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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  16hr ago (text post)   211 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for February 17, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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The other day, I read this article from a literary agent-turned-novelist who made the point that a literary agent has to be hooked by a submission from the very first paragraph, and that, in her experience (and contrary to unpublished novelists' claims that their books "start slow, but get better later"), most books which didn't capture her interest from the first paragraph tended not to improve thereafter. She gave very specific instructions for how the first paragraph ought to grab the reader's attention: namely, surprises and discordances that provoke their curiosity, but without overwhelming them with weirdness.

It may seem like obvious advice, but for whatever reason, it prompted me to look at my novel with fresh eyes, and I think the opening needs to do more to grab the reader's attention. (Even if I didn't think that, no literary agent has yet requested the full thing, so I'll have to meet them halfway.) Fortunately, I came up with an idea for a new first paragraph to be inserted immediately before the old first paragraph, and the old first paragraph becomes the second paragraph, largely unchanged. Still need to finish editing the remainder of the manuscript to get it down to ~100k words.

I'd like to A/B test this to see if I'm on the right track, so if any of you would be interested in offering feedback on just the opening paragraph (without knowing if it's the old one or the new one), I'd really appreciate it. They're both no more than 300 words.

I recently read a book that started with "My mother was late to my birth". I remember thinking "ok, that's a pretty decent starting line, good job!" Also, recently read this: https://gwern.net/blog/2026/make-me-care which I think makes a lot of sense.

I recently read a book that started with "My mother was late to my birth".

What was the book?

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