By PJ Parrish
We’ve got an interesting First Page submission this morning. One caveat about your critic here: I am pretty inept when it comes to new technology. If they gave out certificates for technophobia, I’d have one framed on my wall. So I will need you nerdo-types out there to help me out with this one — let me know if I’m being too hard or too soft with our dear writer.
Here’s our submission. BRB FLASH. (I trying…I really am).
UNTITLED
Monday hit like bad coffee: bitter, necessary, unavoidable. Steam curled off my mug and threaded through the air. Across the kitchen, Zach leaned against the sink, tie loosened, expression caught between amusement and dread, the face before a meeting that’ll eat your soul.
“Ready to charm another nest of executives?” He crossed the kitchen, moving like he owned half my life already.
“I was born ready to confront middle management about trust exercises and weaponized slide decks.”
His mouth twitched. “Workplace Solutions. Nobody calls us when things are healthy.”
We’d been partners, professional and otherwise, for a year and a half. Corporate threat assessment paid the mortgage. Noticing what people tried to hide came with the job.
Our bungalow smelled of coffee and deadlines. Tug, our small golden retriever, snored at my feet like a broken motor.
For once the week started without a fire to stomp out. No terrified client calling at dawn, no red-flag emails waiting to detonate. Zach brushed his knuckles along the back of my shoulder on his way past, a small touch that carried the weight of every night we’d fallen asleep in our clothes after a crisis debrief. I leaned into it without thinking, grateful for a morning when my pulse didn’t sprint ahead of me. Maybe we’d earned a stretch of easy cases. We might even sleep in the next weekend, no alarms, no threat assessments, blankets tangled around our legs while Tug nosed in for space.
My phone lit up on the table. Carly. Windblown hair, fierce grin, camera strap slashing across her shoulder. The photo punched light straight through my chest before the ring even finished.
“Morning, sweetheart—”
Her voice came raw, splintered. “Mom, turn on the TV. I’m on my way.”
The air went brittle. I grabbed the remote.
The screen flickered, then locked onto a news crawl:
BREAKING: TIERNEY ROURKE, FOUNDER OF PIVOT POINT NETWORK, SHOT OUTSIDE DOWNTOWN HOTEL.
My heart slammed hard enough to skid my vision.
Sirens bled through the speakers. Police tape snapped in the wind. A reporter leaned into the gale, shouting over it.
Zach set his mug down hard. Coffee sloshed.
The feed rolled clips: Tierney onstage at Northwestern, then on a Milwaukee dais. A tall woman moving with a commanding glide that silenced a room. Then laughing softly on a late-night couch, calm eyes, measured voice, coppery hair caught the light…
_______________
BAK! I’ve made my return. Now, again, I usually don’t like stories that are heavy on tech-stuff. Computers and everything connected with them are like cars to me — I like them user-friendly, devoid of bells and whistles and I just want them to get me where I need to go. BUT…
That shouldn’t be a deterent to me liking a tech-oriented book. I am reading Andy Weir’s The Martian right and man, this thing reads like a NASA launch manual. Does that negate my enjoyment? No, because first, Weir makes me care about the hero and his perilous circumstance. And second — and this is key to my critique here today — Weir is very good at explaining the technical stuff, translating scientific gobbledigook into terms I can grasp.
This is a craft sleight of hand for any writer who is dealing with any kind of arcane subject matter. It’s like handling foreign languages in your book. Yes, you can use French dialogue but you have to find a way to make the reader understand it in context. Example:
“Tu vas me manquer,” she said.
“I’ll miss you, too,” he said.
Thus, if you are writing a story dealing with any kind of modern technology, with jargon, situations, and procedures, you have to be really careful how you handle it. So how did our writer today do?
This is a good submission overall. And the writer does three things well: Gets the dramatic ball rolling quickly with a break in the norm — the phone call about a dead woman who has some connection to the narrator, who I assumed is the main character. Second, the writer doesn’t overwhelm readers too early with information about the character’s tech job. Thrid: In just 400 words or so, the writer gets in a lot of basic plot information:
- The (unammed) narrator is working hard lately on some kind of project to please the corporate suits.
