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Many a writer has had this conversation with himself (or herself), though personally I would be thinking about a blueberry muffin or a cranberry scone instead. Who am I kidding? I’m an apple fritter guy. So yeah, that would be my pastry of choice.

The point is, as difficult as it can be to finish a book or a story or a screenplay, there’s always that moment at the beginning where you’re trying to figure out how to start. Sometimes it’s easy. You hear some song lyrics or read something in the news or a line just comes to you out of nowhere and you’re off and running. Or rather, off and writing.

Other times, you sit and stare at a blank screen or a blank page and run through an internal dialogue similar to what Nicolas Cage does above. When that happens, you can spend hours searching for a beginning. Looking for the door that opens into your story.

I’ve had my fair share of both. And as I’ve mentioned before, since I don’t plot out my stories but discover them as I go, my opening line is always the impetus that propels me forward to the next discovery. I usually don’t have any idea where the story is going or where it’s going to end or what it’s going to be about until my characters start talking and doing things and letting me know what’s happening. So the opening line helps to get me going.

However, that’s not to say that I wait to come up with the perfect opening line every time. Something close is helpful. And even though I might think my opening is perfect, there’s always the chance that I’ll go back and change it to make it better. Or completely different.

My original opening to Breathers began with:

My name is Andrew and I’m a survivor.

The first chapter took place in his Undead Anonymous support group. It wasn’t until halfway through the 82 rejections I received that I moved the Undead Anonymous chapter to Chapter Two and wrote a new opening chapter with Andy waking up drunk on the kitchen floor and finding his parents stuffed into the Amana bottom freezer.

I don’t think that necessarily helped to land an agent, but I think it started the story off on a more active note. It’s not everyday you wake up and realize you’ve killed your parents and stuffed them into the refrigerator between the mayonnaise and the leftover Thanksgiving turkey.

While the opening chapter to my second novel, Fated, remained more or less the same and took place in a shopping mall in Paramus, NJ, the original opening line was:

I look at people and see what they’re going to be like in twenty years.

Eventually, after making some edits and adding a list of rules to the manuscript, I rewrote the opening to read:

Rule #1: Don’t get involved.

This worked on several levels and helped to tie some things together. It also set up the rule to be broken because that’s what rules are there for.

So even though the opening is important, just because you don’t come up with the perfect opening to start with, if you walk through the right door, the opening you’re looking for will eventually find you.

Below are several opening lines I’ve come up with that never wavered and led to two short stories and a novel that were inspired by: 1) a song from Beck; 2) my first novel; and 3) a writing exercise.

Grandpa only had one finger left and it was pointing at the door.
(From my short story “Softland,” which will appear in my upcoming e-book short story collection Shooting Monkeys in a Barrel, available March 27.)

Is it necrophilia if you’re both dead?
(From my short story “Zombie Gigolo,” inspired by my novel Breathers; “Zombie Gigolo” can be found in Shooting Monkeys in a Barrel, as well as in The Living Dead 2.)

It’s my understanding that naked women don’t generally tend to carry knives.
(From my third novel Lucky Bastard, scheduled for release on April 17.)

Sometimes, the first time is the charm.

It’s A Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, Elf, The Santa Clause, Bad Santa, Miracle on 34th Street, Die Hard, and The Family Man. Though I’m not sure how many lists would have included Edward Scissorhands (yes, the climax takes place at Christmas) or Planes, Trains and Automobiles (true, it’s Thanksgiving, but last I checked that was still a holiday.)

So now that we’ve got that out of the way, here are my Top Ten Holiday Songs and the artists who sing my favorite versions:

“Winter Wonderland” (Louis Armstrong)
I love me some Louis Armstrong and no other version of “Winter Wonderland” hits the same notes with me as this one. This song is playing at the beginning of Chapter 50 in Breathers. Sing it, Satchmo.

“Happy Xmas” (John Lennon)
Yes, it’s a bit of a political song, but The Beatles are my favorite all time band and Lennon my favorite songwriter of the group, so this one makes the list. Plus I love the Harlem Community Choir signing in the background.

“A Holly Jolly Christmas” (Burl Ives)
This is the classic version from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer that always makes me feel like a kid again. I can almost hear the reindeer up on the roof.

“Christmas Time Is Here” (Vince Guaraldi)
This vocal choir version from A Charlie Brown Christmas is such a sweet holiday song and the instrumentals are absolutely beautiful. See “A Holly Jolly Christmas” for the way this song makes me feel.

