For the second day in a row, his first officer, Mac McCullum, awakened Rayford.
Bizarre first sentence of this POV section. It’s specific, sure, but too mundane to actually hook the reader. Rayford being awoken by the same person twice in a row doesn’t signal anything to us. You could just as easily start the scene with “For the second day in a row, Rayford woke to discover he hadn’t taken off his shoes” and get the exact same impact. This is the kind of first line that you write as a temp line, because you want to grab the reader’s attention, but haven’t figured out how yet, and then you say, “I’ll fix it in editing, so I can write the rest of this scene.” This line is doubly-wounded, because the next sentence is essentially another introductory line, with no connective tissue to this one. And that makes me think that this scene started with different sentences in two different drafts, but then they were both left in when a later draft was being assembled. (I know this is a long diversion for a single sentence, but it gives a lot of insight into how these books were written, and I find it fascinating.)
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