Are you, like, a crazy person?
(I have to own up to Googling that… it rang a bell, but I couldn’t place it! 
)
“My name is V; Amber V.” 
X
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Bra[size=200]V[/size]o!
Praise be to all the saints, that it isn’t [size=150]V[/size]ic-k 
Grateful Fluff
He was the last man on Earth. Then he heard a knock at his door.
Beads of rain congregate around the tiny fissure inside the ruptured roof of room 316. It’s only a small crack, but enough for the parade of droplets to descend upon the wall. The white walls still glisten from the paint job, which must have been completed a few hours earlier. My hands tremble, and tired eyes glare as water and pastel mingle.
My new novel begins with this:
That night, she dreamed about a toothy monster with claws for fingers, huge and scarier than the cute ones on Sesame Street. Kassy ran to Mommy and Daddy, but they weren’t in their room. The telenovelas were over and the gray haired man who told the news was frowning. When the TV was on mute at night, Mommy was helping Daddy close up the bodega on the first floor. Even if scared, Kassy was supposed to tiptoe so that the neighbors wouldn’t complain about her running up and down the stairs. The door from the hallway to the storeroom was unlocked. The ceiling lights buzzed and hissed. Kassy was about to call Mommy when she heard voices. She wasn’t supposed to interrupt Mommy and Daddy when they were helping customers. She waited behind a stack of boxes next to the metal shelves, but the voices were unfriendly. She peeked.
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certainly an interesting premise to kick off a story with. it,s always good to set peoples expectations firmly in one direction and then set a little wobble. the premise asks a lot of questions…
- how did he get to be the last man on earth
- is there a last woman
- there are still plenty of cats, though, right
- what is knocking on his door
- how different a world is this to the one i live in
- why would the knocker want to contact this last person
- did the last man know he was the last man
- is the last man meant to be literal, in a girlfriend in a coma kind of way, semi-literal in a i am legend kind of way, or figurative in a he-is-in-an-emotional-place-where-he-feels-like-the-last-man-alive kind of way
so all in all, if you have the next line, and the next… etc… then not a bad idea to start with.
i would encourage you to look at a great piece of work which handles this kind of a set-a-indisputable-premise-and-then-dispute-it really well… a christmas carol by charlie dickens
that is one of my favourite pieces of comedy writing, and - despite being only a short story really - devotes the first 37 lines to explaining just how dead marley is. in other words, it really goes to an effort to sell the premise before it pulls back from it.
what i,m trying to say here, is that although the premise is good, the bluntness feels like you,re writing the tagline for the movie poster, rather than the book itself.
this one is quite difficult to judge without a bit more context - whether provided by the next couple of paragraphs or from more infomation about the genre, book title etc.
in any case, as it is it feels to me like quite a soft open. the environment being described is supposed to be quite harsh, but the description of it is quite relaxed and poetic, using words like glisten, tremble, and mingle.
i also think that the ordering of sentences / observations might need some thought. this is being told as a first person narratve, which means that we can reasonably expect the observations to be in the order the character notices them or attaches importance to them. in which case, the beads around a fissure would probably come after larger observations.
i’m also not sure that starting a book with a description of location is the best lead-in. better to start with some sort of action, or at least with the character’s reaction to the location. eg,
all pretty presumptuous without more context / genre, i know.
better still, go with something that tells you up front what kind of story you are telling. eg, lee child,s excellent book ,gone tomorrow, begins…
not much room for doubt about what you are in for there.
interesting open. i like the use of mommy and daddy to give the narrative as younger language… so that even though it,s being told in the third person we feel the narrator is a similar age to kassy and has similar fears.
there are a couple of aspects of the writing i,d consider for a second run and polish. i,ve listed a few below to give you an idea, but basically my advice is keep going and see where it takes you.
since this is the first line of the story and you,ve not established any setting yet, the lead in phrase of ,that night, doesn,t work here. we haven,t got any context of what ,that night, is.
aren,t all claws like that
think about sentence structure and also cadence - this implies the fingers are huge and scarier rather than the monsters - or at least is ambiguous.
make sure the tense of all the parts of the sentence are in agreement. also the second part of the sentence doesn’t really follow from the first and should probably be seperate out.
i have a pretty good vocabulary - even for an educated cat - and i had to look up what these two were. i,d advise against using words that a good proportion of people wouldn,t know at the best of times as it breaks the fourth wall between the action and the reader, but this is especially true when you are deliberately writing in a younger and more innocent voice.
given the choice of words here i have to ask… is this a translation of something originally written in spanish
Zubi, Hiya,
When I skimmed this sentence, a while back, I went,'Ughhh! Creepy!" which, I should imagine, is the desired effect that you set out to achieve. However, having revisited your post, and reread it along with Floss’s comments. I now see it in a different light.