“The Christmas Song” (Nat King Cole)
The perfect song to appreciate your friends or family or that special someone around the fire or the Christmas tree. Thanks Nat.

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (Petula Clark & Rod McKuen)
The most playful and risque version of this song I’ve heard. And you’ve got to love a holiday song about a guy who’s working hard to get some cold weather action.

“Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” (Judy Garland)
This is the It’s A Wonderful Life of Christmas songs. Sweet and poignant and filled with hope. No one owns “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” like Judy Garland.

“It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year” (Andy Williams)
No other song gets me revved up for Christmas like this version by Andy Williams. For some reason, it always manages to give me goosebumps.

“Father Christmas” (The Kinks)
I’ve always been a fan of the Kinks and came across this gem of a social commentary holiday song about poor kids threatening Santa. “Father Christmas, give us some money, don’t mess around with those silly toys…”

“Santa Claus Is Back In Town” / “Merry Christmas Baby” (Elvis Presley)
No list of Christmas songs would be complete without something from The King. I couldn’t pick just one and went with these two because I love the R&B influence in both of them.

On the 2nd day of Bookmas, my bookstore sent to me:
A Tale of Two Cities, and Silverstein’s The Giving Tree

On the 3rd day of Bookmas, my bookstore sent to me:
The Three Musketeers, A Tale of Two Cities…
And Silverstein’s The Giving Tree

On the 4th Day of Bookmas, my bookstore sent to me:
Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Three Musketeers, A Tale of Two Cities…
And Silverstein’s The Giving Tree

On the 5th day of Bookmas, my bookstore sent to me:
Slaughterhouse-Five!
Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Three Musketeers, A Tale of Two Cities…
And Silverstein’s The Giving Tree

On the 6th day of Bookmas, my bookstore sent to me:
The Dark Tower VI
Slaughterhouse-Five!
Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Three Musketeers, A Tale of Two Cities…
And Silverstein’s The Giving Tree

On the 7th day of Bookmas, my bookstore sent to me:
The House of the Seven Gables, The Dark Tower VI
Slaughterhouse-Five!
Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Three Musketeers, A Tale of Two Cities…
And Silverstein’s The Giving Tree

On the 8th day of Bookmas, my bookstore sent to me:
Eight Men Out, The House of the Seven Gables, The Dark Tower VI
Slaughterhouse-Five!
Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Three Musketeers, A Tale of Two Cities…
And Silverstein’s The Giving Tree

On the 9th day of Bookmas, my bookstore sent to me:
Nine Stories by Salinger, Eight Men Out
The House of the Seven Gables, The Dark Tower VI
Slaughterhouse-Five!
Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Three Musketeers, A Tale of Two Cities…
And Silverstein’s The Giving Tree

On the 10th day of Bookmas, my bookstore sent to me:
Ten Little Indians, Nine Stories by Salinger, Eight Men Out
The House of the Seven Gables, The Dark Tower VI
Slaughterhouse-Five!
Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Three Musketeers, A Tale of Two Cities…
And Silverstein’s The Giving Tree

On the 11th day of Bookmas, my bookstore sent to me:
The Count of Eleven, Ten Little Indians, Nine Stories by Salinger,
Eight Men Out, The House of the Seven Gables, The Dark Tower VI
Slaughterhouse-Five!
Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Three Musketeers, A Tale of Two Cities…
And Silverstein’s The Giving Tree

On the 12th day of Bookmas, my bookstore sent to me:
Twelfth Night by Shakespeare, The Count of Eleven
Ten Little Indians, Nine Stories by Salinger, Eight Men Out
The House of the Seven Gables, The Dark Tower VI
Slaughterhouse-Five!
Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Three Musketeers, A Tale of Two Cities…
And Silverstein’s The Giving Tree

(*Author’s Note: Thanks to everyone who gave me their suggestions for the 8th and 11th days)

S.G. Browne / Author Revealed

To follow up on this, I thought I’d share a dozen additional tidbits of information that you might find enlightening, amusing, or worthless. Or maybe all three. I like to keep my options open…

• My first job when I was 16 years old was making pizzas at Chuck E. Cheese. I earned $3.35/hour.

• I attended Burning Man from 2004-2007.

• While I’m definitely Beatles rather than Stones, I think The Who should be involved in the conversation.

• Give me Mark Twain over Ernest Hemingway any day.

• My cat’s name is Griffen. Sometimes when he purrs he sounds like a pigeon.

• I’m a sucker for It’s a Wonderful Life.