- She is in a relationship with Zach but it is implied things aren’t all lovey-dovey.
- She has a daughter she loves who is a photographer.
- Someone important whom she knows well just got whacked outside a hotel.
Not a bad start. No throat-clearing or background info-dumps. So I think the writer is on the right track. But, as with all of us, there are some things that could be better. Let’s start with the opening paragraph — the coffee metaphor.
You guys know how much a love metaphors. But they are the nail gun of the craft toolbox. They must be handled with the greatest care or you get bump-firing (too many metaphors), uncontrolled recoil (cliches and mixed metaphors) or maybe a barbed rivet in your ring finger (the dreaded tortured metaphor).
I don’t mind that the writer used bad coffee as a metaphor for her mood. We can all relate to that. But the metaphor here goes awry because it is impersonal and confusing.
Monday hit like bad coffee: bitter, necessary, unavoidable. Steam curled off my mug and threaded through the air. Across the kitchen, Zach leaned against the sink, tie loosened, expression caught between amusement and dread, the face before a meeting that’ll eat your soul.
The coffee metaphor needs to relate directly to the character. And can coffee be “unavoidable?” Then we get steam curling and threading, which is soothing, a contradiction of the first line. Also confusing mood: The first paragraph compares this Monday to bitter coffee. Yet later, the heroine thinks that for once, it has been a nice quiet Monday.
Then we get Zach coming out of nowhere with an expression that is amused and yet dread-filled. Again, confusion. Plus, in this CRITICAL OPENING PARAGRAPH — who gets named first and thus steals the spotlight? Not our heroine.
I took a whack at writing a coffee metaphor opening that roughly follows what I think is happening in this scene:
The coffee looked like I felt. Bitter and dark.
And what were all those black flecks? I flipped open the Mr. Coffee lid. Zach had used a paper towel as a filter and the pot was filled with grounds. What a way to start this Monday morning.
I dumped the paper towel of grounds in the sink, put in a real filter and grounds and stabbed the the brew button. Coffee in my morning — especially this morning — was not a luxury. It was a neccessity. Work at had been overwhelming lately, my days as a cyber threat assessor filled with talking clients off cliffs and ironing the suits in the boardroom. Zach and I had started Work Solutions five years to protect some of biggest companies in the world from data breaches, ransomware, and hacking. Today, I couldn’t even get a damn cup of coffee going.
Zach came into the kitchen, and I could see from his slack face he hadn’t slept.
Now this might not even represent the mood the writer wants to convey for both the heroine and her relationship with Zach. I only show this to demonstrate that the coffee metaphor HAS TO MEAN SOMETHING. Michael Connelly, quoting Joseph Wambaugh, calls this THE TELLING DETAIL. One image, one small thing, can tell volumes about your character. And second, I delayed Zach’s entrance so we could start empathizing with the heroine first.
Small but important aside, dear writer: You must find a way to tell us her name in these first pages. This is a common problem in first person POV. Maybe you do it with dialogue from Zach wherein he addresses her by name? Maybe her job requires a name badge? Or she can have a thought about it?
The box of business cards was still on the counter where Zach had left them last night, beside our empty champagne glasses. I pulled a card out and stared at the embossed text:
WORK SOLUTIONS
Zach Phillips
Kendra Bradley
The champagne had been to celebrate our first anniversary going into business together. The business cards? That had been my idea. It still bothered me that my name was second.
Again, this is just an example. But note that this sort of “telling detail” of the order of names also illuminates character and her relationship.
One more thing before I shut up. As I said, I am tech-challenged and it took me too long to try to figure out what this woman does for a living. I figured “corporate threat assessment” probably had someting to do with cyber-security. But when I looked it up, I found out it’s an incredibly varied profession. Schools have threat assessments to create active shooter drills. Police departments have threat assessment people to deal with hostages and even domestic abuse. Personnel departments have threat assessment teams to look for potential workplace violence.
