List the first lines of your last twenty stories. See if you find any patterns.

It was all wrong, of course.

D bit his lip, and tried to find something polite to say in the face of Leon’s latest eyesore of a t-shirt.

At least, Sephiroth told himself wearily, the brothel was relatively upmarket.

Adamo frowns when he enters the common room.

Rook remembers his brother clear enough, but he remembers in pieces.

If there's anything to be said about being a kept thief, it's that it leaves you with a Great Septad stories to tell even if you're really fucking awful at it.

The dream resolved after a few blurred moments, like settling spectacles over his nose: a clear, crisp night, sakura bent low with the weight of their blossoms, and the scent of Haruka-san’s spiced cigarettes curling slowly around a crescent moon.

Hiru did not wake again until after negotiations were complete, a fact which undoubtedly contributed to their speed.

In the years between the burning of the farm and his eventual return to the coast, Lapis invented names and plied his trade on the plantations, tugging the storms around after him on a magical leash.

The djinn in books didn’t look like this.

Stretched out on his stomach with the sun’s heat dissolving his bones, Hiru should have been well past the point where the outside world was of consequence

The scent of dust hung thickly in the hall of records; merely opening the door could not hope to disturb it.

For as long as he can remember, and probably before even that, Vesca Howell knows that he has dreamed.

Hiru was in his twentieth year the first time he appeared before Seelie Court, and he was so afraid that he could hardly breathe.

Vesca is in the front room trying to decipher a dried and faded scroll when around him, the pets still.

Blood wells as the scalpel presses downward, and his aide siphons the blood swiftly away.

Youji sits at the edge of the spring, chin on his knees, hands around the tops of his shins, just below the water line, tail somewhere around his ankles.

There is a moment of silence in the pet shop as every occupant holds its breath.

It had started with a papercut.

The shot came first, of course, but the sharpness of the bullet’s impact seemed to precede the sound as far as his nerve endings were concerned.

---

Generally my sentences are either:
a) --what the hell where are we what's happening oh god PROMPT!
b) Something has just happened and reaction is about to happen.
c) Semi-biographical in nature.

I rarely start with dialogue because I have this thing where I think it's like cheating. This does not prevent me from starting with a character's thought, but that is usually part of the above approaches.



In other news, Oopie is in hospital and I nearly set my computer on fire this afternoon, but I did get to have pancakes with Wyrren and Maddie, and Maddie is going to make me an icon of the face Holmes made at the end of The Golden Beeches.

Now I'm going to bed because I'm tired and it's late.