• I’ve been a fan of the Minnesota Vikings since 1977. Somebody please shoot me.

• When I was 11 years old, I wanted to play professional football.

• My major at the University of the Pacific was Engineering. That lasted one year.

• I didn’t realize I wanted to be a writer until a year before I graduated from college.

• My favorite artists are Vincent van Gogh and Edward Hopper.

• I am not a fan of fruit cake.

I was recently asked on my Goodreads author group about words that I loved and/or hated. While I provided a brief answer on the original post, it got me to thinking about some of my other favorite words, which eventually led me to corrupt the Rodgers and Hammerstein song “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music.

To be honest, I don’t make use of all the words included in the rhyming lyrics above on a regular basis, though I am fond of spitting out eschewed and omniscient and plethora whenever I can fit them into the conversation. Dude is my favorite word, because it can mean so many things with just a simple change of inflection. And I don’t think there’s a more amusing word in the English language than blimp.

Go on, try it. Say blimp. Then say it again. Repeat it over and over. I’ll wait. See? I told you so.

Some of my other favorite words include:

Susurrus, salubrious, lugubrious, onomatopoeia, omnipotent, gargantuan, quintessential, ubiquitous, denouement, verisimilitude, denuded, culinary, milieu, bogart, apocryphal, gasp, haunt, and loathe.

Speaking of loathing, while there aren’t any words that affect me like the proverbial fingernails dragging along the chalkboard, I’m not particularly fond of the word gherkin. I don’t know why. It just rubs me the wrong way. Other than that, I’m pretty easy to get along with.

How about you? Any words that you love or hate? That just roll off your tongue or make you squirm?

As you might have figured out, I’m not prepared for the holiday season. It seems like just a few weeks ago I was dressed up like Uncle Sam, selling illegal fireworks to middle school kids.

How did this happen? Where did the rest of the year go? When did Thanksgiving follow summer?

I guess it doesn’t matter. Thanksgiving is upon us, or at least upon me, and that means it’s time to reflect upon the things in my life I’m thankful for. Which is easier than having to deal with New Year’s resolutions. That’s way too much pressure. At least with Thanksgiving, I don’t have to worry about breaking any promises.

So I’ve decided to list the things I’m thankful for in the universe of writing. No reason. I just wanted a theme. I chose 24 because that’s the date on which Thanksgiving falls this year.

So here they are, in no particular order. 24 Writing Related Things for Which I’m Thankful:

1) My agent
2) My editor
3) My readers (Thank you for the support)
4) Stephen King
5) Chuck Palahniuk
6) Ray Bradbury
7) The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
8) The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
9) Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
10) The screenplays of Charlie Kaufman
11) Haiku
12) Spell check
13) Copy editors
14) Brick and mortar bookstores
15) The comedic writing of Matt Stone and Trey Parker
16) Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
17) Oscar Wilde
18) Mark Twain
19) Book reviewers (positive reviews are a bonus)
20) My writer’s group
21) My writing community (both in the real and cyber world)
22) The song writing skills of Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day
23) Lyrics by Lennon/McCartney
24) Books that aren’t electronic

That about wraps it up. Now it’s time to go make garlic mashed potatoes for the annual family gorge fest. I’m always in charge of the mashed potatoes. I think it’s because I use two sticks of butter and a cup of sour cream.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I prefer my chapters short and manageable. Chapters that give me some dialogue, some action, some character building, some plot movement, and don’t screw around with excessive description or weighty exposition or ten-page flashbacks.

Call me a product of Hollywood movies.

Plus short chapters give me a definite place to stop. With long chapters I always feel like I’m being forced to keep reading to the end when sometimes I just want to roll over and go to sleep. At least give me a break in the middle of the chapter, a space or a line of asterisks or some fancy little symbol so I don’t have to pick up the book mid-scene and try to remember where I stopped and what was going on. It’s like stopping in the middle of a conversation while you’re at a bar and trying to remember what you were talking about before you did another shot of Jagermeister.

Writing a chapter is like giving a speech. You really only have 3-5 minutes before people lose their interest. But because I’m being generous, let’s say you’ve got 10-15 minutes. Tops. After that, eyes are turning glassy and people are wondering where to take their next vacation and what to have for dinner and and how to kill their boss without going to jail.

Book chapters should be governed by the same rules. 10-15 pages, max. You exceed that and I’m flipping forward, wondering how much longer it’s going to take me to finish this damn chapter so I can feel like I have a sense of closure.

