Contest Mania!!!

Thank you to Tina Lynn for posting the link to the Bransford contest. I follow his blog, but I don't check it every day. I would have hated to miss that one. I loves me a good contest. I also loves me a bad contest. I'll enter anything. Seriously.

I entered my first paragraph from my WIP, as the instructions stated. This is not my completed manuscript that I am currently shopping around to agents, it's my WIP that I'm referring to as TRP. (Any one want to start a small, lame contest with guesses about what that might stand for? Best guess gets...I don't know...hmmm. How about best guess must also be accompanied by best prize demand. And I am the sole judge. Demands considered unreasonable will be null and void.)

So anyway! Here is that first paragraph. My husband didn't like it. He knows what the book is ultimately about, and he said that it didn't hint towards the plot of the novel. He's basically right, but I have my reasons for starting the novel this way. I don't know precisely what they are at this point, but that's the way I've started the novel, so clearly I have reasons, however obscure they may be, even to myself. Without further ado, the first paragraph:

Becca had always wanted to be wild like Joey, but it never seemed to work out for her. Joey could do just about anything and get away with it. She was the love ‘em and leave ‘em type. She mowed down guys and never looked back. The only time Becca had tried a one night stand, all she’d gotten out of it was a pregnancy scare when the condom broke. Joey could drink any guy under the table and walk away unscathed. The night Becca had finally allowed herself to get stinking, filthy drunk, she’d managed to get her foot caught in the seatbelt when she tried to climb out of the back of Frank’s two door Chevy Nova. She’d been dragged for half a block before anyone had noticed. She did not need the third time to be the charm. When Joey left, it just about killed her. But she didn’t go with her. She wasn’t wild. It wasn’t in her DNA and she was painfully aware of that. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to go. She just knew that she wouldn’t have survived it.