On December 29, 1662, as Samuel Pepys was making his usual rounds about town, he heard about “the burning of Mr. De Laun, a merchant’s house in Loathbury, and his lady … and her whole family; not one thing, dog nor cat, escaping; nor any of the neighbours almost hearing of it till the house was quite down and burnt.” He found the story to be “a most strange thing” and so do I. How could a massive fire go unnoticed for so long? That’s the detail that inspired the day’s shorty. Too bad the shorty itself isn’t worth noticing. Make friends, dear shorty, because you will not be leaving my hard drive.
Working Title: Keeping Time
1st Sentence: I was the first to notice.
Favorite Sentence: “Maybe they weren’t home,” whispered my Marnie.
Word Length: 688
Photo of engraving by Robert White, after a portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Engraving (with Pepys’s motto beneath) served as the frontispiece to Pepys’s ‘Naval Memoirs” (1690). Courtesy of the British Museum, London.
Daily Shorty 
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