Yes, I’m a little bit obsessive compulsive. But so are you. Admit it.

Right now I’m reading Look at Me by Jennifer Egan, which at 415 pages and 20 chapters averages nearly 21 pages per chapter. To make matters worse, the book is written in 10-point Times Roman so there’s more than 400 words per page. Come on! That’s a good 100 words per page more than Carl Hiaasen’s Star Island, which is written in 12-point Times Roman and, at 354 pages and 31 chapters, comes in at a much more reasonable 11.4 pages per chapter.

Bing, bang, boom.

In this age where e-mails and text messages and Facebook status updates have replaced hand-written letters and phone calls and actual conversations, where in another generation Twitter will have made it impossible for anyone to have any kind of interaction that’s longer than 140 characters, I think short chapters are definitely going to be in demand.

Fortunately I’m already ahead of the game, as Breathers, with 310 pages and 58 chapters, comes in at 5.3 pages per chapter (PPC), while Fated (352 pages and 54 chapters) has a PPC of 6.5.

Ka-ching!

After going through a random sampling on my bookshelf, I discovered that the majority of my favorite novels have short chapters, with The Great Gatsby being one exception to the rule with a PPC of 20. And nearly every novel written by Chuck Palahniuk, Christopher Moore, and Kurt Vonnegut comes in with a PPC of less than 10.

True, Slaughterhouse Five has only 10 chapters and a PPC of just over 20, but each chapter is broken up into as many as 80 separate sections and some of the chapters even have pictures. Bonus! So it’s still technically in the club. And then there’s Cat’s Cradle with 191 pages and 127 chapters for a PPC of 1.5, which is by far the lowest PPC of any novel I’ve ever read and sets the bar for ADD readers and Twitter-philes.

Can I have a hallelujah?

Conversely, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has nearly 35 pages per chapter for the entire trilogy, which probably explains why I never made it past The Fellowship of the Ring. You ask me, it needed more pictures.

Here are some other notable books I own and their PPC quotient (based on the copies on my shelf):

• The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger (214 pages / 26 chapters / 8.2 ppc)

• Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk (218 pages / 31 chapters / 7.0 ppc)

• Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (309 pages / 36 chapters / 8.6 ppc)

• The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (231 pages / 32 chapters / 7.2 ppc)

• Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (288 pages / 23 chapters / 12.5 ppc)

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (143 pages / 35 chapters / 4.1 ppc)

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (322 pages / 43 chapters / 7.5 ppc)

• High Fidelity, Nick Hornby (323 pages / 35 chapters / 9.2 ppc)

• The Stand, Stephen King (817 pages / 66 chapters / 12.4 ppc) *The original version, not the complete and uncut version, which has a PPC of 14.8

So where do you sit? Long chapters? Short chapters? Tequila shots instead of Jagermeister? Have at it. Or not. It’s a free country.

I had Rachel Getting Married from Netflix all cued up in my DVD player when I caught the end of the Family Guy episode “Something, Something, Something Dark Side” on TV, which is a parody of The Empire Strikes Back, and I decided to watch Star Wars again for the first time in nearly ten years. On VHS.

Yes, I still own a VHS. And I have a cathode ray tube television that weighs a thousand pounds. I have trouble getting rid of things that still work.

But back to Star Wars.

While I still have a soft spot for what was the most awe-inspiring and memorable movie-going experience of my life (having seen the original release at the Festival Cinemas in Hayward in 1977), I discovered that the writer in me couldn’t abide several problems in the film that I used to be able to overlook.

For one thing, the Stormtroopers need some target practice. Sure, you can argue that on the Death Star they were missing on purpose to allow the good guys to escape so they could track them to the rebel base, but throughout the film they were about as accurate as a weather forecast.

Speaking of shooting, when you have a single point of entry to defend where only one stormtrooper can come through at at time (like when the stormtroopers are coming out of the elevator into the detention block), it seems like Han and Chewbacca could have picked them off one by one as they came out. Not that I have any experience fighting with plasma bolt weapons, but it seems reasonable to me. Just sayin’.

But the part that really gets me is at the end of the movie when the Death Star approaches the planet Yavin, on the other side of which sits the moon that is home to the rebel base. With all of that “ultimate power in the universe” hyperbole, couldn’t the Death Star just blow up Yavin to get to the moon and take care of wiping out the rebellion in a matter of minutes? Instead, the Death Star goes into a leisurely orbit around the planet, which takes thirty minutes and gives the rebels plenty of time to attack the Death Star and blow it up.

