Kafka and Craft

Well, g'day again, everyone. I hope life has been treating you all as tip top has it has recently been treating me. Here in Sydney the winter is practically over, even though we are only one week into the second month of that bitter season. Anyway, today I will tell you why I wrote the thirty-seventh story in Aberrant Selected, entitled, Trial and Retribution. This story I wrote, basically, in homage to the favourite novel of my early twenties, The Trial, by Franz Kafka. My short story begins where Kafka's novel ends.
     My story was not only written because I really adored Kafka's novel, but also because I learned a lot of my craft from Kafka, and The Trial in particular. The beginning of the novel immediately arrests the reader's attention, sucking her/him into continuing with the novel and to somehow resolve the paradaox that the book opens with. Similarly, in all my short stories, the first sentence is meant to establish a contrast, a paradox, or an incongruity of some description, thereby grabbing the reader's attention and encouraging them to thus read the tale and so resolve the problem that it begins with. Accordingly, my homage to The Trial, is also a thank you to Kafka for helping me crystallises my craft, for giving me a methodology to write stories that are interesting to both the reader and I.
     Lastly, in always being very careful in writing the first sentence of a story, in making it as interesting as possible, I have also discovered that doing so naturally leads to the last sentence, and my stories tend to end somewhat wistfully. Thanks, Franz, you're a legend.