I finished a story recently entitled “The Last Echo of Humanity.” It’s a much-improved redo of an older story of mine, one that was called “Rebirth.” Like writing articles for a newspaper, with short stories one has to come up with a strong opening paragraph to grab the reader’s interest, ’cause if that first paragraph is boring, the read will move onto something else. Admittedly, I’m guilty of this sometimes. I think I came up with a pretty nifty intro paragraph (ack — cue the unpleasant flashback to WSU’s basic English classes) for “Last Echo”:

The rum had long-since stopped burning his throat, he idly realized as he took another huge swallow from the bottle, right before he put his fist through the face of the Mona Lisa. The poplar wood shredded his knuckles. He only abstractly felt the throbbing in his hand, filtered as it was by his drunken haze. It only served to make him angrier. He wanted to feel something, anything to break him from the unyielding torpor that he’d been in for the past few millennia — even if that something was just pain.

What do you guys think?

JAB