While my giveaway has been completed. I will sometime in the future be giving another copy of Trapped in a Curse away. I’ve also made a new entry on my blog on my webpage. I’m planning on making an entry every week this month. Something I tried to do at the end of every year. That’s the blog on my webpage, not the one here. If you search the older entries you can find information that can allow you to get a copy of the book. So far nobody’s followed the instructions that I left there. So I’m still giving that copy away.

When I write I find the first sentence the hardest part of anything. Particularly the hardest part of writing a book. The first sentence should be the sentence on which the entire book hangs. If it’s not a good starting place I find I can’t keep going, even if I have a complete story to write. When I first tried to write Trapped in a Curse I started in the wrong place and as a result scrapped the original attempt. I don’t think I even bothered to save it. About three months later I came up with the new first sentence of the book and started in the right place. I was still very slow at writing and was very impressed when I managed to write an entire page, until I realized that I had an awful long ways to go to get a book. The sentence “Talida was searching for armour.” I found to be in much better opening sentence. Although I was never fully satisfied with it. I tried several alterations including one that the had an entire paragraph before it, describing the city of Norwitch. Now I think it’s a pretty good opening sentence.

The opening sentence for Good Doctor Poor Mage I think is somewhat better. At least I haven’t tried rewriting it. I think it it’s a little on the long side. It goes “D0k (he pronounced it Doc) hurried after Misty through the darkened streets of Somerton.” it certainly got me writing faster, since I wrote the entire first chapter of the book along with that sentence. Usually I only write a paragraph or two after I get my first sentence down.

As for the opening sentence of Stretching Their Wings, A Meadow and Lark Adventure. It has an opening sentence for the prologue and a second opening sentence for chapter 1. The first opening sentence is “Lark had stopped screaming.” A sentence that I quite like. It grabs my attention and allowed me to write several paragraphs. The second opening sentence isn’t as good. It doesn’t really grabbed my attention, but it does introduce the longest book I’ve actually written. It goes “The large covered wagon rolled slowly down the street.” It doesn’t say much about the world or what is going to happen. It doesn’t even introduce any questions for the most part.