Opening Passages Meme
Gacked from 
melissatreglia:
List the first lines of your last ten stories. See if there are any patterns.
These aren't so much first lines as opening passages.
1) Ralph Mouldy wasn't surprised that it took a hefty bribe to free himself from the muster-roll. A man had to pay for what he craved; that was the way of the world, whether you were a prince in Ethiopia or a farmer in Gloucestershire. His wife Jane would be cross that he'd paid forty shillings for the privilege of returning home, and she would be even angrier if she knew that he'd called her his "old dame" and had implied, very strongly, that she was his aged and almost helpless mother. (From Three Things That Never Happened To the Muster-Roll Soldiers, Henry IV Part 2 -- Shakespeare)
2) "It wasn't all bad," Crowley said. "I was happy to reunite Arthur with his sister."
Not that that had gone well at all. And it hadn't been his fault, no matter what Aziraphale thought.
The problem had started with Morgana. As humans went, she'd been tolerable. More than tolerable, if he was going to be honest, because in his line of work, he didn't meet many sorceresses who were the spiritual equivalent of Switzerland. (From The Pendragon-Gorlois Family Reunion [The Historically Inaccurate Remix], Good Omens/Arthurian Mythology crossover)
3) Her name was Indala. Her brother’s was Erelur. In later years, she clung to both these facts, just as she clung to the memory of her last glimpse of home.
She could see it with ease if she closed her eyes: the sinople sky, simultaneously the bright scarlet of rubies and the dark green of emeralds; the pearlescent fog shimmering over their parents’ flocks of nomadic lilies, whose voices could charm or terrify; and the gentle glow of perpetual twilight illuminating the river of brilliant light that marked the border between home and the world of humans. (From From Under a Sinople Sky, English Folklore [a subset of Fairy Tales and Related Fandoms])
4) It is often said that witches and wizards can correct any illness not caused by magic, but this is untrue. While we can usually survive unscathed accidents that would kill most Muggles, few witches or wizards have concerned themselves with healing contagious non-magical diseases. We scarcely acknowledge that a mind can be racked by fear, hatred, rage, depression, guilt and grief as anguish-inducing as the Cruciatus Curse, though far less magical; we house the worst at St. Mungo's and ignore the pain of those who are still nominally functional. And despite the existence of Squibs, we rarely admit that children can be born without other physical abilities that many consider almost as vital as the inborn magical power we value so highly.
It is no wonder, then, that the pre-Hogwarts tale of Helga Hufflepuff and Rowena Ravenclaw at has been largely forgotten. For it is also a tale of Helga's Muggleborn students-Astrugona Alcon, a rabbi's daughter from what is now known as Valencia, Spain; Oswyn, the bastard son of a fisherwoman of Roman blood and a Norse sailor who had gone a-viking; and Merwenna, a merchant's child who was born deaf-and what it meant to teach "the rest" at a time when only tutoring the purebloods, the knights and nobles, and the natural scholars was deemed acceptable...
-Introduction to Teaching the Rest: The Biography of Helga Hufflepuff by Zipporah Tully, St. Martin's Land Publishers, London, UK, ©1934, p. viii.
(From Dances, Dulcimers and Marginalia Dragons, Harry Potter)
5) Reality isn't what most people think.
People like to pretend that reality is solid, which it mostly isn't, and immutable, which it couldn't be and remain real. Animals, insects and vegetation come into being, grow and die in swamps, despite an abundance of stagnant pools of water. Even in ice-coated wastelands that most people[1] ignore, mites, earthworms, lichen and of course the odd beetle live their lives in blithe disregard of the inhospitable climate. Life, as the proverb states, finds a way-and that almost always involves adaptation and change, even when magic isn't involved.
When it is, adaptation and change still happen, but very, very quickly. Especially if magic has already convinced reality that something that wasn't originally part of it really and truly belongs there.
Like, for example, an inter-dimensional portal. Or, if you want to use an even simpler term, a door.
[1]Except for natives, scientists, explorers, tourists, environmentalists, meteorologists, storytellers, and any other person throughout the multiverse who might view icy wastelands with interest and/or enthusiasm. This is a surprisingly large number...surprising to those who consider themselves "most people," anyway.
(From Portal Authority, Discworld/Marvel Cinematic Universe crossover)
6) It had never occurred to Tris that, at Lightsbridge, being bright and capable might not be enough.
It wasn't that she couldn't do the work. She could. She couldn't coast in all of her classes--few were that easy--but she'd struggled harder to master seeing the future on the wind.