Those schooled in the art of serious constructive critique of other’s work, would, I suspect, want to know: on whose authority are we to believe that ‘he’ is, at the time of the knock on the door, the last human being on Earth, which is what I think you are implying. Or more accurately, he believes he is the last human being on Earth. Pedants would probably point out that only an omniscient narrator, would know if 'He" was the last human being. The man himself, could only reasonably be expected to suspect at the very best, that he could be the last. The fact that we the readers, as well as the narrator are in the privileged position of knowing yea or nay, doesn’t extend to, “he”. For the shock that the man would undoubtedly receive, from the knock on his door, to have the maximum impact upon the reader, I think you may have to sacrifice the brevity of the sentence, and redefine the nature of the man’s isolation.
Still an eery quick skim, though! 
Take care
Vic
Merci beaucoup, querido gatito lindo Floss…
Thank you for your comments, it means a lot that you took the time to analyze my paragraph. Yes, this needs much polish, and yes, English is my second language. I use Spanish in my writing, a word here and there because I wish the reader to know that, while he or she is reading the text in English, the people in the story are thinking/speaking Spanish.
I’m in the very beginnings of this novel and this is how it starts in my process, but it’s likely that this paragraph might not be in the first page. When crafting fiction I feel like an explorer, approaching a new shore, sailing as close as I can get to land, peering through my telescope and taking note of the one or two or three things that fill in the gaps of my ignorance. Eventually I find a place to land.
My regards to your human, the pirate.
Saludos,
Esmeralda
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Esmeralda, ¡feliz año nuevo!! 
If my mouse-hound, Fuff (Floss’ cousin) was posting this, she’d say, 'Yeah! Second language as in 'Fluent’." Then go on to say, “Decidedly superior to anything my human can come out with.” What do cats know, anyway? 
[size=85]pffrrrtt!![/size]
As I am aware of your Latin/Spanish heritage, the words:…telenovelas… bodega…didn’t actually penetrate the fourth…, but Floss does have a point, unless of course, your intended market was/is a burgeoning Hispanic market of English speaking youngsters, whose English, will, I should imagine, contain many words of Spanish influence/derivation. Just a thought.
Good Luck with the novel, Esmerelda. I’ll look forward to its publication.
Take care
Vic
PS
Meant to say, that in my much younger days, I had a pint or two in: manchesterbeat.com/venues/ma … bodega.php
Randomly reading forums I’m subscribed to beats doing work on a Friday afternoon…
Here goes with my attempt:
Young Thor, the above[size=200][1] 
only serves to illustrate the more than obvious fact that you don’t know what you are talking about. Reading anything on the Scriv. fora is hard work…very…hard work. You’re obviously a masochist.
You won’t be forced to walk the plank if you regale us with a few more hundred words. They’ll give the sharks, piranhas, and barracudas, something to get their teeth into.
Take care Odin,
Fluff
/size ↩︎
as my good friend fluff says, more please so we can have a good go at it. but, based on what you have here so far…
as a reader, editor and general all round critic, i like to know i,m in for a good well written read. so in the same way that i hate to hear the apology ,sorry i,m not a great singer, just before someone launches into a song at an open mike night, an opening that suggests something might be an awkward or complex read - ,it isn,t easy to explain or describe, - sets some alarm bells ringing.
i do like the idea of launching off with the confession that - bizarre as it might sound - the character actually deliberately chose to get embroilled in whatever misadventures followed.
which brings us full circle back to… more please.
Really interesting idea, Esmeralda. But my feeling is that you are cramming too much into one sentence. Plus you say she is a descendant of men (it would be one man, rather than men). Also, I don’t know what the Ocean Sea is, though you may explain this later - is this a fantasy novel of some sort? And couldn’t Ana be a descendent of Don Cristobal himself? That might make it more powerful.
you can be a descendent of men: dad, granddad, granddaddad, etc…