Start

'On this warm Wednesday lunchtime she is drinking whisky' is the first sentence of a short story. The writer likes to think it draws the reader in - why would she be drinking whisky on a warm Wednesday lunchtime? Has she just come out of a difficult relationship and is struggling to cope? Is she on holiday? (We all know holidays make good settings for short fiction.) Is she a ravishing, lost beauty from the 1920s? The writer also thinks that the sentence works as the first sentence of a short story as it just happens to be the last sentence of a short story that I have already written. It is clever and ironic to do all this self-referencing crap. And on top of that it is the first sentence of this short story, although it fulfils no function of narrative value.