I saw this meme a while ago on
earth_dragon's journal and thought I'd be able to avoid it, having packed most of my books in storage. But today while sitting in the bookstore trying to write...I thought I'd give it ago since my characters are being fickle and my story line is non-existent...We'll call it inspiration, shall we?
♦ Take four books off your bookshelf
♦ Write the first sentence
♦ Write the last sentence on page fifty
♦ Write the second sentence on page one hundred
♦ Write the next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty
♦ Write the final sentence of the book
♦ Let your friends guess what book it is1. This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.
He put chunks of lead through his toilet and a washbasin and a bathtub enclosure.
He used to have photographs of Dwayne on the walls of his cell at Shepherdstown.
"We call it
The Hundred-Nigger Machine," said the workman.
Here was what Kilgore Trout cried out to me in my father's voice:
"Make me young, make me young, make me young!"2. It was predictable, in hindsight.
Then he willed his hands to grasp and smash the ROM tablet against the wall, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and turned towards the door.
"They are too close not to go."
The single craziest thing about being a priest, he'd found, was that celibacy was simultaneously the most private and most public aspect of his life.
Unaware of his own movement, schooled by old habit, Vincenzo Giuliani rose and went to the windows, and stood looking, for how long he had no idea, across a grassy open courtyard to a complex panorama of medieval masonry and jumbled rock, formal garden and gnarled trees: a scene of great and beautiful antiquity.
3. This was supposed to be a writer's retreat.
The hair swooping down to hide one ear.
To polish us up, nice and bright.
The Matchmaker has been asking around, trying to find someone willing to lop off his penis.
Starting on that sun-glorious day, the whole world is going to love us.
4. To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains come gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.
"If you're touched, I wisht ever'budy was touched."
Pa walked around the truck, looking at it, and then he squatted in the dust and found a stick to draw with.
Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.
She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.