The quality of my daily shorties seems to go up and down in small cycles—I’ll write 2 or 3 in a row that I really enjoy (even if they’re not destined to be publishable) then 2 or 3 that bore me and make me nervous about continuing this project. Then something good will pop up again. I spent a lot of time on today’s shorty, which emerged from a childhood memory, hoping to push it into something good. Didn’t happen. I think I need to keep faith that I will always write another story I love. Just maybe not today.
Working Title: Looking Sharp
1st Sentence: The sweater vest was the showpiece—four broad stripes of fuzzed yarn plush as a cat—pale blue, then orange, then yellow, then dark blue.
Favorite Sentence: Our teacher, a certified nutjob who sometimes liked to punish us by choosing to remain silent for an entire class period (yeah, that really hurts) and other times berated us nonstop for things our parents and grandparents had done—voting for Nixon, inventing plastic, bombing anyone small and dark—agreed, saying, “I know, so awful.”
Word Length: 1,517
Daily Shorty 
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