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!

With my twins Biff and Bash up to their eyeballs in Dr. Who comics, books, and films, I couldn't help but pick a time-traveling story this month. After all, I grew up with the adventurers and time travelers; we even traveled through time ourselves to catch criminals like Carmen Sandiego!And it sounds like Ludington's protagonist Rabbit Ward has his own Carmen Sandiego to contend with. See, Rabbit Ward is an archaeologist who also travels back in time. He doesn't bring artifacts back with him, but he does try to ensure artifacts will be where present-day excavators can find them. It's a fun premise that promises plenty of misadventure, especially if there are competing time-travelers to contend with. That's an interesting twist Ludington shares on the second page of the novel: time machines are expensive, but not unique. This means different owners of those time machines may have their own motives for traveling through time...and chances are they are not all out to preserve antiquities like Rabbit Ward.Ludington's prose establishes the pacing of the story from the get-go with Rabbit Ward "crashing" back into the present, and that momentum never drops. Ludington takes care that the prose never slows that momentum, whether he's describing the time machine or sharing a flashback of Rabbit Ward in ancient Rome. If you've gotta go back in time, then Splinter Effect may be just the trip you need to double-back again.And what will we discover in the following story's pages? We'll have to wait and see. xxxx

Read on, share on, and write on, my friends!