THE LOTTERY

This day begins the same as

yesterday and days too many to count. He

awakes alone slipping his numb feet inside

the soft, slightly cushioned slippers.

The diet ordered by his doctor for the

advancing diabetes worked for a time, but

he can’t resist the donuts. His toes may

be without feeling, but he is not. He

remembers how he scolded his daughter for

going without shoes when she was small and

running about. There is no need for shoes

most days since his mail and paper are

delivered to his door.

The empty house embraces him.

Every sound is magnified by its hollow

feel. He calls himself Wood or Deadwood

if he is in a humorous mood. Wood

invokes thoughts of something solid and

strong, not to be pitied and having the

potential for great things. Trees can be

made into vessels and lovingly carved and

conditioned, navigating the seas to foreign

lands. Then again, they can be scarred and

returned to the earth. Scars lie hidden

behind clothing and he knows that someday,

maybe sooner than later, he too will return

to the earth. He enjoys deep thoughts and

analogies. Maybe he will tell his daughter

The advancing diabetes hooks me, because it's scary. However, he's careless of it, which makes me care less too. (Technical detail: if his diabetes is this bad and he's still pigging out on donuts, this is going to be a pretty short story!)

Consider dropping paragraph 2, and getting on to whatever action will be happening. It amplifies his hopelessness and his focus on his daughter, but this can be done while something is happening.

Consider using past tense; I don't see an advantage in present tense here.

quote:

---

This is the beginning of the novel

---

"Thank you."
OR
"Could you please clarify _________?"

Thing is, when you explain to us what you're up to, those explanations don't go into your book, so the reader doesn't benefit! Let your story do the explaining.

THE LOTTERY

Day of days

The day began the same as yesterday and days too many to count. He awoke alone slipping his numb feet inside the slightly cushioned slippers. The diet ordered by his doctor for the advancing diabetes helped him somewhat. His toes had no felling unlike himself. There was no need for shoes most days since his mail and paper were delivered to his door. Wood liked to check the numbers and read the obituaries, joking that he wanted to see if his name was there. He had never been lucky with the former, or ill-omened by the latter. On November 18, 1974 he didn’t know what to do with the reality that he became a winner of the weekly lottery. That would require his appearance on television. He wished that he didn’t have the ticket.

Laurie, fiction means "made up" and nonfiction means "not made up" (or true).

If your book-length manuscript is made up, it's book-length fiction, also known as a novel.

I think this may be the origin of the old dictum "everybody has one novel in them". I'm not sure I agree - I can't think of any incidents in my life that would be remotely interesting in novel form - but it clearly does hold true for a lot of people. After all, another common dictum is "write what you know" - and if you don't know your own life, well, you don't know anything!

It is harder to write what you don't know - but one of the advantages of fantasy (and to a lesser extent SF) as genres is that you can effectively set your own ground rules, and decide what does and doesn't work. If you create a world, no-one else can tell you how it does or doesn't work!

I've toyed with doing some crime fiction but am daunted because I know I'd want to do heaps of research about forensics, police procedures, etc etc. Whereas with fantasy, while I have done immense amounts of research, it has to an extent been incidental - just part of my general reading (being how I'm the strange sort of person who will read books on Ventian shipbuilding, or the leather industry in the Middle Ages).

We had a separate True Crime section.