As an exercise, to try to ease my brain up out of its months-long stress-induced no-writing slump, I sat down and copied out the first sentence (or two; the first lines of If The Mountain Comes really don't work if you only take the first sentence) of all the short stories I've had published in various markets, and then grouped them by whether I (personally) thought they were engaging or not.
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In any case, it's something I don't think I'd really sat down to examine in any depth before, so now I can say I've done that. And hopefully have a better sense of how this particular mechanic works in the stories I write in the future.