As we all wake up from our sparkly holiday hangovers, it's time to start thinking about the new year and new beginnings. Many of us have all agonized over the perfect first sentence to our next works of staggering genius, so as a New Year's gift, I'm going to be giving you the first sentences of your story! But, y'know, we live in the darkest timeline, and that means you don't get good first sentences. Your task will be to create good prose from sublimely bad starts.

When you sign up for this week, pick a basic fiction genre (SF, Fantasy, Mystery/Crime, etc.), or "non-genre" if you're feeling indecisive and want something with no implied genre. I'll assign you a sentence or short passage from the Lyttle Lytton contest, a contest that collects attempts to write the worst possible opening to an imaginary novel. You must begin your story with the Lyttle Lytton entry I assign, and you must somehow go on to make a non-shitty story out of it. You're not required to completely copy the writing style of your start (because that would lead to be a pretty crap story), or write exactly the story your start implies, but it needs to be a real part of your narrative -- no cutesy "meta" copouts like having the line be from a bad novel your main character is reading, for example. Embrace the garbage and make something brilliant, or at least less garbage.

If you :toxx:, I'll give you two Lyttle Lytton entries to choose from to start your story. The one you don't choose will apply as a flash rule that should factor into your story in some way, but doesn't need to be literally quoted.

Also, in the spirit of the holidays, I will extend Kaishai's word count bounty for crits for this week. Write a crit for a 2017 story you haven't critted before, get +200 bonus words to deal with your godless hell-prompt!

Standard TDome rules apply: no fanfic, erotica, political screeds, nonfiction, quote tags, Google Docs, or hand-written entries about masturbation. Have fun!