Lame. Not as lame as regurgitating the same plot point in Return of the Jedi, but still lame.

If there’s one thing that irks me in films, it’s contrived or inexplicable plot points that allow the story to unfold in a manner inconsistent with the existing story elements.

But then, George Lucas has a bazillion dollar movie franchise and his own special effects company and a campus in the Presidio in San Francisco with a Yoda water fountain out in front of it, so what do I know?

This is all according to my mom. I don’t have any recollection of these moments of communication frustration. Nor do I have any recollection of calling my pacifier a “loodela” (pronounced loo-da-lah). It was like I was speaking another language. Something Germanic, I’m guessing.

As I grew older, my speech began to resemble something closer to English, but I still had trouble with certain letters, like U’s and R’s. So words like “fork” came out sounding more like I was from South Boston. Apparently, this was a great source of amusement for my parents as their five-year-old son would say things like: “Where’s my fuhk?” or “I need a fuhk.”

Doesn’t everyone?

However, I do recall a not-so-amusing moment when I was seven years old and, frustrated with my mom about something that had just occurred, I yelled out “It’s all your fault!” and stormed up the stairs to my bedroom. Only because of my speech problem, what my mom heard instead was “It’s all your fart!”

I don’t know what that means, exactly. I guess it implies definitive ownership of the fart. But I do know it was enough to get my mom to follow me up the stairs and wash my mouth out with a bar of soap. Ivory. Dove. Palmolive. I don’t know what flavor it was. And I didn’t imagine myself going blind like Ralphie in A Christmas Story but let me tell you, it didn’t taste too good.

And what does this have to do with writing? (Scratches his head to try to remember where he was going with this.) Ah yes. It has to do with communicating your ideas to others. Using language and characters and plot to convey what it is you want to say to your readers. Getting your point across. As another author (I believe it was Nigel Hamilton) once said:

“If the reader doesn’t understand what you’re saying, then you’re just talking to yourself.”

I suppose you could say it would be the equivalent of literary masturbation.

I think that’s something writers just take for granted. Not the literary masturbation part, but the ability to communicate.The idea that the story we create in our heads makes it to the page without losing something in the process.

When my writing group read my initial drafts of Breathers, Fated, and Lucky Bastard, they brought up a number of questions about the worlds I’d created. I didn’t withhold this information on purpose, but the story made sense to me when I initially told it. After all, I’m the creator of the universe, so naturally it all makes sense to me.

It wasn’t until I got feedback from the other members of my group that I realized I needed to do a better job of getting my ideas across. I needed to convey the concepts in my head so that the reader would enjoy the story and understand what I was trying to say.

Which is why rewriting is such an integral part of my writing process. It’s where I get to fix the problems. Where I get to craft and shape the story. Where I get to clarify what it is I’m trying to say so I’m not just talking to myself. Sometimes this process can include as many as half a dozen rewrites before the manuscript reaches my agent. That’s followed by a round of edits with my editor, then another three rounds of line edits, copy edits, and proof edits before it’s finally ready to publish.

I guess you could say that if writing the novel is the equivalent of giving birth to it, then rewriting it is like raising it and teaching it everything you know before sending it out into the world.

After that, you just hope it doesn’t throw a tantrum or get its mouth washed out with soap.

New Interview
First off, I have a new interview up on ShadowCast Audio (though it’s a text interview, not audio) where I discuss laughing at inappropriate moments, the hardest thing about writing, the possibility of sequels to Breathers and Fated, and why afternoon naps should be mandatory.

New Conventions
Next up, I’ll be at the World Horror Convention at the Doubletree Hotel in Austin, TX, from April 27 – May 1. While the convention itself isn’t new, I’ve never been to Austin, so there you go. And although the convention does run through the weekend, I’ll be leaving Saturday to attend the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC, which is new for me. On Sunday, May 1, I have a scheduled signing at the Mysterious Galaxy Books booth, #372 with Christopher Farnsworth, Debra Ginsberg, and Steve Hockensmith. I’ll post more details about Austin and Los Angeles on Monday.

New Book
And last, but certainly not least, my third novel, Lucky Bastard, has been sold to Simon & Schuster with a tentative publication date of Spring 2012. Lucky Bastard is a dark comedy and a bit of a mystery/noir about a private detective who lives in San Francisco, has an addiction to corporate coffeehouse baristas, and who was born with the ability to steal luck.

That’s all I’ve got time for today. Thanks for listening. And Happy Easter!