Flogometer for Stephanie; would you keep reading?

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Flogging the Quill has been named one of the 100 best writing sites here. There are other sites of interest, so you might want to give it a look.
The Flogometer challenge: can you craft a first page that compels me to turn to the next page? Caveat: Please keep in mind that this is entirely subjective.

Note: all the Flogometer posts are here.

What's a first page in publishingland? In a properly formatted novel manuscript (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type, etc.) there should be about 16 lines on the first page (first pages of chapters/prologues start about 1/3 of the way down the page). Directions for submissions are below.

Some homework. Before sending your novel's opening, you might want to read these two FtQ posts: Story as River and Kitty-cats in Action. That'll tell you where I'm coming from, and might prompt a little rethinking of your narrative.

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Stephanie’s first 16 lines (YA story):

The world ended in a cacophony akin to a crappy Britney Spears song. Manufactured on the top floor of a multi-national company in Los Angeles, it was a mishmash of humping noises and synthesized wah-wah sounds that couldn't finish too soon. In the dance club of the final days the lights went out and billions of hipsters wavered on the floor with no one to tell them what to believe in. And then came the fever and the storms and the angels of death, and everyone fell down.

Everyone except me. I am heavy metal, the beast that cannot die.

* * *

I head north along the highway, churning my skinny legs as fast as I could. Its tornado seasons and the dust storms swell and curl over the cracking road, but I can't slow down to wipe my eyes or drain the snot from my nose.

Don't ask me which highway I'm walking. The Highway to fucking hell, for all I care. All the signs blew over, and I ain't stopping to ask directions. Where I am and where I'm going is of no concern to me as long as it ain't where the Seraphs are.

I figure maybe New England ain't been hit by fires, and maybe the forests will clot out this incessant dust. I figure the Seraphs are too busy expanding their territory to the (snip)

I turned the page
Except for a couple of careless mistakes, the writing is clean and the voice is strong. And I’m a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction. I do wish the character didn’t use “ain’t,” but that’s personal—it’s a word that’ grated on my ears since I was a kid. There is tension here because he’s being pursued, but more than that the story questions of what caused this world and what will happen. Notes:

The world ended in a cacophony akin to a crappy Britney Spears song. Manufactured on the top floor of a multi-national company in Los Angeles, it was a mishmash of humping noises and synthesized wah-wah sounds that couldn't finish too soon. In the dance club of the final days the lights went out and billions of hipsters wavered on the floor with no one to tell them what to believe in. And then came the fever and the storms and the angels of death, and everyone fell down.

Everyone except me. I am heavy metal, the beast that cannot die. (This is misleading because later we find that he is pursued by people (as near as I could tell), and this implies that everyone died except him.)

* * *

I head north along the highway, churning my skinny legs as fast as I could. Its can. It’s tornado seasons and the dust storms swell and curl over the cracking road, but I can't slow down to wipe my eyes or drain the snot from my nose.

Don't ask me which highway I'm walking. The Highway to fucking hell, for all I care. All the signs blew are blown over, and I ain't stopping to ask directions. Where I am and where I'm going is of no concern to me as long as it ain't where the Seraphs are.

I figure maybe New England ain't been hit by fires, and maybe the forests will clot out this incessant dust. I figure the Seraphs are too busy expanding their territory to the (snip)

Comments, anyone?

For what it’s worth.

Ray

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Public floggings available. If I can post it here,

1. send 1st chapter or prologue plus 1st chapter as an attachment (cutting and pasting and reformatting from an email is a time-consuming pain) and I'll critique the first couple of pages.
2. Please format your submission as specified at the front of this post.
3. Please include in your email permission to post it on FtQ.
4. And, optionally, permission to use it as an example in a book if that's okay.
5. If you’re in a hurry, I’ve done “private floggings,” $50 for a first chapter.
6. If you rewrite while you wait you turn, it’s okay with me to update the submission.

ARCHIVES

© 2009 Ray Rhamey

Comments

[Kat]

I'm not sure I would turn the page, although I agree the voice is there. For the first paragraph, I wasn't sure if it was really the end of the world, or if it was just the end of a dance club (I read it twice and I still can't tell until the second paragraph). Music and the music scene are always written with such hyperbole, and if one doesn't catch that it's the other way around in this case, then the statement "I am heavy metal" doesn't clear things up.

I am a music fan, and I hate both Briney Spears-style dance music and heavy metal equally, so that might be part of my issue. I could see someone who does like heavy metal getting hooked.

[Scott V]

I was confused by the beginning, but I did think that it was an interesting start nonetheless.

[Maya]

I loved the drama in the first bit, and the way Stephanie made such an otherworldly event (the apocalypse) so grounded in humorous, realistic detail. It makes the grandiosity of the APOCALYPSE so much more engaging to me.

