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A good first line is not always necessary because who stops reading after one sentence? But it can be extremely useful in building expectations for the style and characterisation that will follow. While book jackets can indicate a broad genre, that line can define the subgenre. The opening may establish the tone, character, location, era or season but it can also pull a reader into the realm of the story that follows, and often into the head of the protagonist or into an alternate reality. When we open a book, we are ready to embark on a journey. The starter...

Full Conceal Folding Full-Size M3D and Sub-Compact M3S Hi-Capacity 9mm Pistols - From the corner of her eye, Christina saw the lumbering man aiming his pistol at her and she knew she was about to die. She didn't close her eyes. When the shot came a moment later, the blast was deafening. She was surprised she didn't feel anything. It wasn’t until the fifth blast that she became aware the shadow of the lumbering figure was gone and she heard what she thought to be the weak tinkling of small bells. Tiny bright objects began to dance on the polished...

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — Wind gusts, heavy rain and lightning have forced people to evacuate the media tents outside of the Wells Fargo Center and take shelter less than an hour before the opening gavel on the final night of the Democratic National Convention. Officials say that the media tents in the vicinity of the Wells Fargo Center are not designed to fully protect people in the event of a direct lightening strike. They’re strongly recommending that people leave their tents due to lightening that becomes a concern when the strikes are within a six-mile radius of the DNC and evacuate...

A University of Wisconsin Oshkosh associate professor has won top prize for her cringe-inducing prose. Sue Fondrie won the 2011 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest -- an annual award that challenges entrants to compose bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. The contest takes its name from the Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who began his Paul Clifford with, "It was a dark and stormy night." At just 26 words, Fondrie's submission is the shortest grand prize winner in the contest's history, "proving that bad writing need not be prolix, or even very wordy," officials said. "Cheryl's mind turned like the vanes of...

Late payments on U.S. home equity lines of credit rose to a 5-1/2 year high in the second quarter of 2007 but delinquencies on many other types of consumer loans fell, the American Bankers Association said Wednesday. In its quarterly report on consumer borrowing, the bankers group said delinquencies in repaying home equity lines of credit rose to 0.77 percent in the April-June period. That compared to a rate of 0.60 percent in the first quarter and represented the highest rate since the fourth quarter of 2001 when the rate was 0.81 percent. However, the rate of closed-end home equity...

More Americans Say Value Of Their Home Has Fallen Topics:Housing | Real Estate | Consumers | Economy (U.S.)By Reuters | 21 Sep 2007 | 10:48 AM ET Font size: A record 26% of U.S. homeowners say the value of their homes has fallen during the past year, above the previous peak of 24% seen in 1992, a survey released Friday showed. Reflecting the extent of the prolonged housing slump, 21% of homeowners polled in September expect the value of their home to decline in the year ahead, up from 18% in August, according to the data from Reuters/University of Michigan...

Subject: FWD: Writing Contest For you lovers of good writing, these are 10 winners of the Bulwer-Lytton contest --AKA Dark and Stormy Night Contest-- (run by the English Dept. of San Jose State University), wherein one writes only the first line of a bad novel. 10) "As a scientist, Throckmorton knew that if he were ever to break wind in the echo chamber, he would never hear the end of it." 9) "Just beyond the Narrows, the river widens." 8) "With a curvaceous figure that Venus would have envied, a tanned, unblemished oval face framed with lustrous thick brown hair,...

Since 1982, the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. The BLFC was the brainchild (or Rosemary's baby) of Professor Scott Rice, whose graduate school excavations unearthed the source of the line "It was a dark and stormy night." Sentenced to write a seminar paper on a minor Victorian novelist, he chose the man with the funny hyphenated name, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who was best known for perpetrating The Last Days of Pompeii, Eugene Aram,...