So, dear writer…take a moment to go into her thoughts and tell the reader, a little more explicitly, what exactly she does in her work. Nothing long or drawn out, no info-dump. Just a line or two that clues us in.
There’s a new good book called Dead Money by Jakob Kerr. It is about a woman who is an “unofficial solver” for Silicon Valley’s most ruthless venture capitalists. She’s an expert at wrangling rich tech bros but the hotttest CEO has just been murdered, leaving behind billions in “dead money” — frozen in his will. The investigation is going nowhere so the heroine has to step up and find the killer from a suspect list that reads like a who’s-who of Valley players.
I started reading it this week and it reminds me a little of this submission. The murder is handled in a prologue and the heroine is introduced in Chapter 1 with this line:
In MacKenzie Clyde’s experience, there were exactly two ways of dealing with a rich asshole.
Dead Money won the Edgar last week for best first novel.
Addendum: For the writer, I am tacking on a quick line edit (my comments in red). Not alot of line editing is needed. But my takeaway, dear writer, is that you’re on the right track. Lots of good stuff there. So keep going! And thanks for letting us read your work.
Monday hit like bad coffee: bitter, necessary, unavoidable. Steam curled off my mug and threaded through the air. Across the kitchen, Zach leaned against the sink, tie loosened, expression caught between amusement and dread, the face before a meeting that’ll eat your soul. Bring Zach in later after we’ve connected with your heroine. Never let a named character hog the spotlight. And you have to pin down the MOOD of this scene better — Zach is imparting both casualness, affection AND dread. (of what?)
“Ready to charm another nest of executives?” He crossed the kitchen, moving like he owned half my life already.
“I was born ready to confront middle management about trust exercises and weaponized slide decks.”
His mouth twitched. “Workplace Solutions. Nobody calls us when things are healthy.” This is your first use of dialogue. Dialogue is precious. Don’t use it for idle morning chitchat, especially this early in your story. And I don’t understand this line: moving like her owned half my life already. Is she pissed off? Resentful? Again, the mood feels oddly unfocused.
We’d been partners, professional and otherwise, for a year and a half. Corporate threat assessment paid the mortgage. Noticing what people tried to hide came with the job. Use her thoughts to be more specific about what exactly she does for a living. TEACH your readers about what threat assessment is. But keep it short. You can SHOW us in later chapters what it means thru her actions.
Our bungalow smelled of coffee and deadlines. Tug, our small golden retriever, snored at my feet like a broken motor.
For once the week started without a fire to stomp out. So it’s so far so good Monday? No terrified client calling at dawn, no red-flag emails waiting to detonate. Zach brushed his knuckles along the back of my shoulder on his way past, a small touch that carried the weight of every night we’d fallen asleep in our clothes after a crisis debrief. I leaned into it without thinking, grateful for a morning when my pulse didn’t sprint ahead of me. Maybe we’d earned a stretch of easy cases. We might even sleep in the next weekend, no alarms, no threat assessments, blankets tangled around our legs while Tug nosed in for space. Not a bad personal graph here. So things are GOOD between them? Then why earlier did you give her that strange thought that he moved like he owned half her life already? Again, inconsistent mood.
My phone lit up on the table. Carly. Windblown hair, fierce grin, camera strap slashing across her shoulder. The photo punched light straight through my chest before the ring even finished.
Good job upcoming on jacking up the pace of your writing — short punnchy — to match the action!
“Morning, sweetheart—”
Her voice came raw, splintered. “Mom, turn on the TV. I’m on my way.”
The air went brittle. I grabbed the remote. The screen flickered, then locked onto a news crawl:
BREAKING: TIERNEY ROURKE, FOUNDER OF PIVOT POINT NETWORK, SHOT OUTSIDE DOWNTOWN HOTEL.how about HILTON MILWAUKEE CITY CENTER. Or wherever this takes place. That way you’ve gracefully slipped in where this book takes place.
My heart slammed hard enough to skid my vision. Not sure what “skidded vision” looks like.
Sirens bled through the speakers. Thru the TV? Police tape snapped in the wind. A reporter leaned into the gale, shouting over it.
