pacific time, at which point entries will be closed. Finalists will be announced on Friday, at which time you will exercise your democratic rights to choose a stupendously ultimate winner.
IV) You may enter once, once you may enter, and enter once you may.
V) Spreading word about the contest is strongly encouraged.
VI) I will be sole judge. Unless I chicken out.
VII) I am not imposing a word count on the paragraphs. However, a paragraph that is overly long may lose points in the judge’s eyes. Use your own discretion.
VIII) Please remember that the paragraph needs to be a paragraph, not multiple paragraphs masquerading as one paragraph.
That is all.
And now I shall retreat to my stupendously ultimate bunker.
UPDATE: CONTEST IS CLOSED!! Thank you so much to everyone who entered.
Not long before dark, a flight of five helicopters landed outside our perimeter, just far enough to keep the rotor-wash dust at bay. All eyes focused their direction. Some thirty men, all strangers, jumped from the choppers and walked in through our protective concertina wire. Strange shit was happening, I should have stayed at my bunker, unconcerned, but I didn’t.
Girls like me didn’t get pregnant. And if they did, they didn’t stay pregnant for long. Girls like me had careers at stake, and for all the talk of tolerance around here, it was still not okay to have a baby. At least not for the student body president of the most prestigious prep school in Manhattan.
He returned again and again to stare into the great black hole. Half of the building–once elegant and white–had collapsed from the heat and the water. The top three floors were completely destroyed, but the Art Deco exterior of the bottom two floors were still intact.
Sophie slipped a twenty out of her wallet and offered it to the cabbie after he set her luggage on the sidewalk. The smiling man was about to accept the crisp bill when a nearby shout stopped him cold. “Go screw yourself, dickhead!” Sophie glanced over her shoulder to get a look at the owner of the obnoxious female voice that had managed to shock the Saturday morning birds into silence.
If it was true that sea gulls possessed the souls of dead sailors, Lucky Valera wondered which of his former shipmates dove at him from the June morning sky. He waved his arms. “Shoo!” His own stomach felt bilgy for lack of food, and Lucky surely hadn't a crumb to offer a hungry bird. Never mind, by guess and by God he’d be seeing the last of New Bedford off the starboard stern by noontide. And with a belly-full of fresh rations in the offing.
The earthquake hit mid-morning on a Tuesday. Down in town, a historic brick plaza crumbed on top of a dozen cars, the sidewalk, and two unfortunate gentleman who had stopped to talk as one fed the parking meter. Up on castle grounds, Eli the groundskeeper headed out the front door, not knowing that at that exact moment, his thoughts were exactly the same as two thousand of his fellow townsmen, all crying out in some kind of telepathic unison: Oh shit.
He missed her. He sat quiet, sipping coffee on their porch, remembering her. Sam Holt realized he existed now between two worlds; life with Mary had been so full of love, excitement and meaning. Sure there had been a sad moment or two, but with her in his world sad rarely found a way to stick around long. But that had been his old world, now gone, forever. His new world, the one without her, he hadn't quite figured a way to step into yet. So he sat missing her.
It never occurred to me that Mom was lying to me all my life.
On the day my father died, Mama came home from the hospital covered in blood: hers, his and forty-three others. Some were strangers. Some friends. Carefully, I tweezed the shards of glass and bits of burnt and twisted metal from her wounds, applying the greasy salve to prevent infection precisely as my father would have done had he survived the bombing. Mama had witnessed the bus exploding while she waited outside for him during shift change at the hospital. Collateral damage in a war we didn’t ask for and never wanted.
According to Jane Austen, a guy who's rich and single should definitely be looking. Of course, Jane Austen lived two hundred years ago, didn't own a cell phone or iPod, and never even heard of the Beatles. So I don't give a rat's ass what she thinks.
I’m still paying for my childhood. I don’t mean that in the way you might think. I don’t go to weekly therapy sessions, or have a string of tragic, codependent relationships. No, I mean that I pay $252 a month, including interest, into a joint account I share with my mother, to cover the costs of–well, everything. My eighth grade bedroom furniture. The food for my fifteenth birthday party. The corsage she bought me for prom the year I didn’t have a date. The gas money I asked for on September 23, 1998. I should just show you the spreadsheet my mom gave me when she presented me with the bill. It explains everything.
