The first sentence of any short story should have some kind of a hook, some sign to the reader that this is an interesting story and they should keep reading. While this is essential in a short story, it is less so with a novel. For a longer work, you usually get a page, or even a few to hook the reader. But the novel I just started, Land of Dreams by James P. Blaylock (I finished Requiem by Graham Joyce a couple of nights ago), uses the short story technique to great effect:

"It had already been raining for six days when the enormous shoe washed up onto the beach."

Another example of this is from A Child Across the Sky by Jonathan Carroll:

"An hour before he shot himself, my best friend Philip Strayhorn called to talk about thumbs."

I'm not going anywhere with this; I just noticed it and thought it was cool enough to mention.

Something else I noticed this week. My birthday was a couple of weeks ago, and my parents gave me Stephen King's newest novel, From a Buick 8. As I opened it, I noticed the price, $28. My first reaction was that this was way too high to price a book that is only 350 pages long (which is extremely short for a King novel), and that Scribner must be capitalizing on King's name to hike the price, since his popularity means that many people will buy it for that price. Then I looked at all the other books they have done for him starting with Bag of Bones (excluding The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and On Writing since they are much slimmer and smaller books) and discovered that have all been priced at $28, even Dreamcatcher, which rolls in at 620 pages. At that point I just scratched my head.

I take the GRE tomorrow at 1:00 PM. Deep breaths, Jason.