A Hooker I Be, Fur Shur

 

A Hooker I Be, Fur Shur

John Clark weighing in on this month’s topic of hooks. While I write full length books, short stories are my secret sin. I blame my sister, Kate Flora, for getting me started with them way back when she and two fellow mystery writers started Level Best Books. They offered a competition leading to a crime anthology featuring stories by New England writers. I have appeared in nearly half of them.

Juggling 5000 word creations and 80-100,000 word ones can be disconcerting. With the former, there’s a tendency to pack a lot in the beginning, as in a book, information is best delivered gradually. In either instance, a good hook is essential.

I’m revising this month’s post after reading some of the other ones. I’m just completing a rough draft for a YA book I’m currently calling (I’m Not) Singing the L.A. Blues) it’s one of several completed, or nearly completed books I’ve written in the past fifteen years, none of which have seen the light of day for reasons that defy logic. However, each has what I think is a decent hook, so here they are.

LA Blues is the story of Skye, an accomplished high school basketball player in Long Beach. Her mother refuses to say anything about her father, and she remembers nothing before she started school. When her boyfriend humiliates her at an end of the year party, she’s angry, devastated, and ready for change. Then a certified letter from a law firm in Machias, Maine addressed to her mother arrives and Mom freaks out, Skye is compelled to read it. What she learns sends her on an unexpected journey to coastal Maine.

 

Don’t Say It, which Holly has read, is the story of high school junior Marcy-Jo Parmenter who was abandoned in different ways by her parents. She lives with her grandfather, a recovering alcoholic and retired county sheriff. It’s 1969 and Marcy-Jo is beyond tired of being treated as less than by nearly every male she encounters. Factor in a mystery encountered while clearing alders from blueberry land she bought as tax acquired property, coupled with a boyfriend with a big secret of his own and you’re off and running.

Finding Ginger begins when a young man working in a mall fast food restaurant sees a wild looking young woman taking food from the dumpster behind the mall. He’s intrigued and over the next few days uses fresh meals to decrease her wariness. She’s a runaway from Baltimore, MD who has bipolar disorder and feels like she dies inside every time her well-meaning parents have her hospitalized, hence her leaving home. She self-medicates with alcohol until her moods stabilize, but it’s a tricky and unpredictable life. Their attraction to each other grows until something unexpected happens, sending her into a panic, forcing her to run again. Now, he must figure out how to find her.

 

When Magic Bleeds starts in a ratty tent in the forest outside of Gettysburg with Thiery awakening to find her mother’s body beside her. Her memories of her earlier life are spotty, the strongest being of them dancing to silent music on a beach under the moon. When she realizes Mom’s dead, she panics, seeks help, and loses consciousness. The hospital where she’s taken does a DNA test, but the results are confusing. She’s not entirely human. In addition, she’s attacked by otherworldly creatures at the foster home where she has been placed. She has to figure out who/what she is as well as who wants her dead. That involves a trip to a place she never imagined existed.

Over the Edge begins when teenager Raphael is kicked out of his home by extremely rigid religious parents in the middle of a Maine blizzard. He’s trying to stay upright in a howling snowstorm when a snow plow hits him, throwing him over the guardrail. When he comes to, it’s night, warm, and he’s lying on damp sand. His first thought, uttered aloud is “I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more, Dorothy.” He hears a melodious female voice reply, “Who is Dorothy?” This is his introduction to a completely different planet in an alternate universe, and Leorah who has green skin and is a member of a small commune of survivors.

 

Dubstep and Wheelie begins when Cece who must use a wheelchair, hears her classmates words of pity just before she comes around the corner to access her locker. Several months earlier, she was returning from her secret dancing spot on a mountain, atop her horse when a partridge flushed, spooking the creature and slamming her back into a tree, resulting in lower extremity paralysis. Her dancing and riding careers seemingly over, she descends into a depressive funk, only to be rescued by a mysterious new boy at school. It turns out that he’s really a Greek undergod, tasked with supporting varied types of dance, his current one being dubstepping. When she extracts a promise to get her to Olympus and confront the gods in hopes they will give her a task to fulfill so she can regain full movement, he initially agrees, but panics and abandons her. What does she do then?

In Thor’s Wingman, Jared Mills is a high school junior, well versed in navigating the woods and waters of Maine, as well as crafting things like signs from wood. His ability to interact with people outside of his mother and grandfather, is impaired by emotional scarring thanks to his abusive father who is now in prison for murder.

When Jared builds his own boat and takes it out for a trial voyage on the lake where Gramps has a camp, he catches a monster lake trout. Something tells him to release the fish. When he does so, he feels a sense of excitement rather than disappointment. That feeling is soon reinforced when during the fireworks display on the Fourth of July, he sees a giant bird tumble from a tall pine tree. At first, he ignores the urge to see what happened to the creature, but when he checks it out, he discovers a six foot tall eagle with a badly broken wing. What happens next involves an encounter with Twyla DelMarillo, a sassy camp counselor with a missing finger coupled with a challenge to travel to another realm to retrieve something stolen from the bird.

Let me know what you think of these as hooks.