After only one bite the hamburger flipped out of his hands and onto the carpet, ketchup side down, and from that point on, [main character name inserted here] knew life was going to be one bumpy ride.
You know, I would have given that sentence to the man at the coffee shop last night for free. It’s not a particularly good sentence, I’m aware of that, but the man needed help, sitting there at his table with a small stack of his self-published books there in front of him, waiting for people with interest and $18.95 in their pocket to spare.
I shouldn’t talk. I’ve never published a book. I have no room to talk; I haven’t earned the right. I can think of a hundred reasons not to say anything about the man’s opening paragraph, which, incidentally, was as far as I could read before I felt the coffee beginning to reheat in my stomach.
“It’s the first of a trilogy,” the man said.
Maybe I should have read further. Maybe the opening paragraph just hit too close to home. The man in the paragraph, walking out of the lottery office with the 30 million dollar check in his pocket, thinking of the possibilities, only to have the “smile quickly left his face as he remembered his wife, [wife’s name here], his companion of thirty years, now gone. Torn from him…
I believe there was a bit of geography thrown into the paragraph as well. The setting was complete. The reader on his way!
“It’s a science fiction story, loosely based on modern, scientific discoveries,” the man said. His wife, sitting across the table from him, nodded in agreement and handed me a bookmark and flier.
I love writers. Filled with words, overflowing with hope, smiling out through the window of the short bus as the world passes by.
I stared a bit more at the book, pretending I was reading, turning it around in my hands a little. I perused the back cover, reading the author’s biography. Longtime Northwest Oregon resident, married, a mathematician. I’d forgotten that mathematicians sometimes write fiction. I wished him and his wife luck, made a mental note not to be photographed in a fedora (should I ever be published), and left the coffee shop.
As luck would have it, the short bus was there at the curb, waiting for me. The driver even knew my name!