Leave the past behind, start fresh. That’s what the recruiter had said, and that’s what Andrew had done. Now frozen red rock crunched beneath his boots. Andrew surveyed the soulless Martian landscape. The military ship’s engines at his back hissed angrily, still upset from landing. A lone terracrawler snaked slowly towards him over uneven ground. Exactly how far away was hard to tell, his bubble visor played tricks with his eyes and threw off his depth perception. Andrew watched its progress until it arrived sooner than expected in front of him.
For one last second the roar assaults my ears and then with practiced concentration I close out the cheering crowd. Silence. I arch my body over the starting block; my toes grip the coarse edge. Swim cap and goggles mold my head. I focus on the swimmers in the water. Breathing in the humid air, my arms stretch out towards my teammate, Sasha as she sprints towards me in the lane. No sounds touch me.
Pastor Houston McPherson skulked through the field toward the glow. Though the night alone concealed him, he kept low, hidden under the corn, slipping between their stalks to avoid any disturbance that might give away his position.
Bianca shivered. Horizontal and naked were words that should bring certain images to mind. Not floating five feet in the air staring down at a warm, raspberry bubblebath without a frigging clue how to get back in there before she turned blue.
The day was young but dark as night. Strange things had been happening, but the villagers wouldn’t speak of it. It began with the bats hanging from the dead boughs of the oak trees skirting the lighthouse. Twenty two pairs of beady eyes pored into the stone washed building that gazed out to sea. Then eyes began appearing everywhere, blinking in the dark…watching. Fidelisai was one of the covert few who knew the implications of the odd events. She was one of the few torn between rejoicing and fretting. The dark shielded her as she came from the towering lighthouse. She struggled to keep the massive wooden door, which had protected scores of warriors, from shutting with a loud boom. The door was enormous–as if it had been made for giants. With bated breath Fidelisai leaned against the inscriptions etched into the unyielding entrance and watched the man standing beyond the trees approach her. She was nonplussed by his wind-blown appearance. Winka’s hair and clothes were permanently starched as if in flight. Her bright auburn hair glowed fiery red as her eyes changed hues from moonlight blue to midnight black. Those who had seen these changes always imagined it was a trick of the light.
Cursing her sister-in-law, Val carried the party decorations outside and threw them in the trash can. The cold, night air was a welcome shock after being stuck in the kitchen all day, making mini quiches and bacon-wrapped scallops for guests she didn’t know. She thought about hiding out here till the garbage men carried her away in the morning. Even the landfill would be a better home.
In this photograph you are three. You’re wearing that sailor suit mom made you wear at your birthday, even though you wanted to wear the cowboy outfit. If you’re three, I must be seven, and we’re sitting together on the grass, next to the bougainvillea at the white house with green shutters where mom used to wake up in the night to search for our floating bodies in the pool. You're leaning forward, your shoulders are hunched up, and you’re giggling. But you’re not looking at the camera; you’re looking at me, like you’re waiting for me to giggle too. But I’m not. I’m sitting straight as an arrow, eyes focused on the very center of the camera lens and I’m smiling, almost toothless. My hair is parted dead center and pulled back with pink plastic clips. I’m wearing the dress I got for Christmas that year, the pink velvet with the white collar and my hands are folded in the hollow of my lap. It looks like I don’t even know you are there, and it looks like I’m all you can see.
An hour after Callie Matheson boarded a commuter plane at Denver International Airport, the tiny aircraft plowed into a bank of bruise-colored clouds and began to buck like a bronco. Giant snowflakes streamed past the window as they hurtled toward earth. A nearby passenger gasped. Another screamed like a little girl. Callie sat up straight and held the armrests with a death grip that made the solid piece of plastic come loose in her left hand. Oh, crap! She had already died once this week but this time it would probably be for real. Damn her father. This was all his fault.
“She needs blood, Jane, safe blood. Cass has already given all she can.”
Boston police Sergeant Detective Jane Pirelli felt a blast of icy east coast breeze cut across her face. She tightened her grip on her cell phone and stared numbly at the oak and maple leaves, some as big as splayed hands, clattering in dry frozen color across the street. Everything appeared stark, moving in slow, frigid motion as she listened to the voice from her past. His guttural accent. His measured tone. Coming across an ocean from a continent and a lifetime away. Brandt Strydom. “I’m A pos, Jane,” Brandt prompted, and she heard the temperance, the worry in his powerful voice. “Kelli needs O neg. She needs you.”
