Can I redeem these HORRIBLE OPENING LINES?

Young writer Kevin used to be hyperfocused on having an amazing opening line. Curent Kevin is a bit embarrassed by how much attention I gave opening lines.

They're important, but...

I thought they had to have this insane level of WOW factor. And they just don't. They are supposed to hook the reader. Not send someone into ecstasy.

In honor of young Kevin's naivetey, today we are going to take some NASTY first lines and make them into something amazing...without changing the first line.

Or at least that's the plan.

Below are the final products (first drafts!) for each HORRIBLE opening line! What do you think? Did I succeed?

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1

She had a body that reached out and slapped my face like a five-pound ham-hock tossed from a speeding truck. She looked nothing like her online profile, but I knew, the moment we locked eyes that she was the one. Collette, the drop-dead gorgeous piece of aunt Tammy’s famous blueberry pie I’d been chatting with the past few days was none other than miss cheap-soup-meat headed toward the bar.

I’d been catfished.

My whole body tensed up. And I was sweating. I felt foolish.

Aunt Tammy’s scolding tones resounded in my head, “Serves you right, Clayton. I taught you better than to treat women like food. One of these young ladies is going to scoop you up one day and serve you as dog food. You wait and see.” Maybe Collette would be the one.

She was skin and bones and still seemed to always be in the way. She stumbled through the crowded bar to the tune of a rowdy tune fit for a Fourth of July rodeo. Hell, any rodeo. And she’d be the clown. Not the charismatic kind that made you feel like you could be a cowboy too. The kind that tripped and fell headfirst in barrels to keep the brats entertained. 

She smiled and tucked her short-cropped hair behind her ear. Shy like. It gave me goosebumps. With that one gesture, I knew if I turned her down, I’d come out of this interaction looking like the jerk. Not her. She’d lied to me and somehow I’d find myself in the wrong.

“Collette?” I said. The name tasted like bile in my throat.

“No,” she said, tucking her hair behind her ear again. It sprang free immediately.

“Thank God,” I breathed out. My shoulders relaxed. I extended a calloused hand toward her and said, “What can I do you for?”

She left my hand floating there in the air like soggy bread. She tucked that damn lock of hair behind her ear again.

“Collette is my cousin. I used her name and picture. My name is Trish.”

She reached her hand toward mine. She was shaking visibly, like jello in a hurricane. But I couldn’t do it. I retracted my hand.

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2

Cthulhu awoke from loathsome dreams of gangrenous decay and the foul stench of congealing viscera, lifting his pulpy, misshapen head to find what foolish supplicant had roused him to yet another age of fear and creeping dread, but found his bloodthirst unslaked, having been brought to consciousness not by horror-filled screams of human sacrifice but by his little sister’s overly dramatic wail of “Cthulhu’s touching me!” from her side of the family station wagon’s back seat.

He groaned audibly sending his halfsister a burning glare. She stuck her tongue out at him and grinned beneath her silly Pikachu hat. “What’s going on?” He yawned loudly, even though creatures of the underworld didn’t feel tired.

“Cthulhu,” the bag of meat that claimed to be his dad scolded from the driver’s seat. “We’ve talked about this. She had to have skin grafts last week.”

Dust churned around the station wagon, leaving a trail in their wake. Cthulhu reached his claws out over her Pikachu hat with a grin and flicked one of the dumb yellow mouse’s ears—or antenna or whatever—leaving a singe mark.

“Hey!” She cried.

“Cthulhu!” his dad bellowed slamming on the breaks.

Cthulhu wrapped his measly teenage hand around the car door’s metal lever turning it hot and threw the door open. He climbed out of the station wagon and marched down the empty gravel road. He didn’t know where they were. A mountain somewhere with lots of trees, but he knew he wanted to be nowhere near his family. Humans liked weekends, but they didn’t have to spend them with his dad.

Maybe he’d get lucky and find a casino or a bar or somewhere else miserable people when so he could get a bite of sorrow to eat.

Car doors slammed behind him.

“Stop right there, Cthulhu,” his dad shouted. The hammer of a shotgun clicked. He’d blown Cthulhu to bits two years ago. The agony of regrowing his body on both plains was enough to make him stop. He liked inducing pain, feeding off it, but not experiencing it.

Cthulhu turned and flipped him the bird.

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3

As Nils Nordgrund struggled mightily treading water to stay afloat, he gave no thought to whether the Giants had any chance at a pennant win this year. From a distance, he grimly watched the Norwegian oil tanker he captained slowly sink in the treacherously dark and stormy seas off Murmansk.

It was a scene from a nightmare. He choked and coughed on the briney water slopping into his nose and down his throat. He shivered uncontrollably in the cold. A shout pushed its way through the roar of the rain slamming into the ocean surface and the beam of a flashlight spun around him. The raft coming his way rocked in the waves.

They shouldn’t have come after him. They’d all die tonight. 

Lightning burst across the sky in wicked flashes like the cracks in a shattering window. A wave threw the raft forward, sending it careening toward him. A hand shot out to him from above as the raft slammed into his neck and shoved him under.

The shouts of crewmen and the roar of thunder muted beneath the churning waters. This was the end. This was the World Series. He pumped his aching arms to the surface, terror and pain threatening to take over. He clawed to the surface and a crashing wave knocked into him, pushing the air from his lungs and plunging him again into the dark depths of the sea.

He gasped for breath but took in a lungful of water. Drowning. How had it never occurred to him that this would be the worst way to go? Worse than being buried alive. This was his element. He was Captain Nils Norgrund. Master of the White Sea. Drowning. Careening. Disappearing into the deep.

Someone wrapped their arms around him and jerked him upward.

***

Warmth. That was the first thing he noticed. And then saffron and cinnamon. Tove? Nils wanted to open his eyes, to look into her amber eyes and be alive, but his aching frigid body told him he wasn’t. He couldn’t be. He faded.