How to write a book series...

What to do When Adding Beer and Naked Ladies Doesn't Fit Your Genre

The barn was molten red, the cat had dreadlocks and my foot developed a humpy bunion overnight.

-Uknown, and always will be

Yeah. This stupid sentence can take a jaunty hike up, steep and bramble-filled, Author Jones Peek. When you attempt to initiate your story, chapter, flash fiction, Dear John, you must grab the reader by the shirt collar and shake them into your world, if you’re good you’ll squeeze their breath away. You gotta carve out a fat slice of time to assure you get them in the gut with whatever revelation yields a juicy beginning.

Prime rib examples:

The reason I was able to buy a house in the San Francisco Bay area during the dot com explosion had a little something to do with my brother, Chris, throwing a rusty butcher knife at my eye twenty years earlier.

-- Beth Lisick, from her book of stories, Everybody into the Pool (ReganBooks, 2005)

Sheena baby, the one that I loved, and I were walking around.

--Larry Brown, Big Bad Love (Random House, 1990)

Do what I do: come from a family, have parents, have done things, shitty things, over and over and over.

--Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way (3rd Bed, 1996)

Meaty. If you’re vegetarian or vegan, Tofurky-y. Each opener here has it’s own sharp voice, clearly illustrating that not only is not necessary to be complex, but being truthful to your own writing style that sets your work apart. If you got no style then you best write daily until one bleeds out every pore. Author Jones cops to having rewritten openers up to 20 or 30 times – damn, that’s how important it is. Think about it this way, when you meet someone and they say, “Nice weather we’re having, no?” Don’t know about you, but A. Jones has already curled up for a drooly nap and wishes for the speaker to stop speaking, stat. First impressions as Dale Carnegie says, are everything, so don’t write some drab, ordinary sentence to start your yarn or you’ll simply create sleepy puppy piles all around your writing. Make’em take the jump off a cliff into your river of words. Oh. Yeah.