Suddenly the hall lights went off and the stage lights came on, it had begun. The Chief Law Enforcer appeared on stage to reluctant but duty-bound applause. He was dressed head to toe in the black uniform, and he bore his usual disturbing expression of mild amusement. He raised his hand for silence, and began the short, scripted speech. ‘We are all here to bear witness to the punishment of Martin 479. 479 has repeatedly broken our rules and of paramount significance he has refused to wear his sleep mask. For these sins he will now be terminated and his existence will cease.’
Screams, silent but tangible, filled Darren's mind. He pressed his head against a white, metal door to quiet the noises from other rooms. Only the screams past the one door remained.
Liars – all of them. One girl in our little circle actually described cityscapes and clouds and gates and (get this) used the word "pearlescent," whatever that means. My only problem with her and all these other faking fakers said was that, unlike them, I had REALLY died for a short period of time – my heart stopped for 16 minutes on my 16th birthday – and let me tell you something: Everything these kids said about the other side was absolute Disneyland crap.
(C.J. Feyd, cjvsamazon@hotmail.com)
She would die. He’d been watching her for the last few weeks. She was predictable, every time taking the same path which led to the seat at the top of the incline, overlooking the pallid lake below. The path ran between two grass verges which were littered with decaying ochre leaves. A sudden thud made him glance to his side but it was only a lustrous conker, newly fallen; the last solitary fruit of autumn
Scared is a relative word until you’re in a situation where your heart stops beating long enough for your throat to swell and your body to go numb. I can’t feel the ground beneath me. My eyelids won’t shut. I’m not even sure I’m still alive.
Twelve-year-old David Hogan lay unconscious on the operating table while a drill burrowed into his skull misting the air with bits and pieces of his flesh and bone. Nervous excitement buzzed in the room like wet electric wires as doctors and nurses scrambled to keep him alive. They had come to the most dangerous part of the surgery where one tiny slip could be deadly. And the surgeon's hands on the drill trembled.
Damion rubbed age’s dull ache from his hands. Countless years marked by even more battles had strengthened the tendons and muscles, but time had also worn them down, replacing strength with occasional sharp pain. Closing his tired eyes, Damion dreamed of his past life. Battle and victory marked most of his memories, but darker images tainted his successes. A single frightening image loomed before him, mocking him and reminding him of his one great failure. The one that haunted his dreams.
Obsession. It had always been my defining trait. Once I developed a fascination with something I became like an addict, impossibly dominated by thoughts of my object of desire. And this summer my overwhelming obsession was the empty house next door. It had always been a preoccupation, but suddenly it was an unrelenting distraction. A passion. A siren ceaselessly calling my name. And tonight, I was going to get inside.
His hand slides under the edge of my shirt and touches my skin, at the waist near my belly button. I pull back from his lips. I knew this moment would come. I’ve been dodging his hands for weeks, but he’s been more aggressive lately. I mean, that’s to be expected, he’s male, right. We’ve only been dating for two months, but that’s like an eternity in dog years, and for a horny teenage boy I’m sure the experience is comparable. The car windows are fogged up, partially because of the hot air and the kissing, and partially because it’s the end of October and freaking cold outside. I think my breath is the one that’s cold, and his is the one that’s hot.
I searched the dark garage for clues, wondering if this was an elaborate hoax. Insulation was hastily tacked to the low ceiling, KISS and Van Halen posters hung on the walls, and amplifiers were scattered around the edge of the cinder block square. Seemed legitimate, but maybe these guys lured girls to their lair to audition for a band, shocked them with faulty equipment, and then dragged them to the basement. Once there, the girls came to and were forced to play Dungeons and Dragons for the remainder of their natural lives. Which actually didn't sound all that bad given my current situation.
Last night Doreen said, “Imagine the perfect color for a baby to snuggle and grow in. What do you think that color is? Fuzzy pink? Peachy golden?” From the table, I turned my head up at her; smiled. Coming to see Doreen is like stepping into a cup of herbal tea – the soothing fountain, dusty-spicy-old-house smell, potted green plants all around. Lemony sunlight yellow, I finally responded. But inside I thought: I know what the perfect color is. I’ve seen it. Red. Ugly, scary, deep dark red. Doreen got the needles ready.
