By low-tech random method involving alphabet magnets and my 3-year-old daughter –

Maggie Robinson!

No April foolin’. So Maggie – you said you have TLP already, right? Just email me another title on your wish list and your snail mail address, and your goodies will be on the way!

Thanks to everyone who shared their own openings or ones from favorite books – they are all wonderful!

And I did promise to post what I’ve got so far as the opening of Goddess of Beauty, so here goes. (I made that promise because I thought it would motivate me to write more this weekend – hah.) I’m sure it’s going to change, eventually, but it’s what I’m working from now. I’m not sure I should (or can) tell you the heroine’s name just yet. Forgive the redaction.

If she was going to become a fallen woman, [the heroine] reasoned, she might as well fall all the way. And the longer she stood in this cramped dockside office, inhaling the fetid chill that would be her last breath of England, the more certain she felt of one thing. The sun-bronzed, wind-ruffled, and – her wicked imagination insisted – salt and rum-flavored man before her would make an excellent place to land.