The problem was that she wasn't...she fumbled for the right word. Perhaps malleable came close.
(From A Square Peg at Lightsbridge, Emelan -- Tamora Pierce)
7) This is the last story I will ever tell.
My name...no one not of our race could pronounce it, for it is a combination of chemical signals which we emit when predators approach, the flash of a brilliant shade of coruscating oseyn which our leaves flicker in budding season, and a deliberate drop in body temperature, which all of us do--have done--when soil and rock shake and the sea boils. We cannot change the sea in which we grow, but we can freeze ourselves inside and out, preserving ourselves to an extent until the world is safe to grow in once more.
But no drop in temperature can save us from the Worms. (From Little Elegy, The Host -- Stephenie Meyer)
8) Up then spoke the Faery Queen;
An angry queen was she.
'Woe betide the wretch who's ta'en
The best knight of Our company.'
The Fairy Queen's fierce hatred didn't trouble Janet that Halloween night. In fact, as she stood at Mile Cross, swaying as she held tightly to the cloak-wrapped form of the man she had just won from the Fairy Court, she smiled. The Queen had been beaten by a mortal; of course she would be bitterly angry. It was horrible of the Fairy Queen to tell Tam Lin that she would have blinded him, turned him into a tree forever, or eaten his very heart rather than free him-but those were just words. She couldn't mean it. And she couldn't truly be warning Janet of misfortune. (From A Haven of Iron, Tam Lin (Traditional Ballad))
9) It was a terrible thing, Joan of Kent reflected as the royal barge sailed toward Blackheath, to be both Queen of England and a rebel against the crown. Especially since she hadn't planned to rebel against her husband, much less lead her only surviving son and her brand new daughter-in-law into doing the same thing. (From Come the Good Peasant to Cheer, 14th Century CE RPF AU)
10) Not long after he had been castrated, the boy who was not yet known as Varys began hearing about a baseborn dragonrider.
That was hardly the first time he had heard of her. He had been part of an acting troupe, after all. The owner of the troupe had been careful to put on plays that would not offend those who ruled any of the Free Cities, putting on airy baubles like Lady Shella and the Rainbow Knight or tales of tragic heroes like Azor Ahai and his wife. Nissa Nissa's spirit, in the troupe's version, had appeared in a flash of phosphor, placing her hands over Azor Azai's as he gripped Lightbringer and swung at a hideous monster that existed only to serve worse ones. The boy had played a child captured by the monster's masters, human-devouring demons riding skeletal beasts out of nightmare. (From The Sister of the Stranger, A Song of Ice and Fire -- George R.R. Martin)
***
Of the last ten stories, nine are written in third person. 2 and 10 are both told by male protagonists (or at least by a demon and a genitally mutilated person who present/identify as male). 6 and 9 are both told by female protagonists. 1, 3, 4, 5, and 8 are all multiple POV. 1 has two male POVs and one female one; 3 is one female POV for most of the story and one male POV for one scene; and 4 is mostly female POVs (Helga's letters to Rowena; Rowena's journal, notes by Astrugona, one of Helga's students; and four female writers or translators) but there are also three male writers whose excerpts are part of the story. 5 features a nameless narrator, Steve Rogers and Granny Weatherwax. 8 starts in Janet's point of view but spends much of the story in Tam Lin's.
7 is the odd one out, being the only story told in first person and the only one told by a plant (who doesn't identify as any gender or sex).
4 is the only story told in the form of letters, excerpts from lessons, scribbled notes, biographies, etc.
Nine out of ten of the stories were written in the past tense. Again, the odd one out is 7, written in the present tense.
Six out of ten of the stories--2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8--involve magic all the way through. 1 partially involves magic, as it takes place in three different universes: a realistic universe, an occult universe, and a science fiction universe.
Two of the stories have disabled characters. The science fiction section of 1 is told from the POV a medic who, in a rational world, would probably be classified as legally blind. It also contains a soldier who has hypersensitive hearing, which tends to be a problem in battle. 4 features a deaf-mute witch as one of Helga's students...which is tricky in a time before sign language was recorded.
Three deal with the Fair Folk--3, 5 and 8.
Two of the stories are crossovers--2 and 5.
9--an AU--is the only story with historical elements that depicts an actual event (the Peasants' Rebellion), alhough the king who was actually in charge at the time has been altered.