Will's heart quickened as he drew his sword. He scanned the woods, ready to strike, but the forest was still and cool. Lowering his blade, he gazed at the lifeless man whose hollow eyes stared towards the canopy. Ivory feathers encircled the body, and a dagger rested near the man's shoulder. Will grasped the dagger and examined the intricate crest etched into the hilt. His mouth dropped. The etching matched the family crest on his sword.
Every other summer, John Meany rowed pairs of his children out from the dock he'd built with his own hands and threw them into the Atlantic Ocean. The summer of quarantine was no exception. According to her birth order, Helen took her turn in the rowboat with Eileen, a year younger and so skinny that her teeth chattered despite the warming sun on their backs. Sweat glistened in John Meany's black sideburns. When he finally pulled up his oars and let the boat glide into the rocking waves, Helen allowed herself one look over her shoulder. The sun had softened beyond the Meany home, lighting the windows ablaze. Semi-blinded, Helen turned to see Eileen's white limbs flash against the sky. She felt the boat pitch and steady under her father's sure stance, then the strength of his hands on her shoulders. In the air, she found the composure to hold her nose, shutting her eyes so that the darkness of the late August ocean didn't frighten her when she plunged, her hair loosing from its braids under the cold pressure of the sea.
I don’t remember when the craze hit because I woke up one morning and spotted ten on my block. They sprung up overnight. Like weeds. Or, zombies. You already know what I'm talking about. And if you don't, then you're not from this planet.
Loki Basgaard was named after a mythological Norse god. His parents were from Scandinavia, except it wasn’t the one above Europe, it was the village in Wisconsin. The Basgaards knew nothing about any culture’s mythology, and if they had, they probably would have picked another name for their son. Whether by providence or undesigned cruelty, he too wound up being a bored jackass who lived in a fantasy world.
The corkscrews—she could twist one through the side of his cheek. Or maybe the steak knives gleaming on the white-linen banquette table; ram those puppies into him, grind back and forth, get him talking. But oh my, she spotted the long skewers in a neat row by the grill, waiting to spear fresh pineapple and cubes of pork tenderloin. The Brazilians knew how to do grilled pineapple. Those would be lovely—eighteen inches of polished steel with a decorative handle on one end and a malicious point on the other. When she was done with him Kimmy could slip one between his ribs and kabob his heart; they had the length to just about go all the way through his torso and burst out the back. She picked up two skewers, keeping them down at her side as she stalked through the party in search of her date—so she could torture and kill him.
I'd never seen this many feral demons attack at once. They raced over the hard-packed snow toward my squad, sharp teeth bared. Butterflies fluttered in my throat. "Attack!" I grabbed for my walkie. We needed backup. Yesterday.
You may think it sounds insane for a genetic researcher or any rational man to agree to live with three serial killers, but to be fair, I thought there was only one at the time.
Two days have gone by since Stephen put the barrel of the old revolver his grandfather had given him for his thirteenth birthday into his mouth and pulled the trigger, ruining the light gray interior of his wife’s Lincoln Town Car. Susan waits for someone to tell her what to do. She sits in the overstuffed chair by the window, an afghan pulled tightly around her shoulders, and shivers in the sun. She lights another cigarette as people on TV fade in and out. Her apartment fills with long curling strands of smoke that mingle with dust motes and daylight. Susan stares at the swirling smoke and loses hours.
“The next stop is Armitage. Doors open on the right at Armitage,” the electronic, recorded voice boomed. Allie quickly stood and pushed her way through the standing passengers, cursing the “L” as she stepped outside. It was always like this on Friday at five o’clock, everyone packed inside like sardines in a crushed tin box. At least the weekend was here. Two work-free days ahead of her. Allie thought about her plans for the night, feeling equally independent and pathetic. Rather than join her colleagues at a bar, she came straight home from work. She knew she should get out and socialize more. She was never going to meet someone staying in all the time. But when she made the effort and went out, she often found herself bored with the bar scene and the people in it. It had yet to trump a night at home, alone, in pajamas, drinking wine and eating pizza.