However, the first part was so well-written that I found the voice in the second part off-putting. I don't have a strong feeling either way about "ain't" in general, but I think in this case it seems odd for an obviously intelligent, modern speaker. (I almost got flashes to Huckleberry Finn as I read "ain't" here!) Just from a practical standpoint, I also wonder if the f-word is a bad idea in the first page of a YA novel? Finally, I found the second part a bit hard to visualize. I'd suggest some more grounding details. What does "churning skinny legs" mean? Is the character running or walking or just kind of weirdly spinning his legs (the image that popped into my mind)? It would actually help me see what's going on if I knew that the character was walking barefoot dragging a sack or what. I also am confused about how the character can be trying to go to New England if he or she doesn't know where the highway is going.

I liked the atmosphere, though, and this story intrigued me even though I said I wouldn't turn the page. I wouldn't turn the page as is, but I feel absolutely confident I would be interested in a final draft of this story.

Ray, I donated! I decided to donate what I thought I'd pay for a fiction-writing book giving me this kind of information. (I'm nervous about subscriptions because I forget about them.)

Maya

[Darla]

I loved the opening paragraph, especially the first line.

The line about being heavy metal first made me think cyborg, but from reading the second paragraph that doesn't seem to be the case.

The voice is great and I'd certainly read on, however, the use of "ain't" does make me cringe. Maybe not using it three times in such a short span would help it not stand out so much.

[Small Grain Farm]

I barely made it through the first paragraph. The words evoked vivid images, but the images were static without anything to compel me to read on, nothing that cried out for resolution. Looking at the language, the description is evocative, but the verbs don't show much motion or emotion. Injecting more vigorous verbs might help.

The following paragraphs were more interesting. You might consider just ditching the first paragraph. I think that would have made it for me.

[Kami]

I would turn the page, but barely. I was confused by the heavy metal also--I wondered if the pov character was a cyborg or AI or something, so in some ways I would have turned the page on false pretenses. To learn that the pov character was human disappointed me, but I got over. If I then learned that he wasn't alone would have sunk it for me. I would have been misled too many times by the author and would expect that throughout the rest of the novel imprecise language would lead me to one conclusion and then slap me with another.

Nitpicks--the world ending has a lot of different meanings now, especially with still lingering fears that the Earth might be swallowed up by a singularity generated by scientists. Be more precise. The churning legs also threw me off. I don't know why he has a snotty nose. Crying? Sick? I have no other clues. And I really have trouble with the heavy metal beast thing, enough to repeat myself here. When setting up speculative fiction, I have a lot of trouble balancing voice, colloquialisms with clear language that won't make a reader think that the sky is literally on fire (or make him think that he's viewing a sunset and then realizing later that no, the sky really was on fire.)

I hope this helps!

[Jess]

The voice is good and the idea seems like it could be strong, but ultimately I didn't turn the page. There were too many small dissonant notes (ha) for me - legs "churning", the grammatical typos that should have been fixed before submission, the music opening that, like a commenter above me, made me wonder if the world was simply a dance club, the over-dramatic "except me" which we then find out isn't true, if maybe New England wasn't hit... and finally, that blasted "ain't" drives me bonkers, too.

However, those are just my nits. There's a lot to like. The Seraph concept, don't ask me which highway... I love that you don't waste time with exposition - we know what we need to and you get us moving quickly; there's nothing we can't fill in ourselves or wait to discover. Also, being a heavy metal fan, this makes me like your hero(ine? I can't tell). I wonder if music ties into the story, though? If it doesn't, it makes the opening very random and probably unnecessary, since I'm sure you could come up with a clever way to say the world ended in a way that's relevant. All in all, good job though. :)

[Julie Butcher-Fedynich]

I like it. I liked the music at the start, the seraphs at the end. Typos can be fixed easily. A voice is harder to find. I love end of the world fiction.

[mai]

The first paragraph is missing the contrast between a lean, edgy personality and an overwhelming time/place that the rest of the opening has.

This will get dated pretty fast: "akin to a crappy Britney Spears song" (imagine rereading that in ten years...). That phrase, and the sentence that follows, could be dropped with no harm to the story or setup.

In the third paragraph, this sentence snippet, "I figure the Seraphs are too busy expanding their territory to the..." is running at a grade level or two higher than the rest of the opening, in terms of social / business phraseology.

There's a tense mistake -- "I head north... ...as fast as I could".

Did the author mean "cloud", not "clot", in the third paragraph? If "clot" is an intentional misusage meant to show the narrator's educational background, would he or she know enough to use "incessant"?

I'd have turned the page. The texture and pace of the second paragraph is a wonder.

[mai]

Sorry about paragraph miscounts:

When I wrote third, I meant last.
When I wrote second, I meant third and fourth.