I'm not sure what to take away from this, except that I really like writing stories about magic in third person and the past tense. Does anyone else see anything?
melissatreglia:
List the first lines of your last ten stories. See if there are any patterns.
These aren't so much first lines as opening passages.
1) Ralph Mouldy wasn't surprised that it took a hefty bribe to free himself from the muster-roll. A man had to pay for what he craved; that was the way of the world, whether you were a prince in Ethiopia or a farmer in Gloucestershire. His wife Jane would be cross that he'd paid forty shillings for the privilege of returning home, and she would be even angrier if she knew that he'd called her his "old dame" and had implied, very strongly, that she was his aged and almost helpless mother. (From Three Things That Never Happened To the Muster-Roll Soldiers, Henry IV Part 2 -- Shakespeare)
2) "It wasn't all bad," Crowley said. "I was happy to reunite Arthur with his sister."
Not that that had gone well at all. And it hadn't been his fault, no matter what Aziraphale thought.
The problem had started with Morgana. As humans went, she'd been tolerable. More than tolerable, if he was going to be honest, because in his line of work, he didn't meet many sorceresses who were the spiritual equivalent of Switzerland. (From The Pendragon-Gorlois Family Reunion [The Historically Inaccurate Remix], Good Omens/Arthurian Mythology crossover)
3) Her name was Indala. Her brother’s was Erelur. In later years, she clung to both these facts, just as she clung to the memory of her last glimpse of home.
She could see it with ease if she closed her eyes: the sinople sky, simultaneously the bright scarlet of rubies and the dark green of emeralds; the pearlescent fog shimmering over their parents’ flocks of nomadic lilies, whose voices could charm or terrify; and the gentle glow of perpetual twilight illuminating the river of brilliant light that marked the border between home and the world of humans. (From From Under a Sinople Sky, English Folklore [a subset of Fairy Tales and Related Fandoms])
4) It is often said that witches and wizards can correct any illness not caused by magic, but this is untrue. While we can usually survive unscathed accidents that would kill most Muggles, few witches or wizards have concerned themselves with healing contagious non-magical diseases. We scarcely acknowledge that a mind can be racked by fear, hatred, rage, depression, guilt and grief as anguish-inducing as the Cruciatus Curse, though far less magical; we house the worst at St. Mungo's and ignore the pain of those who are still nominally functional. And despite the existence of Squibs, we rarely admit that children can be born without other physical abilities that many consider almost as vital as the inborn magical power we value so highly.
It is no wonder, then, that the pre-Hogwarts tale of Helga Hufflepuff and Rowena Ravenclaw at has been largely forgotten. For it is also a tale of Helga's Muggleborn students-Astrugona Alcon, a rabbi's daughter from what is now known as Valencia, Spain; Oswyn, the bastard son of a fisherwoman of Roman blood and a Norse sailor who had gone a-viking; and Merwenna, a merchant's child who was born deaf-and what it meant to teach "the rest" at a time when only tutoring the purebloods, the knights and nobles, and the natural scholars was deemed acceptable...
-Introduction to Teaching the Rest: The Biography of Helga Hufflepuff by Zipporah Tully, St. Martin's Land Publishers, London, UK, ©1934, p. viii.
(From Dances, Dulcimers and Marginalia Dragons, Harry Potter)
5) Reality isn't what most people think.
People like to pretend that reality is solid, which it mostly isn't, and immutable, which it couldn't be and remain real. Animals, insects and vegetation come into being, grow and die in swamps, despite an abundance of stagnant pools of water. Even in ice-coated wastelands that most people[1] ignore, mites, earthworms, lichen and of course the odd beetle live their lives in blithe disregard of the inhospitable climate. Life, as the proverb states, finds a way-and that almost always involves adaptation and change, even when magic isn't involved.
When it is, adaptation and change still happen, but very, very quickly. Especially if magic has already convinced reality that something that wasn't originally part of it really and truly belongs there.
Like, for example, an inter-dimensional portal. Or, if you want to use an even simpler term, a door.
[1]Except for natives, scientists, explorers, tourists, environmentalists, meteorologists, storytellers, and any other person throughout the multiverse who might view icy wastelands with interest and/or enthusiasm. This is a surprisingly large number...surprising to those who consider themselves "most people," anyway.
(From Portal Authority, Discworld/Marvel Cinematic Universe crossover)
6) It had never occurred to Tris that, at Lightsbridge, being bright and capable might not be enough.
It wasn't that she couldn't do the work. She could. She couldn't coast in all of her classes--few were that easy--but she'd struggled harder to master seeing the future on the wind.
