Landfall at Starship Reckless
At Starship Reckless blog, Athena Andreadis has just released the TOC and first paragraph of each of the stories in her forthcoming anthology, The Other Half of the Sky. Already a promising start to what looks like a more interesting anthology than usual. My own contribution is the opening chapter of my Frontera sequel, story-titled “Landfall”:
Most college sophomores spent their summer running toyworlds while catching sun at air-conditioned disappearing beaches. Jenny Ramos Kennedy spent hers at the Havana Institute for Revolutionary Botany, which students called the Botánica. At the Botánica, Jenny worked with ultraphytes, Earth’s cyanide-emitting extraterrestrial invaders. Could she discover how to engineer ultraphyte chromosomes–to control them genetically, before they poisoned the planet?
Good grief, I’ll have to do better than that. For all my books, the opening paragraph gets rewritten a hundred times, so it likely won’t be recognizable by the time the book comes out (The Blood Star Frontier). But the key themes are there. Botánica of course is a play on the term for a santeria herbalist shop. And yes, there is santeria, alongside the science. At the Cuban scientific farm I toured, there was a santeria altar.
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Ultraphyte 
Well, yes, that’s engaged my interest in several of the stories there.
Also, your’s isn’t the worst opening paragraph, and I notice that several of the others are cheats. According to them, this is a paragraph! (all the way from “Well, yes…is a paragraph!”)
Well let’s not be grammar dictators. I like short paragraphs, especially as my eyes age.
I found it intriguing just to see so many footsteps into other worlds.