But is it any good?

Today I am struggling with the age-old trauma; 'Am I actually any good at this writing business?' Doesn't help that just as I am tweaking the final 3000 words for the Debut Dagger I have a crisis of confidence!! Not a good idea really to look at what other people have written (and have been published with) but I have been checking out other novels that have been written in the first person. Here are three openings:

These days, I see Carla everywhere.
Emerging from Green Park station through the morning crowds, I catch sight of a woman just ahead of me, a tumble of auburn hair falling on narrow shoulders and that quick, jerky way of moving that she had, and for an impossible moment I think, Carla! Joanna Hines: Improvising Carla

My name is Salmon, like the fish: first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. In newspaper photos of missing girls from the seventies, most looked like me: white girls with mousy brown hair. This was before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons or in the daily mail. It was still back when people believed things like that didn’t happen. Alice Sebold: The Lovely Bones

What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. It is the core of our careers, the end game of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies and concealment and every variation on deception. Tana French: In The Woods