You are supposed to start your story when everything goes awry. Writers call it media res and it means that you begin a narrative "in the middle of things" rather than at the beginning of the event.
You dump the reader right into the juicy bits of the events...right when things are taking a turn. Preferably for the worse.
The main character in my current project, The Dreadful Dark, lives each moment as if things are going to go awry in a bad way. That is because she can literally drop dead at any moment. She has a heart condition, something called Long QT Syndrome that sends her heart racing with chaotic beats...and it does it randomly.
When she is sent to the desert to recuperate after an operation, strange happenings and the dangerous secrets of a mysterious family known as The Dreadful Darlings, draw her into a world of longing and fear and suspense.
Where a typical person might fear for their life, cringe at the sight of death, run from the unexplained...well, Venus is not typical."When death is your constant companion, it is familiar, and nothing is frightening about the familiar." ~Venus Bell
So my story begins...not at the hospital or as she makes her way to her eccentric uncles Earthship home in the barren landscape...
No, our story begins in the chill of the desert at night. Underneath a riot of stars against the velvet black sky. In the shadows of an abandoned sanitarium nearly reclaimed by the sand, she meets a boy both dark and strange.
Is he all that his name implies? Or is there something about Rowan Darling worth saving?
In the midst of malevolent forces gathering against them, Venus finds that her heart is far stronger than she had ever imagined.
+Raquel Byrnes