Zach set his mug down hard. Coffee sloshed. Keep the focus on the TV for now. He can come up to TV later.
The feed rolled clips: Tierney onstage at Northwestern, then on a Milwaukee dais. A tall woman moving with a commanding glide that silenced a room. Then laughing softly on a late-night couch, calm eyes, measured voice, coppery hair caught the light. Nice…good way to tell us the narrator knows this victim, not just professionally but personally. Ups the ante. Well done.
Great critique. I read the submission and felt like it wasn’t quite working – you nailed the ‘why’ it wasnt. Can I be you when I grow up?
{{{Chuckling}}}
It’s only 8 a.m. and you’ve already made my day. P.S. I used to make my living as a dance critic and the hardest thing I had to learn is that opinions come easy but being helpful is the real goal.
I had no problem with the amusement/dread. Good way to approach things sometimes. Same with the necessary coffee. Agree with you re Kendra’s name and more about threat assessment.
“Our bungalow smelled of coffee and deadlines. Tug, our small golden retriever, snored at my feet like a broken motor.” Love those sentences.
The “moving like he owned half my life…” is confusing. What does it mean? Is it desireable or not? Is it for sale?
Like the “camera strap slashing across chest”. Other points well taken.
Yes, I like the dog image and snoring metaphor as well. Personalizes the scene as well.
Congratulations, Brave Author! I would turn the page to find out what’s happening. I have to admit, when I first started reading, I was thinking “how can a book on business people possibly be interesting?” But by the end of the piece I was intrigued to know more. What started out in the beginning of the scene to be just another day (and a Monday, have mercy!) turned tense very quickly by the end of the page.
Just a few other thoughts:
“moving like he owned half my life already” – while I understand you are trying to convey some sense of a dominance issue in the relationship, I could not fathom what “moving like he owned” really looked like physically.
Minor note: “camera strap “slashing” across her shoulder” it threw me off because it reads like the camera strap is alive and trying to do something.
As noted in critique, have no idea what “skid my vision” means.
In the last paragraph that begins with “The feed roll clips:” maybe my innate bias caused my confusion, but when you first mention Tierney, I auto-assumed it was a man. Then in this last paragraph, you mention Tierney again, but then it says “A tall woman moving”. I was unclear–is this someone else in the film image or is this also intended to be Tierney? If Tierney, it needs clarificaition because it read to me like you were describing Tierney and another person.
I did not find the piece overly techy. While I may not understand threat assessment in the business sense in great detail, it was not a hindrance to me to read it as written in this piece. To me, it was kept simple–did not try to get overly techy, just establish the mood to start things rolling. I assumed more in-depth detail would come later.
Also, I admit I did not pick up when reading it on the good day vs. bad day discrepancies in the submission. I guess because that’s what Mondays are to me. That first day of the week can be great in one aspect but bummer in another.
In summary, the submission flowed for me. The chief things that disrupted the read were the confusing imagery of “moving like he owned…” and “skid my vision”.
Thanks for submitting!
Helpful stuff from you, BK. And I agree, I didn’t find this overly techy as you said. Which is the LAST thing we want in the early going. My nit pick, I guess, stems from my own ignorance of threat assessment. If it is a commonly known profession, then this is sufficient for now. There is time to explain later.
This page definitely grabbed my attention. I liked a lot of the writing.
“Moving like he owned half my life already” has a feminist millennial tone and gave me the impression he’s in her home, wants to make the relationship permanent, and she’s reluctant.
The “raw, splintered” voice of the daughter was nice but conflicted with the grin that immediately preceded it. I’m presuming they’re face-timing. The narrator never actually turned on the TV so I thought the daughter was sending a newsfeed through the phone. That confused me.
Also great, subtle job of slipping in an approximation of their ages —the narrator is old enough to have an adult child who’s evidently a pro photographer.
“Corporate threat assessment paid the mortgage. Noticing what people tried to hide came with the job.” Excellent summation of her job as well as the conflict she deals with. It sounded more like protecting a company’s PR image than cybersecurity.
The description of falling asleep in their clothes after a crisis debrief was terrific.
