My100: Original One-Page Story Hooks 81 and 82

The challenge: 100 first-page story hooks in sixty days. Just the first page (or less), and it has to hook the reader to want more. Today I'm 3/4 of the way done. It's been an interesting ride.

The reward (for me): I have two writing notebooks crammed full of story ideas. It occurs to me that here's a chance, with these hooks, to try writing what's in them, just the first page, try it out, see if it has legs. The second one is one of those, way, way darker than I had originally imagined.

But the first is something different. I have a contract to write a book about a hot marketing firm that's making a big name for itself with work like this. The book is mostly finished, but one of my beta readers called me the other day and said, "dude, where's the hook? You might have written Good to Great here, but if I don't care about the book on page one, I'm not buying it." Fiction needs hooks, but nonfiction needs them, too, and I'd forgotten that. This is an attempt to punch that up a bit.

Eighty-one:

In early 2015, the three Brothers Harmon were broke, scrambling for any work they could get, half a million dollars in debt, and trying to raise money for a project that almost certainly would get them sued by four different multi-billion-dollar corporations. By the middle of 2017, they would be out of debt, flush with a (wildly oversubscribed) ten-million-dollar public offering, charging $500,000 a client, with more than a thousand potential clients clamoring for their services, and products being delivered every day to their offices from companies desperately hoping the Harmons will agree to take them on. Cash-strapped companies raise money on nothing but the news that they are in discussions to have the Harmons do marketing for them. They’re the hottest marketing firm in America.

It’s impossible. Absolutely.

Want to know how they did it?

Eighty-two:

I lit the last building in town, watching the blaze lick the sides of the clapboard building. Hungry beast, fire. He gave me such a delicious feeling of power, too. No one in a century had come to him as ravenous as I had.

Once or twice, people from the town tried to stop me. I felt their pulses from a hundred yards away, across the dust of the cobblestones, and locked them in place while I burned the hair off their head, one strand at a time. Their shrieks wove a fine tune in the late summer air. Some of them I allowed to die, even, if they were musical enough.

City Hall remained, and across the large grassy square a smallish, aging church, hardly worth the effort. I sauntered past and crooked a finger at it, calling on my lover, offering him yet another sacrifice. I paid little attention, and perhaps that was my undoing.

A knife of ice raked across my heart, and the fire quenched. I stumbled, dropped to a knee. From behind me, the church door opened, and out came a little girl, no more than ten years old. She cocked her head, studying me, and said, in a voice that rang off the facade of City Hall like a gunshot, “It’s you, then. You’re the one that’s pulled the aether from its alignment.”

I meant to answer. I meant to say that I cared nothing for the aether, or any other thing. The words lodged sideways in my throat, cutting off breath. I gagged. The girl nodded. “You have done a great wickedness,” she said. “And now I give you the gift of the consequences.”

~Cristof

P.S. This series is the brainchild of The New Creatives, which challenged us to create 100 of something as a way of attaining mastery of a particular art form (or beginning the process, more like). This is my attempt. #TNCmy100