The challenge: 100 first-page story hooks in sixty days. Just the first page (or less), and it has to hook the reader to want more. I'm now into the home stretch, and it's been a very long and interesting ride. Today, in fact, I'll finish them all up. They're all there, on my hard drive, one hundred new story possibilities. Two months of hard work. And it was hard.
Ninety-three is the first bit of an essay, which is a different kind of story, but a story nonetheless, and the beginnings still need to grab and hook whether fiction or non. It's actually been published, as part of 
Ninety-four has also been published, and it was honorable mention (I'm calling it a silver medal) in 
Ninety-three:
I was a millionaire once, did I ever tell you that?
Eighteen, nineteen years ago. I had spent the last decade working as a financial professional hawking products to get people into the stock market by any means necessary, and I woke up one morning and knew I was supposed to be doing something else. So I quit, and went to work for myself, doing...nothing. For eight months. We were so broke that when someone put a sack of flour on our doorstep one night, my wife and I just held each other and cried.
But at the end of that eight months, I somehow inserted myself into the sale of an internet company to a smart-card company, and I had a job. The job was supposed to pay $70k a year. It might even have done that, if they'd made payroll more often than once in three.
They didn't.
Ninety-four:
The first time I met her, I kissed her goodbye.
It was a bright golden June. Flags snapped overhead and from behind the entry gate laughter floated out like confetti. Behind us in the queue a pair of girls chattered about nothing.
“You, um, come here for the fair?” I said.
The brunette took in my nondescript brown hair and average jeans, and decided not to respond. But the redhead swiveled my way and said, “No. We heard there was a hanging.”
Her friend gasped. I felt the biggest grin of my life shatter its shell and try wings.
“There was,” I said. “They let me off for good behavior.”
Her eyes widened a fraction. “Do you think that was wise?”
~Cristof
P.S. This series is the brainchild of The New Creatives, which challenged us to create 100 of something as a way of attaining mastery of a particular art form (or beginning the process, more like). This is my attempt. #TNCmy100