Autopope! - Writer's meme

01:15 pm - Writer's meme

This appears to be a meme on the wander -- write down the first sentence or paragraph of every work of fiction you've currently got sitting in a file waiting for you to finish it:

The Jennifer Morgue:

If you work for the Laundry for long enough, eventually you get used to the petty insults; the paperclip audits, the disgusting canteen coffee, and the endless, unavoidable bureaucracy. Your aesthetic senses become dulled, and you go blind to the decaying-pea green paint and the vomit-beige fabric partitions between office cubicles. But the big indignities never fail to surprise, and they're the ones that can get you killed.

A Hostile Takeover:

Mike Fleming tensed unconsciously, steeling himself for the explosion, and crossed his fingers as the four SWAT team officers swung the battering ram back for a second knock. Not that tensing would do any good if there was a bomb in the self-storage room ...

"Are you sure this is safe?" asked Don, fingering his mobile phone like it was a lucky charm.

Trunk and Disorderly:

"I want you to know, darling, that I'm leaving you for another sex robot -- and she's twice the man you'll ever be," Laura explained as she flounced over to the front door, wafting an aroma of mineral oil behind her.

...

And that's all. I'm not long on unfinished work right now.

TJM is nearly ready to hand in to Golden Gryphon for editing and publication in November 2996, with a Berkeley imprint trade paperback to follow in late 2007 or 2008.

AHT is #4 in a series, barely started, my next book project, and that scene is likely to get shifted backwards into the body of the novel due to edits that occured post-submission on the previous book. A shame. I figure the punch-line later in the scene makes a great hook.

TaD has been stalled at 10,000 words for about two years, which is when I began writing it. (The elevator pitch is: "Jeeves and Wooster reincarnated in the 27th Century", in a society that looks back to the Anglo-American 19th/20th/21st centuries much as the upper classes of that culture looked back to the Greek and Roman classics.) I've just got to get my teeth into it sooner or later -- or someone else's teeth. (Currently waiting to see if Mike Swanwick can do something with it.)