You’ve Got Five Pages, You Are Fatally Invited by Ande Pliego, to Tell Me You’re Good.

Welcome back, my fellow creatives!Yup, I'm back to looking at the first five pages of various stories, for those five pages can make or break the engagement of a reader--or an agent. So, let's scope out the stories of others to see how they hook an audience!Clearly, Pliego was stoked to take the iconic And Then There Were None premise and ratchet it up with a gathering of mystery authors on a mysterious island estate. Throughout the introduction written by the gathering’s organizer and the opening pages from an attendee’s perspective, readers can see a clear difference in voices, but neither voice comes off as a trustworthy narrator. I particularly love the introduction’s opening line: “If you were to take Story, strap it down onto your dining room table, and slide a scalpel through its chest, you would find the lifeblood is theme.” Such a line gives a very strong sense of what this…soul, I’ll say, will be like. The visual of taking a creature and strapping it down onto your dining room table is already quite an image, but it’s the scalpel that gets me. Not a butcher’s knife or a dagger, but a scalpel. That’s a very surgical, sanitary, clean but deadly tool. Yet this dining room setting is NOT clinical at all–such a juxtaposition says a lot about the person who puts these things together. And the fact that the scalpel goes straight into the chest–the lethal place, the bloodiest place. Such a start promises plenty of “beautiful madness” in the pages ahead.And what will we discover in the following story's pages?We'll have to wait and see. xxxxRead on, share on, and write on, my friends!