Opening Lines

I find that my great American novel is continually getting stuck behind a thousand other duties. I promised my wife a book by Thanksgiving…1987.

One of the biggest problems is that I come up with great opening lines. But that’s it. They stare up at me with expectant eyes, saying, “Well? Is that all?” And, sadly, it is.

Take this one, for example: “The apocalypse had not been kind to Binky.”

It’s a great opening line! Change the silly name (or not) to a hero struggling against any number of problems (God, nuclear monsters, loneliness, whatever), and I’m sure it would be a smash. But, alas, that’s all I got. [Editor’s note: Even so, don’t frickin’ try and steal it, lahooser.]

It’s not that I can’t write. It’s that I don’t write. Blogging has both helped and hurt. It has helped by giving me an excuse to spew forth meaningless prose on a daily basis. Unfortunately, it has also given me the bad habits of spilling said spewage onto other peoples’ blogs (too much commenting) and of writing short “Lookie what new blog toy I found” and “What kind of tree frog are you?” entries instead of real stories.

So, here’s my very early New Year’s Resolution. From now on, I will limit my comments to short, non-snarky entries where I have an actual opinion on the author’s post (yah, like that’ll happen), and I will write at least one, essay-length post each week.

It’s either that or stop blogging more than diary entries such as:

October 5, 2002
Stuck on chapter 13. Can’t decide on kind of leather for Charmian to wear.

No, I don’t think so. Back to work.

The apocalypse had not been kind to Binky. During the first three months after the great conflagration, he wandered around what used to be London, looking for his left shoe and a good pint of Monkman