...It was a dark and stormy night...

was once traditional, and was actually considered quite thrilling when this particular story was originally penned by Edward Bulwer-Lytton in the opening sentence of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford, first published in 1830.

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

These days, flowery language is generally considered de trop, but was all the rage back in the 'Thirties, when literacy was more-or-less expected, and parenthetical meta-comments were taken well in stride.

Here's one from Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants:

The hills across the valley of the Ebrol were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.

Note that most twelve-year-olds wouldn't be forced to guess at many words, yet this sort of thing is (or was) considered “modern” whilst Bulwer-Lytton is regularly mocked and scorned by the current literati.

Note too that both opening sentences paint a scene, with more or less detail. This is because few of us are blind, and the first thing we do when dropped into a strange situation is to look around. If the story starts off in darkness, then describe what a blind men hears, perhaps punctuated by flashes of lightning, or a flickering fluorescent light.

These things tend to be faddish, with literary styles going in and out of fashion as regularly as Paris hemlines rise and fall, so don't be afraid to use your own judgement.

Everyone has different habits, including the sorts of things they read. Many won't read anything unless it starts on football pitch.

The best thing is to pick a few stories you really like, whose authors you admire, and then slavishly copy their strategy and style, but not their actual words.

Writing is one of the few trades which still requires an apprenticeship, and every serious author studies other authors with the same sort of concentration that rock musicians devote to the performances of Jimi Hendrix or B.B. King.

...sex workers of all sorts generally arise in societies in which there is gross inequality between social classes, where it's generally driven by desperation and greed, not necessarily in the same players, and cruelty is generally involved.

In the USA, the average age of entry into sex work for girls is twelve years. Think about that for half a second. Some girls are forced into prostitution as young as seven or eight.

There's a University of Pennsylvania study entitled “The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children In the U. S., Canada and Mexico,” which finds that the typical age range of entry into prostitution for boys, including gay and transgender boys, is from eleven to thirteen years of age.

It's always nice to start from something reasonable, or at least plausible in terms of some sort of objective reality, even if it's set in the far future or the past.