My Favorite Font: Anne Fadiman, Jonathan Lethem, Richard Posner, and others reveal what font they compose in and why.
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On the subject of openings, I recall the (perhaps apocryphal) story of the author whose short story had been rejected from a magazine that specialized in "spicy stories."
"There isn't enough sex in it," said the edtior.
"Whaddaya mean?" said the author. "There's sex on the very first page!"
"Yeah, but it's near the
bottom."
(This would have been in the days of the pulps, when authors dropped by the editors' offices in New York City to hand in their stories and pick up their checks. Ah, the golden days! We'll never see their likes again....)
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Do y'all remember when, back on
page 246, I posted this and asked, "Would you turn the page?"
Never have I felt quite so worldly as I did on my very first real date, when, after considered perusal of the wine list, I masterfully commanded the waiter at the Log Cabin restaurant in Lenox, Massachusetts, to fetch me a bottle of Mateus Rosé. In its distinctive Buddah-shaped bottle, with its slight spritz, it represented a step up from the pink Almaden that my friends and I sucked down in order to get into the proper Dionysian frame of mind for the summer rock concerts at Tanglewood. (And that seemed a classic accompaniment--rather like Chablis and oysters--to the cheap Mexican pot we were smoking at the time.) Later, of course, as I discovered the joys of dry reds and whites, I learned to sneer at pink wine; it seemed--as Winston Churchill once remarked regarding the moniker of an acquaintance named Bossom--that it was neither one thing nor the other. A few summers ago a bottle of Domaines Ott rosé in conjunction with a leg of marinated grilled lamb cured me of this particular prejudice; I thought I'd died and gone to Provence, though in fact I was at my friend Steve's birthday party in the Hamptons.
Well, ask yourself, punk: Would you?
That's the first page of a published novel. In a bit, a line-by-line to see what the author was doing.
