My100: Original One-Paragraph Story Hooks 40 and 41

The challenge: 100 first-paragraph hooks in sixty days. Just one paragraph(-ish), and it has to hook the reader to want more.

Raise the difficulty: Stop writing in genres all over the place, with a new character or two every time, and focus on one or two characters, writing hooks for twenty stories with just those main characters (38 through 57). As if these were the first page of twenty books in a series.

Forty:

Karen’s hair still dripped from the shower when the knock came. She padded across the floor of the hotel room toward the door. “Hang on a moment. I’m not decent.” She clutched her robe tighter around her and checked the peephole, but the port was black. Something blocked it. “Who is it?” she said.

“Je suis Carlos,” a voice said, as if trying not to be heard.

Karen slung the chain off the door and cracked it. “Carlos. You shouldn’t be here.”

The figure raised his head slowly, exposing a bruised face. He raised a finger and pulled back his mane of dark, stringy hair. Blood dripped off his elbow. “I should not be standing in zis hallway, no.”

Karen gasped and pulled the door further open. “Better come in, then,” she said. “I’ll call Nik.”

Carlos slumped through the door. “No, you don’t,” he said, “He was there when this happen. I don’t think anyone call him again.”

Forty-one:

Karen hadn’t noticed him, sitting just two tables away behind a newspaper and a cheap pair of sunglasses. Half an hour. Half an hour. She had to be blind as a shrew. Of course, she might just be distracted by the huge Samoan sitting next to her, rubbing her arm, laughing at her jokes. Jokes, of all things. Karen couldn’t tell a joke about liquor to a room full of drunks. But there he went again, roaring as if she were Amy Poehler. Now he draped his meaty arm over her shoulders. Okay. That was it. A fellow could only take so much. And would she ever be surprised.

He rose from his seat like a specter of doom and stalked around the linen-covered table between them, planting his hands on the chair across from them and glaring silently for a moment. Karen looked up in shock. “Nik!” she said, half rising, shedding Maui like a duck sheds water.

“Yes, Nik. You think I wouldn’t find out about this little tryst? Maybe you should keep company with someone that’s smaller than one of the islands.”

She stood there, mouth agape, for a full five seconds. The Samoan flowed upward, lava rising from the sea. Holy...was he big. Nik swallowed and rose up to his own not inconsiderable height, but he had to take a half-step backward, and when he did, Karen collapsed back into her chair, cackling like the Wicked Witch of the West. “Oh, Nik, you’re priceless. Stop it. Sit down. Stop moping two tables over like Othello and say hello to Puleleiite. He’s going to guide us out to the site.”

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If you're looking for writing help--and who isn't--there are a lot of good editors on the Discord channel. I recommend it.

~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