I have actually written about ghostpigs...

I just felt like passing on this very funny blog entry by Catherynne Valente (I'm kind of stalking Apex right now):

Dudes, a short story is not that long. You do not have 50 pages to hook a reader (you don't, really, in a novel either, but that's another post), you cannot lazily dick around for a page and a half before being all CHECK IT OUT GHOSTPIGS. Because no one ever made it to the GHOSTPIGS, who were buried under: "Robert walked down the street. The sky was cloudy. All the houses were brown. He thought about work."

OH MY GOD.

Don't bury the lede. There is no reason not to open with: GHOSTPIGS MOTHERFUCKERS. You know how Ezra Pound famously cut the first 200 lines of The Wasteland so that it began with April is the cruelest month, one of the most famous lines in poetry, which Eliot, not ever having met a ghostpig, stuffed under a pile of 200 other lines which were not the most famous lines in poetry? Yeah. Do that. For serious. Because I should never be scrolling up to see how long is this story, really after a single paragraph about Robert and the brown houses.

I'm supposed to be editing my ghostpigs story, and now I'm all, "uh-oh, should I put the ghostpigs up front?  they don't come in till (much) later..."  And then I'm like, oh it's okay, I've written other stories where the "ghostpigs" don't come up till later, and then I realized that's not really true.  The "ghostpigs" really were introduced pretty quickly, at least in my most successful stories.  Yo, there's a monster here.  Yo, the lake is alive.  Etc.  If not first paragraph, then first scene.  So... ghostpigs to the front.