This is my thirtieth post on beginnings, and I think it’s time for a change. Does this mean I’ll never again talk about what makes a great beginning to a novel? Probably not. But it is the end of this series, and likely the beginning of something new every Monday. So, for my final “beginning,”…
For this week’s “beginning,” I chose the first three paragraphs of one of my favorite openings, the beginning of Bernard Cornwell’s Agincourt (here’s my review). Here it is after this image of the book’s cover. On a winter’s day in 1413, just before Christmas, Nicholas Hook decided to commit murder. It was a cold…
For my twenty-eighth “Beginning” of the Week, I’m going back to one of my all-time favorite authors, Bernard Cornwell. Here is the opening passage of The Winter King, the first book in The Warlord Chronicles, his fascinating take on the Arthurian legend. Once upon a time, in a land that was called Britain, these things happened….
For this week’s “beginning” I’m featuring another of Stephen R. Lawhead’s works, the opening passage of his excellent novel Byzantium. (You can read my review here.) I saw Byzantium in a dream, and knew that I would die there. That vast city seemed to me a living thing: a great golden lion, or a crested…
This week’s “beginning” comes from Hood, Stephen R. Lawhead’s reimagination of the Robin Hood myth. For those who haven’t read my post on Legends Reimagined, Hood features “Robin” as a Welsh freedom fighter during the Norman Conquest. Here is how it begins: The pig was young and wary, a yearling boar timidly testing the…
For this week’s “beginning,” I’m going back to one of the great journey tales by Stephen King, his second book in The Dark Tower series: The Drawing of the Three. Here’s how it begins, after this image of the book’s cover: The gunslinger came awake from a confused dream which seemed to consist of a…
The end of last week’s discussion on the beginning of Deryni Checkmate and openings that start with the weather had me thinking about the opening passage of one of my favorite novels, The Arcanum by Thomas Wheeler (you can read my review here). I think I’m on the side that believes opening with the weather…
I’m returning to the realm of vintage fantasy for this week’s “beginning.” Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni Chronicles books are among the classics from the early days of the historical fantasy genre, and here is how the second book in that series, Deryni Checkmate, begins. March has long been month of storms in the Eleven Kingdoms….
Last week I published my review of Graham Joyce’s new novel, Some Kind of Fairy Tale, so it’s only fitting that the opening passage of this story serves as my “beginning” of the week. In the deepest heart of England there is a place where everything is at fault. That is to say that the…
A year ago today I published my first blog post titled What is Fresh-scraped Vellum? It analogized the medieval art of bookmaking to the task of writing a publishable novel in today’s world. It also promised book reviews and commentary on both classic and recent fiction in the historical and fantasy genres, along with posts…
A while back I was focused on Viking tales since my second novel has a big Viking component. I’ve unfortunately fallen way behind on both novel #2 and my reviews of great Viking tales, but at least one such tale can serve as my “beginning” of the week. So without further ado, here is the…