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Pick a last line...
Ahhhh, I am back from my weekend of birthday celebrations with the fam (yes, 'tis early celebration for me).
Scored: A very nice winter coat and alpaca socks and alpaca gloves from Blue Lake Alpaca Farm.
(Check out the cute fuzzies! Awwwwwww! I love me alpacas. Nicer than llamas and smaller, too.)
And lemme tell you right now: alpaca anything rocks hard. Socks that are warm, cushiony, and comfy, but your feet don't sweat. It has something to do with the alpacca fur itself allowing the feet to breathe. These socks are a poly blend, so they're washable (unlike most knit products).
Of course, it started snowing today and I had to leave early, so thankfully I had my alpaca gloves. Gloves got soaked, but my hands stayed dry and were reasonably warm. Yay alpaca yarn!
Mucho thanks to the Incas that hid these cute litte treasures in the Andes from their Spanish overlords who, rightfully, saw these sturdy animals from the camel family as competition for sheep. Alpacas seem to be growing in number in New England because *gasp* they do well in rocky soil and in the snow and don't hoover up all the local food sources through their mouths because they evolved in fairly harsh conditions.
In other news...ummmm, not that there's other news, but I saw this article on great last lines from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
musesfool.
Personally, I find it to be very true. Even back in my dim days as a newspaper reporter, I sweated just as much over the last line as I did over the lede. Hence I was always upset when an article was cut for space because, in my mind, the final echo was as important as the opening salvo (so to speak).
As an interesting note, when I write fanfiction I usually write the last line and the opening line at the very same time. In the case of Living History, I wrote the closing scene first, even before the opening scene. Sometimes the wording in the last line gets tweaked, but generally, the spirit of it remains pretty solid throughout the whole story.
Last lines are so incredibly important because that's what leaves the lasting impression. You may lose people with a bad opening line, but you've got time to recover if people chose to stick with it.
A last line, though, is forever.
So, just for fun, I'm throwing open the forum to questions. (I'm doing this mostly because I shudder at the very thought of doing the DVD commentary meme on fanfiction that seems to be going around).
If you're so inclined, check out my stories and look at the last line. Ask me any question you want about the last line and I'll answer it.
Completed stories can be found in LJ memories or the Pit of Voles.
(Note: Screening for anonymous comments is off.)
Scored: A very nice winter coat and alpaca socks and alpaca gloves from Blue Lake Alpaca Farm.
(Check out the cute fuzzies! Awwwwwww! I love me alpacas. Nicer than llamas and smaller, too.)
And lemme tell you right now: alpaca anything rocks hard. Socks that are warm, cushiony, and comfy, but your feet don't sweat. It has something to do with the alpacca fur itself allowing the feet to breathe. These socks are a poly blend, so they're washable (unlike most knit products).
Of course, it started snowing today and I had to leave early, so thankfully I had my alpaca gloves. Gloves got soaked, but my hands stayed dry and were reasonably warm. Yay alpaca yarn!
Mucho thanks to the Incas that hid these cute litte treasures in the Andes from their Spanish overlords who, rightfully, saw these sturdy animals from the camel family as competition for sheep. Alpacas seem to be growing in number in New England because *gasp* they do well in rocky soil and in the snow and don't hoover up all the local food sources through their mouths because they evolved in fairly harsh conditions.
In other news...ummmm, not that there's other news, but I saw this article on great last lines from
musesfool. Personally, I find it to be very true. Even back in my dim days as a newspaper reporter, I sweated just as much over the last line as I did over the lede. Hence I was always upset when an article was cut for space because, in my mind, the final echo was as important as the opening salvo (so to speak).
As an interesting note, when I write fanfiction I usually write the last line and the opening line at the very same time. In the case of Living History, I wrote the closing scene first, even before the opening scene. Sometimes the wording in the last line gets tweaked, but generally, the spirit of it remains pretty solid throughout the whole story.
Last lines are so incredibly important because that's what leaves the lasting impression. You may lose people with a bad opening line, but you've got time to recover if people chose to stick with it.
A last line, though, is forever.
So, just for fun, I'm throwing open the forum to questions. (I'm doing this mostly because I shudder at the very thought of doing the DVD commentary meme on fanfiction that seems to be going around).
If you're so inclined, check out my stories and look at the last line. Ask me any question you want about the last line and I'll answer it.
Completed stories can be found in LJ memories or the Pit of Voles.
(Note: Screening for anonymous comments is off.)
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You can read the whole thing there, but I'd suggest switching over to my LJ memories where it picks up with Part 39 because of the formatting problems.
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The brand to ask for is Red Maple because those are the socks that are washable.
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She wanted to actually raise alpacas before she found out that a single animal buying price is something about $10,000.
It was more of a economic apocolypse thing, though.
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I think the idea of knowing what the last line of a story is before you even write the story is fascinating; not being a writer, I've never really considered how writers actually plot out their story lines. I suppose that knowing where you want to end up is important, even if you're not entirely sure what will happen on the way there.
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Every story I've ever written has had at least the last paragraph written at the same time as the opening paragraph, no matter how short the story is. In longer stories, I have the entire last scene written.
The only exception is actually Whisper, where I had to completely scrap the original closed ending because Dolly mutated on me. I was actually almost half-way through Whisper when I actually wrote the closing scene for that story and the final line.
However, I will always tweak the last scene (since the original run through is a rough draft) before posting it. Water's last scene is actually going to undergo an extensive re-write because of some issues that cropped during the course of Water that would need to be addressed on some level.
However, the last line is not getting changed one iota because it is a damn good closing line.
Although my favorite closing line of all my stories is tied between Whisper's closing line and Living History's closing line.
no subject
Cool article about last lines. But this:
I love Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters but, even allowing for cultural differences, it has to have the most peculiar final sentence in all literature: "Yukiko's diarrhoea persisted through the twenty-sixth, and was a problem on the train to Tokyo."
makes me want to start a contest for worst last lines, like The Edward Bulwer-Lytton Contest for worst first lines!