Register 04Literary prose
The Crimson Roar
Book one. The world ends at 11:40 on an ordinary morning.
The last ordinary thing Paul did was lose an argument about a banana.
The baby wanted it peeled from the wrong end and would not be reasoned with, and Dana was laughing at him from the sink, and Lucy was narrating the whole crisis to her cereal in the grave voice of a courtroom reporter, and Paul stood in his own kitchen in the gray of six-forty with a banana and a furious toddler and thought, the way you think a thing you’ll never get to be embarrassed about later, that he was a man who had everything and most of it was sticky.
He kissed all three of them on his way out. He always did; it wasn’t a thing he noticed doing. The baby’s head smelled like sleep. Lucy held up her cereal spoon for inspection and he inspected it. Dana, on his way past, without either of them looking up from what they were doing — her hand found his and squeezed once and let go, the whole of a marriage in it, the entire ordinary miracle, go on, you’ll be late.
The Crimson Roar · Prologue
What this proves for your book
Sentence-level craft at full length — 96,000 words that hold this standard from the first banana to the final withheld line. This is the register memoirs and upmarket fiction are bought in.
