Can anyone tell me why I have -1 messages?  Did anyone else get that after they deleted the spam messages from their inboxes?

Since someone just posted the opening lines from a NIPP (mine are only in perpetual progress cause I keep getting ideas for other bloody stories), here's the opening from one of mine.

A town burned.

It had been a quaint little place, just a small town out in the middle of nowhere.  Everyone there had known each other by sight if not by name and there was little crime.  They’d been content in their lives.

Now they were all dead.  And their killers stalked the streets where they had once walked.

That's my story involving Heaven, Hell, a demon/angel friendship (wherein the angel drinks far too much alcohol), and a 12 year-old girl who's inhabited by a disembodied devil assassin.

Then there's the story I've been working on for...oh, since 2001 or so.  I created a whole thing of vampires, slayer, witches, werewolves, and etc that run around NYC and create havoc.  It's gone under three rewrites as of now (at least the first story has) and has a role-playing message board that's slowly dying a second death except for me and two friends just continuing on with our characters storylines.  Here's the new opening, written from the main character Darien O'Connell's (a 300+ year-old vampire) point of view.

Remember when you were young and your mother always told you a bedtime story?  Princes, castles, dragons, valiant knights, damsels in distress – the general pish and posh.

Or maybe you were one of those rare children who wanted the scary tales; the ones your mother never wanted to tell you and your father wanted to but couldn’t tell a story to save his life.  Y’know – the boogeyman, werewolves, Freddie Krueger, Jason.  The regular scare-the-piss-out-of-you stuff.

You might right now be asking yourself if there’s a point to all of this clatter.  Yeah, there is.  A sharp point lies at the end of this railway tunnel, so get a tighter grip on the rail of the caboose.


That was written after I started reading Dresden.

But back to topic...I suppose the opening line is usually what snags me in a story.  Though its usually the first few paragraphs or so - that's what grabbed me about Fool Moon, first Dresden book I picked up...well, that and it was about werewolves and I LOVE werewolf stories.  But nice catchy opening lines are good.

And what about this opening line?

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.   

Right now, I'm involved with writing stories based in the Battletech Universe. Now, because of the way the universe is set up, there is no need to use established characters. Writring in this universe allows the author to develop his own characters, create situations, all without invaladating anything that has happened in the time line. It's a rich universe, with many factions, many levels of story, and many places to set said story. I love it.

Ooo, Battletech?  Do you have stuff posted anywhere?  I'd love to read it.

And I definetly agree.  With CBT you can run with anything you want.  I was trying my hand at writing a story in that universe myself, involving the Kell Hounds and Clan Wolf-in-Exile, but I don't know if I'll ever complete that story.

Guilty of being a fanfic writer.  Have one Harry Potter fanfic that's over 600 pages long (rewrote the first 4 books and then made up original plotlines for the other 3).

Writing all the fanfic's that I have has really helped me out with writing my original stuff.  I've gotten a great deal better since I first began writing (my very first original stuff read like crap) and it's all because of what fanfic's I've written.  Still write fanfic's (mainly Buffy now with a few HP mixed in) but I'm trying to work more on my original stuff.