The problem was that she wasn't...she fumbled for the right word. Perhaps malleable came close.
(From A Square Peg at Lightsbridge, Emelan -- Tamora Pierce)
7) This is the last story I will ever tell.
My name...no one not of our race could pronounce it, for it is a combination of chemical signals which we emit when predators approach, the flash of a brilliant shade of coruscating oseyn which our leaves flicker in budding season, and a deliberate drop in body temperature, which all of us do--have done--when soil and rock shake and the sea boils. We cannot change the sea in which we grow, but we can freeze ourselves inside and out, preserving ourselves to an extent until the world is safe to grow in once more.
But no drop in temperature can save us from the Worms. (From Little Elegy, The Host -- Stephenie Meyer)
8) Up then spoke the Faery Queen;
An angry queen was she.
'Woe betide the wretch who's ta'en
The best knight of Our company.'
The Fairy Queen's fierce hatred didn't trouble Janet that Halloween night. In fact, as she stood at Mile Cross, swaying as she held tightly to the cloak-wrapped form of the man she had just won from the Fairy Court, she smiled. The Queen had been beaten by a mortal; of course she would be bitterly angry. It was horrible of the Fairy Queen to tell Tam Lin that she would have blinded him, turned him into a tree forever, or eaten his very heart rather than free him-but those were just words. She couldn't mean it. And she couldn't truly be warning Janet of misfortune. (From A Haven of Iron, Tam Lin (Traditional Ballad))
9) It was a terrible thing, Joan of Kent reflected as the royal barge sailed toward Blackheath, to be both Queen of England and a rebel against the crown. Especially since she hadn't planned to rebel against her husband, much less lead her only surviving son and her brand new daughter-in-law into doing the same thing. (From Come the Good Peasant to Cheer, 14th Century CE RPF AU)
10) Not long after he had been castrated, the boy who was not yet known as Varys began hearing about a baseborn dragonrider.
That was hardly the first time he had heard of her. He had been part of an acting troupe, after all. The owner of the troupe had been careful to put on plays that would not offend those who ruled any of the Free Cities, putting on airy baubles like Lady Shella and the Rainbow Knight or tales of tragic heroes like Azor Ahai and his wife. Nissa Nissa's spirit, in the troupe's version, had appeared in a flash of phosphor, placing her hands over Azor Azai's as he gripped Lightbringer and swung at a hideous monster that existed only to serve worse ones. The boy had played a child captured by the monster's masters, human-devouring demons riding skeletal beasts out of nightmare. (From The Sister of the Stranger, A Song of Ice and Fire -- George R.R. Martin)
***
Of the last ten stories, nine are written in third person. 2 and 10 are both told by male protagonists (or at least by a demon and a genitally mutilated person who present/identify as male). 6 and 9 are both told by female protagonists. 1, 3, 4, 5, and 8 are all multiple POV. 1 has two male POVs and one female one; 3 is one female POV for most of the story and one male POV for one scene; and 4 is mostly female POVs (Helga's letters to Rowena; Rowena's journal, notes by Astrugona, one of Helga's students; and four female writers or translators) but there are also three male writers whose excerpts are part of the story. 5 features a nameless narrator, Steve Rogers and Granny Weatherwax. 8 starts in Janet's point of view but spends much of the story in Tam Lin's.
7 is the odd one out, being the only story told in first person and the only one told by a plant (who doesn't identify as any gender or sex).
4 is the only story told in the form of letters, excerpts from lessons, scribbled notes, biographies, etc.
Nine out of ten of the stories were written in the past tense. Again, the odd one out is 7, written in the present tense.
Six out of ten of the stories--2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8--involve magic all the way through. 1 partially involves magic, as it takes place in three different universes: a realistic universe, an occult universe, and a science fiction universe.
Two of the stories have disabled characters. The science fiction section of 1 is told from the POV a medic who, in a rational world, would probably be classified as legally blind. It also contains a soldier who has hypersensitive hearing, which tends to be a problem in battle. 4 features a deaf-mute witch as one of Helga's students...which is tricky in a time before sign language was recorded.
Three deal with the Fair Folk--3, 5 and 8.
Two of the stories are crossovers--2 and 5.
9--an AU--is the only story with historical elements that depicts an actual event (the Peasants' Rebellion), alhough the king who was actually in charge at the time has been altered.
I'm not sure what to take away from this, except that I really like writing stories about magic in third person and the past tense. Does anyone else see anything?