Today’s shorty was inspired by a postcard showing the Pissarro painting pictured here (photo credit below). It reminded me of Colonial Williamsburg, VA, on a blurry winter day, which in turn sparked the story.
Working Title: Tourons
1st Sentence: Tourons, they called them, because crossing the words “tourist” and “moron” is so clever, and college kids are nothing if not clever.
Favorite Sentence: It was a really funny story, crafted with care and including plenty of vulgar words applied to the SUV-ful of docile lambs from Michigan.
Word Length: 569
Photo of Camille Pissarro’s Boulevard des Italiens, Morning, Sunlight, 1897, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Once again I find myself catching up on posts (I’m writing this on December 3). I’ve been working hard on polishing some of these shorties to submit to a chapbook contest—yeehaw! Wish me luck. In the meantime, my third postcard, which inspired my November 29 shortie, is one showing two pages from a scrapbook Isabella Gardner made to document a trip to Japan. Pictured here is one of the pages shown on the postcard (photo credit below). I’m slightly embarrassed to say that my plodding brain produced a story about… a scrapbooker. But what can you do. Next!
I have a postcard with the image shown here (see photo credit below) of Barry Flanagan’s sculpture “Thinker on a Rock.” I meditated on this wonderful man-like hare for quite some time and then landed on a certain famous manlike bunny we all know well…. So the day’s shorty turned out to be my first fan fiction!
I buy pretty postcards wherever I go just so they can sit on a shelf. Today I gathered a pile and went through them, selecting the most intriguing as I went. I kept whittling the pile until I had seven to use for story prompts this week. The first, chosen randomly from the seven, was imprinted with the photo you see here of an Edward Steichen painting (see photo credit below). Isn’t it stunning? It took most of the day for me to get a story out of this image because I was so enchanted with it all I could think of were more colors and shapes. Gorgeous.
People keep asking me if I bring back characters created for these shorties and I keep saying no while thinking that I should. Today I thought about previous stories with that idea in mind and one character came to me immediately, Yessiree Bob from the story of the same name written on 
In the second shorty inspired by my tenure in a dental office, my protagonist is a thwarted woman. My friends keep asking me if I’m seeing the same themes emerge in these shorties. Yes. Thwarted women. And thwarted men. All kinds of thwarting.
Once I jumped off the corporate train and decided to learn how to be a writer, I took various jobs to bring in a decent paycheck while the husband went back to school for his much more obvious and lucrative career-change path. One of the jobs I fell into during those years was at a dental office. In the 18 months or so I was there, I amassed enough material for several novels, if I could manage to move through those mental files without shivering. The other day I made myself take some notes on that experience and what I came up with inspired shorties two days in a row (I’m writing this story post on Monday the 26th). The shorty for the day happens to mark a “first” for me: I am almost certain that I have never used the word “pussy” in a story before. In fact I can’t remember ever having mentioned lady parts before at all, but if I did, I wouldn’t have used that word, as I tend to be priggish about crude words for lady parts (though I can talk like a sailor in every other way). Anyway, I used the word SEVEN times in this very short story. So I’m thinking I can go another 10 years of writing without using it again, yes?
This time a physical description from a conversation with a friend about someone she had met recently inspired the shorty. This challenge is teaching me how to find story in just about anything.
So, writer friends, you know how people tell you these outrageous things about their family members and every time you hear one of these stories you get a half-thought that truly you’re going to have to use that batshit-crazy tidbit in a story someday and so you just keep it tucked away, waiting…? The day’s shorty was inspired by one of those tidbits.
The handful of you subscribed to this blog know that I missed a few days of posts (I’m writing this on Sunday, November 25). The Thanksgiving holiday overtook me, I’m afraid, but not entirely—I have kept up with my story-a-day commitment, and today I’ll catch up with my posts, backdating as usual so that the date I wrote the story matches the date of the post. I’m not using prompts this week, just letting inspiration come from wherever. This shorty was inspired by grocery shopping, though that doesn’t show in what I have here.
This challenge more and more shakes up my notion of what makes a story. I love this but just like all good educational experiences, the more I learn the more I discover my own cluelessness. Today’s shorty took hold once I settled on a playful conversation between a woman and her father, sitting at a dining table, waiting for dessert. And I found I wanted to stay firmly in that conversation—the story begins with the mother walking away from the dining table and ends when she returns. There is nothing approaching a traditional beginning, middle, and end, and there’s no story arc to speak of. I tried to develop an unspoken conversation beneath the surface of the exchanges, but I don’t know that I was terribly successful. And is this a story? It is a fiction and I was very conscious of my own decision about how to begin it and how to end it. But does that make it a story? All I know is that for the purposes of my Daily Shorty challenge, it is. And the photo today is pulling double-duty. The dessert our protagonists await is an apple pie. Let’s enjoy this gorgeous pie, too, as a celebration for completing Week 29. Yahoo!
This morning’s fragrance was… Worcestershire sauce. Nothing smells quite like it, yes? A big whiff of it made me think of my mother preparing the kind of food you take to a party—dips, sauces. Which in turn made me think of deviled eggs. Which in turn made me think of family reunions.
Oy, another tough one. The husband had trouble coming up with a scent for the day so when we went out this morning he drove to the gas station to fill up and I rolled down the window to get a whiff. Doesn’t show itself much in the shorty but the smell of gasoline was indeed its inspiration.
Having a really tough week because I’ve got other commitments that are taking a lot of time. I pulled this one out, inspired by the fragrance of a burning match, but only just. I think I’ve got something that could come good in revision, so okay. Onward!
