Chicken Ranch: Chapter One

Part of writing a successful book is getting the opening just right. Any writer or editor will tell you that the reader's attention must be grabbed in the first few sentences or else all is lost. With that in mind, I've been struggling to find the proper approach to take with the first chapter in my book on the infamous La Grange Chicken Ranch. So I figured, "Hey, everyone who reads my blog is essentially a first reader! That's something approaching six people, give or take." So here's the opening paragraph for your review. I think it sets up a dignified presentation, with an ominous foreboding of what's to come.

No one would have believed in the early years of the nineteen-seventies that this brothel was being watched keenly and closely by a media personality more flamboyant than the sheriff though not yet as renowned ; that as prostitutes busied themselves about their various tricks they were scrutinized and surveilled, perhaps almost as intensely as a teenage boy with a stack of his father's Playboys purloined from under the bed. With infinite complacency Johns went to and fro down Highway 71 from Austin or College Station and beyond, gleeful in anticipation of the carnal pleasures that awaited. No one gave a thought that to become a legend, one must first kill a legend. It is curious to recall some of the sexual habits of those departed days. At most, horny Texans fancied there might be other, jealous men in Oklahoma or Louisiana, perhaps less virile than themselves and ready to settle for the missionary position. Yet across the airwaves in Houston, an ego that is to our egos as ours are to those of the chickens at the ranch, toupee white and unrealistic, regarded this brothel with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew his plans against it. And early in the nineteen-seventies came the great disillusionment.

Mind you, it's still a work in progress. This could all change if I come up with something I think works better.

Now Playing: Rush Chronicles