Why am I publishing a ‘Friday’ post on Saturday, you might be asking? Well … to put it simply, my old computer was dying. I spent most of the week in safe mode rescuing nearly 20 gigabytes of files and stashing them in cloud drives (which is an extremely sloooooow process). And then Friday, the day I should have posted this, the new computer was delivered (five days earlier than promised, yay!!!). Setting it up has proven to be a sloooooow process too. I’d forgotten how many programs are dependent on one or two others to be there in order to open them. That means I’ve been downloading, uploading, and installing like mad. But I think everything is mostly done. I hope.
So….
I just read about #FirstLineFriday on Ruth Ann Nordin’s blog. She has become one of my favorite bloggers and is always full of great ‘writerly’ advice, and I’m enjoying getting to know her.
Borrowing this from her post (and I hope she borrowed it from the one she got it from!)…
It’s Friday again, so you know what that means. It’s #FirstLineFriday!
1. Create a post on your blog titled #FirstLineFriday, hashtag and all.
2. Explain the rules like I’m doing now.
3. Post the first one or two lines of a potential work, a work-in-progress, or a completed or published story.
4. Ask your readers for feedback and then encourage them to try #FirstLineFriday on their blogs (tagging is encouraged but not necessary).
I’ve chosen to go with what will likely be the first two lines in the Enza prequel, When All Was Well. With Enza, I wrote most scenes entirely out of order, laid them out in the way I wanted, then wrote more scenes tying everything together. This books seems to be going the same direction … but it worked the first time, so I imagine it will this time too.
The cover isn’t quite what I want yet, but this is sort of what it will look like when it’s finished.
Elliot Owens, holding the paper in hands that trembled, wished he’d waited another hour before tucking into the lunch Meg packed for him that morning. The thick ham sandwich and oatmeal cookies, which had been his pleasure to eat not thirty minutes ago, now felt as heavy in his stomach as the dumplings Grandmother Carson piled on his plate every Sunday afternoon when he was a boy.
Hope you enjoyed that excerpt. And now, I’m going to tag Dale Amidei and Diana Layne.
Hmm. I really suck at responding to comments sometimes – except I thought I HAD. And I probably did and just closed the window before I hit comment. :/
Anyway… It’s always interesting when a story rebels and won’t let you write it in a ‘normal’ way, isn’t it? There have been times when I’ve had to skip scenes, or the occasional chapter, and come back to them later (I’ve always suspected I needed to figure out what happens later in order to know what happened then), but I’ve never written EVERYTHING out of order, lol. Well, except the first chapter. For whatever reason, that kind of wrote itself.
Thanks on the food.use. Not sure why a memory of heavy, doughy dumplings came to mind when I wrote that but who knows how my mind words. 😀
I hadn’t thought of tagging more than one person for this thing. 🙂 It’s a good idea.
I don’t often write stories out of order, but one of my current works in progress refuses to come at me in a linear fashion, so I’m having to do what you did. Then I have to go back and link one scene to another when I finally know to do.
I love your use of describing the food to convey mood. That’s was really neat. 😀