After being kidnapped by outlaws, Antonio, an eight-year-old boy, is asked to tell them a story which he makes up as he goes along.

The world-famous competition that seeks to find the most atrocious opening sentence to a hypothetical lousy novel, presents a hilarious, even perversely instructive, collection of skilled ineptitude.

You won't believe this, but I'm about to tell you a story that will change the course of history. A story about time travel, secret agents, and paradoxes. It's a story that will start with a chance encounter with a time traveler known as Jack the Ripper, and it will end with the founding of TACO, the Time Agency Chronoclasm Organisation, a powerful agency controlling time travel throughout history. The second short story tells how I was coerced into joining TACO as an observer on a mission to rescue the Blair witch. It was either that or be slightly dead. Apparently, the Blair witch was also a TACO agent and had been set-up to be almost killed by the good citizens of Blair by BELL, the time travel equivalent of the FBI. They wouldn't tell me what BELL stood for. The third story, my second time-travel mission, was to make sure the Titanic sank! Over 1,500 died but their deaths saved the lives of millions throughout the timeverses. The fourth story deals with paradoxes. 1493 wasn't ready for flying machines so Alex Pearin (aka Jack the Ripper) and I traveled to Florence in Tuscany to talk to Leonardo da Vinci about paradoxes and why he shouldn't build the world's first flying machine. Alex and I ended up helping Leonardo complete a flying machine and helping him on its first flight. I also solve a couple of other mysteries and discover I founded BELL.

So I present to you twelve chapter 1s of novels that have never been written or, more importantly, finished. Maybe someday, after the kids leave and I have all sorts of free time, Ill finish one or two of these into full-fledged novels. But I doubt it. So dont hold your breath. Instead, just enjoy the potential of chapter 1. Who needs an ending anyway?

"This project is drawn from the obsolete card catalogs of the Mütter Museum Philadelphia, and the discarded main card catalog of the Los Angeles Central Library. ...The poems ... are composed of the title lines of sequences of cards taken in order, using all cards beginning with a given word, series of words, title groups, author groups or subject groups, and are printed as plates following the poems."--Colophon [v. 2].

Antonio, a small boy who has been kidnapped by brigands, passes the dark and stormy night in thier cave weaving incredible stories for their own exploits - and solves his own problem of how to escape.