Didn’t need a crystal ball to tell me Daddy was fixing to leave his teaching job for one better suited. I’d seen it too many times. How he’d come home all antsy and before long be flapping out the back door muttering the Lord’s name in vain and stay out a long time chunking rocks at the trash barrel. My best agates and quartz. On purpose.
Like any good Fine Art college graduate, I had taken a solemn oath: starve to death before ever resorting to the classroom. I’d even considered having “Teaching is the artist’s vampire” tattooed on my bicep. Yet here I sat in my beat-up Civic waiting for my job interview, parked across from the formidable ivy covered facade of Woodbridge Academy. The school that just last week graced the cover of Star Magazine because one of its celebrity students had been busted with a bag full of pot at the tender age of thirteen. I stared at the steady procession of limos and chauffeur driven Rolls-Royces. The last time I'd seen a flashy display of this magnitude was the Oscars viewing party at Leslie’s apartment. But today I didn’t have the buffer of three margaritas and a crappy 28” TV. This was real.
I’m running. Fast as I can. Hot wind in my face, and the horrible whooshing sound in my ears, that is in my left ear, the one that can still hear after the explosion. My right — not so lucky. A dull, aching, hallow thud, like my ear has been given the Van Gogh treatment, tells me I might need surgery, or worse. Maybe I’ll be half deaf, if I survive, of course. It’s always the little things.
It was a twenty-seven hour bus ride from Boston to Nashville. She could have traveled another way, but the bus was easy, the bus was cheap, the bus let her sit curled up in the back corner for hours on end watching the scenery swiftly pass, alone with her thoughts. Craggy mountains looking almost like home gave way to hills smoothed by the passage of time and finally to highlands and plateaus. When the sun ebbed away, sliding below the horizon ahead of them, she pulled up the hood of her grey cloak, covering her face and her hair. A lock of silver peeked out from beyond the hood’s woolen edge, turning black beneath the occasional streetlight.
The vibration in his left pants pocket initiated two chain reactions. The first, an adrenaline surge from the startling sensation in his pants caused Lucas Fowler to jolt back in his computer chair so fast the rollers couldn't keep up. The chair flipped. His head thudded against the hardwood floor. End of the first chain. The second chain had started too. Only it was a lot more subtle. It would last longer. And it would hurt a lot more than a bump on the head.
Detective Nick Moreno battled the flies with a flick of his wrist and a swat from his hand. He shifted his six-foot-two frame and balanced his weight on his new Nike running shoes trying with all his might to keep them clean; a tough task with the puddle of blood pooling under his feet. “I thought they did away with beheading people back when Henry the Eighth was still in office,” he said to his partner as he stepped carefully around the body. Arthur Bronski bent over at the waist and examined the severed body parts with the tip of his pen. “Yeah, guess the perp figured it the best way to treat head and shoulders now a days.”
The shop windows were never clean. It didn’t matter how hard Evelyn scrubbed at them. Each time she attempted it, the glass was as cloudy and smudged as though she’d never even tried. Evelyn was quite sure the other shops had long given up on cleanliness; Their windows were black and gritty and as clear as bricks. Were it not for the wooden signs hanging above the doors, it was impossible to have any idea what the shops might be selling or that anyone was there at all.
The sun was beginning to burn away the clouds and the sidewalks were almost steaming as I rode home along the Bayou. It was only the first week of May and Houston was already in full greenhouse effect. Think sauna, then add a molten ball of blinding light hovering just overhead. Sweat was streaming down my face and dampening areas I’d rather not discuss, but it was better than the alternative.
It sat there gnawing at my very being. My body, the intricate organs are engrossed
in a peculiar malaise. It takes all my attentions this small thing, it, petite winged- beast.
My noonday meditations have been profoundly agitated and dismissed because of this
presence. I laugh at first and leave the room but upon my return it still sits there. Its eyes, bulbous, a magenta red encased in a spider web- like black substance. The ringing of the phone in the kitchen distracts me but I stay still. I do not wish to answer for I am entertaining. A girlish voice echoes through my loft.
Nessilla stood in front of the Temple, waiting. Her weight shifting from foot to foot as she wished he would hurry. She needed to get inside before her courage deserted her and she ran off to hide. Why was he late today of all days? The Eldest was to announce the new Caretaker today and her only reason for staying in this village was to become that Caretaker.