An executive shot dead outside a downtown hotel immediately brought to mind the United Heathcare murder.
I like the voice. Subtext infers that she’s conflicted in her career as well as her personal relationship.
Yeah, I’d turn the page.
Good feedback, as always. And I agree…I would read more.
I thought this first page was great. Good job, Brave Author!
It seemed obvious to me that the POV character and Zach had a meeting coming up with a new corporate client. I didn’t feel tension between them, just her thoughts. The daughter calling and her photo coming up is the same thing my phone does when my kids call, so no confusion there. Also, I’ve read several books with a female named Tierney, so didn’t even imagine it would be a man. I also didn’t mind the POV character not being named in the first 400 words. I know from experience that it’s hard to get everything in those relatively few words. I imagine Brave Author was trying to make sure the shooting was included. So, yes, I would definitely read on.
I found this submission to be very relatable. Yes, if you’re going to be consultants to major corporations, particularly when those corporations are in a time of stress, you’ll unavoidably drink bad coffee. It’s about the bonding ritual of shared food (beverages). We see this all the time in English mysteries where the detectives interview someone in their home and accept and sip weak or over-stewed tea to calm and bond with the interviewee. I probably would not keep reading if there was a long intro involving the making of the coffee.
I don’t see any indication that this couple works exclusively in the tech industry. The only company mentioned is Pivot Point Network, which could be anything from a Political Action Committee to another consultancy firm. Trust exercises and slide decks are used in all kinds of corporations, not just the tech industry. It’s possible this will be some kind of cyber-crime thriller, but at the moment, we don’t have the information to determine that.
I agree that I had confusion about the complaints of it being Monday while the narrator thinks about what a quiet and relaxing week they seem to have ahead. Otherwise, this seemed like a fast-paced mystery thriller opening. I actually liked the open questions about what was going on in the relationship between the two characters, especially after the sexually suggestive way the dead woman is described–late night on the couch, noticing the eyes and the gleam in the hair.
Good input. thanks for weighing in. I’m sure this is helpful to our writer.
Until I read the other comments, I thought I just lived in threat assessment to long to see this as ‘too techie’. It isn’t. The closest thing to techno-babble is slide deck. That is a PowerPoint presentation.
Dear Author look at the suggestions. You were 80% or so there on the first read. I would probably take this home with me.
Corporate Threat Assessment is dominated by ex-law enforcement and cyber security people. It can cover personal protection for staff members, building security, and/or cyber protection. I have met C-level personal protection staff for a global company and several cyber security specialists who work local and globally. I am re-assured that the head of a regional security office likes my children. Most of his officers know the children at site. At least twice they have had to act on threats, one aimed directly at one of my children.
As I said, I didn’t know what threat assessment was. I let my co-author and sister read this because she’s more savvy than me on this stuff. She had worked in personnel for a large casino so she knew right away. I think this is a very good start, as I said. Lots of potential for investigation and intrigue.
I’d definitely keep reading, and your critique, as usual, is spot on & easily understood.
Here’s a question I had as I was reading (unless I totally missed something).
I don’t know if anyone else wondered: I was wondering all the way to the daughter calling the MC “Mom”, if the two primaries were men. Even the comment about “taking over my life” didn’t clarify it for me because a man could conceivably feel that way…and be called “Mom”. Probably a bit nitpicky of me, but slipping in the MC’s name (maybe) woul clear it up for me.
Having said that, I’d turn the page. It sounds like the beginnings of a good story. 👍
Interesting observaton re gender. Which is why I like names early on in first person POV. Just for clarity-sake. I am currently editing an old book of ours for repubbing and realized I waited until chapter 3 to insert my protag’s name. Found a way, via dialogue, to get it in sooner. Your characters live in your head as you write and sometimes you don’t realize readers can’t see them as clearly.
Great critique and suggestions, Chris. I agree that bringing Zach in kept me from connecting with the protagonist, whom I assumed was a woman. I would read on.
Thanks Patricia and all. Dear writer I hope this encourages you to keep moving forward with your writing. Let us know how you’re doing.