The First Line

Six years ago, sitting on my back porch with a cup of coffee and cicadas singing in my ears, I wrote:

“If I hadn’t stayed home sick that day, I would have been the first to know.”

That line became The Iceman Cometh, my next work of fiction. I’m releasing it in two parts starting next week, the first free for everyone and the second for subscribers.

The opening sentence has remained unchanged since the day I wrote it. Part of me was afraid that if I erased it, the whole piece would collapse like removing a keystone from a masonry arch. I’m not superstitious but am reluctant to question the gods when it feels like something is working.

At the time, I had started many stories but finished very few. Something about that line clicked. My mind refused to let it go.

Everything that followed took years and multiple rewrites to catch up. The final draft was shaped with the generous eye of Wesley Stace (John Wesley Harding), whose edits sharpened what had been sitting with me for years. I wasn’t prepared for how exposed I felt the day I walked into his home office and saw more red than black on the printed page. I thought it was almost done.

It became the first piece of fiction I wrote that I felt was truly finished.

Charles Baudouin once wrote, “An idea upon which attention is peculiarly concentrated is an idea which tends to realize itself.”

This one finally did.

This One’s Called… The First Line.