BELOW IS THE MARCH FIRST PAGE PICTURE PROMPT for anyone who would like a little inspiration to spark their first page.
Always thought there was a story with this picture illustrated by Mark Meyers. Mark spends his days drawing and painting pictures filled with kids, escaping circus monkeys, and everything in between. He was featured on Illustrator Saturday. Here is the link: http://kathytemean.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/illustrator-saturday-mark-meyers/
I was not able to confirm our guest critiquer for March in time for this post.
Here are the submission guidelines for Sending in a First Page.
To send in a First Page: Please attach your double spaced, 12 point font, 23 line first page to an e-mail and send it to: kathy(dot)temean(at)gmail(dot)com. Also cut and paste it into the body of the e-mail.
Put “February First Page Critique” or “March First Page Picture Prompt Critique” in the subject line. Make sure you have your name on the submission, a title, and indicate the genre.
You can only send in one first page each month. It can be the same first page each month or a different one, but if you sent it to me last month and it didn’t get chosen, you need to send it again using the March directions. Of course, it doesn’t have to be the same submission. It can be a first page from a work in process or you can use the picture prompt above.
Please include your name, the title of the piece, and whether it is as picture book, middle grade, or young adult, etc. at the top.
CALL FOR ILLUSTRATIONS: Thank you to everyone would sent in an illustration last month. I still have a few in the folder that I plan to use, just looking for the right post, but I am running low, so please look to see if you have anything that you would like me to show off. I am looking for illustrations that would go well with the month or any illustration that might go with a writing or illustrating post. Same as always: At least 500 pixels wide, sent to kathy (dot) temean (at) gmail (dot) com, and include a blurb about you. Thanks!
Talk Tomorrow,
Kathy
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Writer's Prompt Tagged:
March First Page Critique,
Mark Meyers,
Picture writing prompt 
Agent Sean McCarthy was nice enough to read five of the first page prompts sent in for review. I thank him and I hope some of you take the time to thank Sean, too. He was very generous with his time. It’s easy to see that Sean is someone who really cares about improving the quality of children’s books.
As a reminder the illustration on the left done by Brian Bowes was the picture prompt for this month.
Here are the first pages and Sean’s comments:
COPERNICA by Lauri Meyers
I banged my foot on the side of the blaster to put out the fire. Old One-Eye got too close that time. Good thing I didn’t skip the fire retardant dip today or I would have been toast. My brother would have been mad if he had to tell mom I got fried to a crisp getting birthday cake.
Mom was still going to be steamed when she figured out we made the supply run. I hoped she would ease up when our little brother got to taste chocolate cake for the first time. Mom told me I had a chocolate cake when I turned four. I think it was sweet and maybe a little spicy. I would remember it this time. Everything tastes sweeter when you battle a dragon for it.
“On your left!” Alistar yelled before a swift turn right.
“Whoa where did the second dragon come from?” I said adjusting my hold. It was one thing to die getting cake. It was another thing to die because you are daydreaming about cake. I checked my supply bag. The cake was safe. The medical supplies we picked up were good too. The magazine in my pants was poking me in the ribs after the quick move. Alistar would lecture me if he knew I had extra cargo. I would have to hide it from my friends too. I didn’t want to get it back with crumpled pages, circled outfits, and drool on the pictures of stars. I was going to know 10 years ago styles better than anyone.
One crazy scientist and a dragon egg was enough to seriously disrupt the fashion industry. Who knew dragons didn’t need a mate to reproduce? One became hundreds in a few years. We are pretty safe in the country, but London is lost. I don’t know if the dragons figured out how to cross the ocean, but there hadn’t been yankee doodle rescue attempts in a few years.
“Hold on, Nic!” Alistar shouted before dropping under the bridge. I tightened my grip. No one called me Copernica anymore. You don’t want to get chomped because someone politely used your full name before getting to the part about the fire-breathing dragon standing behind you.
Here’s Sean:
With dystopian manuscripts, it’s crucial to immediately establish how the character’s world is different from the current landscape, and to set the manuscript apart from other books within the genre. I liked that you took chocolate cake and fashion magazines, and transformed them into something exotic. This, along w/ the dragon references, let’s the reader know what kind of story to expect.
With that being said, the amount of information that’s being presented to the reade
You know, this is always so much fun! Of course, I read the comments on my story first, but just finished reading everyone else’s. It’s always so interesting to me to read the different directions everyone’s imaginations go when looking at the same picture. These were all so imaginative, I think, and I’m sure the readers of the blog learned a lot from Sean’s expert critiques. I know I did
What I see for mine is that I should learn to follow my instincts more because the things Sean points out are things I considered while writing the page, about the logistics. Not as excuses, but I spent about an hour on it, from beginning to end, and didn’t want to spend more than that, to be honest. There’s always the confines of the page where, when typing to revise, changing one word or adding one extra letter can shift the whole document to a second page, so even though things could be worded differently to be clearer or better—you can’t. It’s SO frustrating! lol
Anyway, in the first paragraph I did mention her “right” arm though didn’t repeat the word “arm” ’cause I didn’t want to be repetitious and thought it was obvious. Maybe not though!
In my mind I was imagining them flying high, but not so high that they couldn’t see people’s faces. In rereading it, perhaps a few simple changes would help. In the first paragraph simply removing the word “high” in the sentence “…as we raced past the towers high above the main thoroughfare…” and deleting the words “Far below” at the beginning of the next paragraph would’ve allowed for that? Opinions anyone?
Also, since it’s been a few weeks since I actually wrote this, I see something that should be changed, too, also to do with logistics: in the very last sentence (I was able to grip her neck and look up in time to see Joe jump and disappear behind the flames of the bike as it exploded on the pavement.) I should’ve written “down” instead of “up” for it to make sense. It’s actually the thing I love about revision, is the tweaking and clarifying. It’s ALways good to be removed from the work for a while, to get that proverbial “fresh eye” going
Thanks for encouraging me to do this, Kathy. It’s such good exercise! And thank you, Sean, for taking the time out for all of us to do this! It’s wonderful!
My family was pretty surprised when I jumped out of bed with a flourish this morning rather than my usual slow extraction from the covers. Hooray, Copernica! Why am I the only one who thinks dragons are scary?
Thank you Sean for taking the time to critique. Thank you Kathy for offering the prompt every month which has been great practice. Usually I work on picture books, so the prompts make for interval training.
First page prompts are tricky. Sometimes only a paragraph peeks out and other times several pages explode from the picture. Where do you start and stop the first page?