My husband enjoys few things more than a huge bowl of Cheerios. Whenever he eats Cheerios, which is almost every day and often twice a day, I am struck by the very specific scent of that cereal and I have commented on it. So no surprise when I woke up to discover a giant box of Cheerios as the fragrance prompt the husband chose for my day. I opened the box and sniffed the cereal multiple times but in the end I couldn’t come up with a story until he came home and fixed a bowl for himself. And there it was, the smell I know so well. Maybe there’s something about his eating pleasure that adds to the scent.
Today’s fragrance was a “Christmas Cookie” scented candle from Yankee Candle that was hanging around our apartment somewhere. The husband left it at my bedside this morning. I smelled it. I smelled it again. And I was stumped. I smelled it once more. Still stumped. So I filled my day with other things and then very, very late, thoughts about baking cookies led to thoughts about candy led to a childhood memory led to a complete story. Ergh. Next.
Today marks the start of a week of shorties inspired by fragrance. This morning’s fragrance: freshly sliced orange. I also wave goodbye to Week 28, so I need to post a virtual treat. This lovely orange cake will do very well, yes?
At the gym, today, I sat on a mat and thought about all the grieving mothers and fathers. Later I wrote a story based on the notes I took.
You’d think that after 6 months of this I’d have so many tricks up my sleeve that I could just sling a story to the page and then waltz off to do whatever moves me. You’d be wrong. I still have days now and again where I work and work and work, all day long, taking food and small entertainment breaks, on getting one simple story to the page. But I did it, dammit, and I sort of like the story, too.
Nothing like writing a story every day for more than 6 months to make you find gewgaws in your childhood worth talking about. And that makes the very first time in my life I’ve ever used the word “gewgaws.”
Mine is not a family with a photographed history. My parents had a hard enough time keeping their kids clothed and fed—there was no money for reams of photos and no money, anyway, for the kinds of things people documented in those days, family trips and birthday parties and fancy Halloween costumes. Of course this marks my age, too. For quite some time, now, taking photos has been easy and cheap. People document a trip to Taco Bell, memorialize a hangnail. Not so when I was a kid, even less so when my parents were young adults. All to say that growing up I almost obsessively studied the very few, the precious photos taken of my parents, my brother, my sister, and myself before we were… us. I knew who we were as we lived and breathed, but who were these characters in the photographs? Today’s shorty was inspired by a few of those photos.
Yesterday I got whacked in the face by a badminton racquet. I play four times a week with faculty and staff at the local college and I’m the least athletic, so I am often where I shouldn’t be. Fortunately, it was a glancing blow because my playing partner saw my stupid face at the last second and did his best to pull back. Unfortunately, I was playing with our best player who is by far our hardest hitter. So today I woke up with a welt under my right eye, a tender bruise across the bridge of my nose, and a small, painful knot on my left eyebrow. And a headache centered around my eyes and nose. Story fodder!
The Halloween candy is long gone but the holiday’s imagery and themes linger. The phone pictured here looks a lot like the very first phone I can remember, back when I was about 3 years old. I loved the way that handle felt in my hand, and the noise the rotary dial made.
With all the election excitement, I clean forgot to celebrate my completion of another week of the Daily Shorty challenge yesterday. Doesn’t this cocoa look wonderful? Let’s drink a fond farewell to Week 27! And hello, week 28. Not starting the week with a barn burner, but… glad to be starting the week.
Election fever has set in with a vengeance. I’ve done a pretty good job avoiding the news for some time now but the energy of the Big Day is pouring over me, now, and I’m finding it very difficult to focus. No surprise that the day’s shorty is lackluster. It was inspired by my last texture prompt, a small die (as in one of a pair of dice) that the husband handed me this morning. For some reason after pressing my thumb into each side of it I began to tap my fingernails on it. That reminded me of the sound of high heels on a hard floor, so that wound up prompting the story. Yes, I know, a sound, not a texture. What can you do.
I put something over four hard hours into this one. I had three starts that refused to grow, so then I just made myself try to blend them. I cut one and made a story out of the other two. Didn’t really work—get comfortable on that hard drive, story # 188—but I always hope the sweat equity counts for something. The texture, today, came from one of those small, air-filled plastic pillow thingies used to cushion shipped goods. I was trying to get a good picture of it when someone came along to make enquiries. Don’t know what Maria thought of it, but holding this thing made me think of tearing into a bag of chips.
Today the husband dropped a Styrofoam ball into my outstretched hands. And in response I wrote a creepy story he much approves—the husband really enjoys creepy—which is only right.
Many years ago—I think I was still in high school—a man in our rural neighborhood plowed under his wife’s strawberry patch as punishment for something they had argued about. She was known for the amazing strawberries she harvested every summer, which might have been the problem—they were deeply religious and he often cited her pride for those berries and other accomplishments (she was an incredible seamstress and a wonderful cook) as regrettable sin she should repent. As even I know, despite two thumbs that will never shade green, it takes many years of devotion to get really sweet, fat berries, so when he destroyed her patch he was destroying years of work and love. I cried when I heard the story, because it struck me as such a cruel, hateful thing to do. The wife, also known for her unbreakable good cheer, replanted and carried on. Back to the present: The texture of the day was a small, soft, squishy puffball. It reminded me of cat fur and so inspired the first sentence of my story.
The husband handed me a piece of a geode this morning (it looks almost exactly like this picture I pulled from the Web), the texture (and inevitably the look) of which inspired one aspect of the protagonist of this gleefully short story. Yesterday the look of my “texture prompt” definitely inspired the story more than the feel of it. Maybe I should do my best to lock onto my story idea while holding my texture prompt with eyes closed, so that it’s more likely I’ll focus on the sense of touch in the inspired story? Or maybe I should just be glad every time I get an idea that develops into a story and not give into the temptation to grade my process. Yeah, that.
Daily Shorty 