Six opening sentences from the fifty-six chapters of my as-yet-unpublished novel (acknowledging Cita)

[Sandra Davies]

1. ‘Pronto?’, intonation anything but welcoming, eyes shut tight since her hand had known the necessary distance to reach, she had grasped her phone and put it against her ear, thumbing the ‘Connect’ button. 

22. ‘Penny Plain become Penny Coloured eh?   A definite improvement if I may say so!’

37. Admittedly the atmosphere in the restaurant had become less than all sweetness and light, with those two blokes picking an argument, and then the ugly bloke dragging his wife across the room, but once he’d sat down again  at the other table he’d behaved himself, and the other one had kept quiet.  

51. There’s only a limited amount of time can be spent sitting in a bar scribbling into a notebook, and since it was unlikely the landlord would be calling it, and Baz knew getting drunk was not something he wanted or intended to do, he eventually drained his third pint and left.  

53. In a file-piled office in the Lerwick police station, institutional green paint grey-grimed except where the natural grease from hands reaching frequently for a door handle had inadvertently wiped it, leaving an irregular shiny circle, Saturday segued into Sunday unnoticed by its four occupants.  

56.  ‘Oh fuck!’ Madigan, stirring an about-to-go-critical roux and the ringing phone just out of reach, hesitated before moving the pan across to an unheated ring and then grabbing it.  

[Mike Handley]

The last one resonates with me, too. About-to-go-critical says it all.

[Gita]

Number two is intriguing because one wonders what colour Penny became. Did she go from grey to blonde? Mousy brown to auburn? And 56 because I, too have been at the stove with a phone just out of arm's length. (Hoot Shiner, if I may, perfected a leg stretch so that, when on the phone, he could reach the fridge door to grab a beer.)

Thank you for sharing your openers. 

[Jenny]

One of the things I like is the unusual numbering scheme. Intrigue.

Secondly, I love how each entry conjures up a bubble world filled with people and their emotions.

Glad that you were inspired by Cita's recent post.