It was dusk, and the wind was hot and dry as it blew
across Hotaru's face as she sat in the grass.

<bapbapbapbap>

Avoid passive voice whenever possible, *especially* for
the first line of a story.

There's no passive voice in the indicated line.  It's rather
clunky, yes, but there's no passive voice.

"It was dusk" is passive.  

No, it isn't.  'was' is a linking verb, and does not express
any action.  It cannot be active or passive; the terms simply
don't apply if there's no action.

	What we have, it appears, is a confusion of terminology.

	From my admittedly limited training in composition, there's a
difference between "passive writing" and the "passive voice." The passive
voice, as you correctly say, applies to phrases built on transitive verbs,
i.e. "The bulldozer moved the dirt" (active) vs. "The dirt was moved by the
bulldozer" (passive).

	However, there's another common dichotomy used to judge the quality
of writing, generally referred to as writing active or passive sentences.
Active sentences express action, while passive sentences focus on
description and states of being. The original passage, above, is in this
sense largely passive, while the proposed rewrite casts it in a much more
active form.

	So while the original passage was not in the narrowly-defined
passive voice, it was still an example of passive writing. Which, I believe,
was Richard Lawson's original intent.

-Patrick, hoping to be helpful