I did it. I actually did it. I was hoping to end the year with a really good story but it was even more important to me to finish before it was too late in the day, so that I could enjoy the accomplishment this evening and go to bed knowing that all is well. So once something took hold this morning, I worked it and worked it, then came back to it after lunch and worked it some more until I’ve got the best story I could make of the premise. It’s not so great. The ending feels wrong. But after a couple of hours of final tinkering, I called it DONE. To celebrate I got a peanut butter supreme from the Dairy Joy in Lewiston, which happens to be within easy walking distance of my apartment, something to both cheer and boo, but mostly to cheer. A peanut butter supreme is a cup of peanut butter soft serve with hot fudge. Sadly I didn’t think to photograph it before I ate it, but it looked a lot like the picture here (but mentally add hot fudge). YUM. Tomorrow I’m having dinner at my favorite Maine restaurant, Fore Street in Portland, as a more complete celebration. And… well, that’s it. I’ll be playing on this site some more, adding nerd romps I didn’t have time for while producing my stories, including Story Facts pages for the 8 months I haven’t analyzed, and a page for each of the writer friends who joined me for a week during the challenge. Otherwise my only immediate plans are to sleep and read, read and sleep, sleep and read.
Working Title: Wide Ride
1st Sentence: Torment.
Favorite Sentence: The more creative, smart and inventive, like Alexander, referred to her as “Wading Pool” or Mattress Pants” or “Rear Admiral Caboose.”
Word Length: 497
Photo by Deva Hoffman here.
And this completes week 52. GULP. Enjoy these rice pudding fritters with orange-honey sauce to celebrate! I have never heard of such but they look and sound DELICIOUS. As for the day’s work, I went meta again. I like the approach, the shape, the kind of ending I chose. But the story doesn’t have depth and that’s mostly the fault of an ending that doesn’t suit. It’s the right kind of ending but composed of the wrong words. Maybe I can make it better in revision. Anyway, it’s done, and I can’t believe I’m typing this, but I have only ONE MORE to write! Until tomorrow….
How did I get to the count-down of my last 3 shorties? What the hell happened?? As tough as April has been, it’s also disappearing at a record pace. I’m equal parts relieved and unmoored at the thought of finishing my year. Best to put those thoughts aside for now. As for the day’s shorty, my friend Patty is in Houston right now, petting alligators. She sent me an e-mail describing an encounter with a baby alligator who calmed to her warm touch. I know a good prompt when I see it.
When the muse has taken a dislike to you and refuses to come even when you have asked her in your best Virginia honey-dipped voice, pretty, pretty please with peaches on top, then you just say, fine, I’ll make a story out of dinner. We had Indian takeout.
In June I used the Daily Shorty challenge to play into a running joke that my husband and I have enjoyed for many years. He’ll comment that there just aren’t enough people writing pirate stories or he’ll look at me when I’m writing and say, “I hope you’re writing a pirate story.” He began to indulge in these comments in a big way once I started writing a story every day. “Have you written a pirate story yet? When are you going to write a pirate story? If you would just write pirate stories, this would all be so easy.” So in June I wrote him a pirate story. And it occurred to me as I was struggling to come up with an idea for the day’s shorty, that I should write him one more as the year comes to an end.
I lost count of how many times I started the day’s shorty. I just couldn’t find my way into anything until I remembered a character I created last month, I think—a sock puppet named Lemonade. So this is what you do at the tail end of a year-long commitment that has mostly eaten your brain: You write stories about sock puppets. Because it’s the only thing that makes you laugh. Lemonade, I thank you.
It’s quite a treat at this point when I have fun with a story. As I’ve already moaned about too much, April has been a pretty sad-sack month, all about gritting my teeth and keeping my head down. The day’s shorty took many tries and then once something stuck I had to work well into the night (morning) to complete it, but, dammit, it was fun to write! I see that it needs more meat on its bones but that just means more fun when I come back to it. Onward!
Yep, I have now completed my penultimate week. Almost impossible to comprehend. I’m writing this a couple of days later and I’m still finding it really hard to accept that I have fewer than 10 days left in my challenge. How the hell did that happen? Anyway… it happened! Enjoy this lovely coconut cake with me to celebrate. It’s my birthday cake from a couple of weeks ago and it was DELICIOUS. As for the day’s shorty, it has promise and I enjoyed writing it. So both a big victory and a small victory for the day.
After a number of frustrated tries at story that didn’t take, I started chatting with my all-purpose main character, the one I pull like taffy into whatever personality suits the day’s shorty, and it turns out she’s as tired as I am (today she’s a she). More so, maybe. She asks that she be allowed to live on the margins for a while, pop up only once or twice in a piece, to deliver a crucial piece of information or highlight a flaw in someone else for a change. That is, of course, impossible, but I avoided saying so and let her vent.
Again, this is not a month of winners. I hope I will find plenty of good ideas to build on when I come back to my April shorties but unlike all other months of my challenge, I doubt if I’ve produced even one story yet that I could submit in its current form. And I’ve produced only a few drafts that excited me while I was writing them. In all other months I’m fairly certain I produced a couple of those a week, at least, often more. But I choose to be happy right now with small victories. The day’s shorty is not among the few April pieces that excite me but it is tidy, a good exercise in compression, and I don’t hate it. Victory!
April has been my most lackluster month so far and I’ve just had to accept that I am (A) running out of whatever steam is necessary to write something brand new and finish it every day, and (B) falling prey to the increasing anxiety I’ve been feeling as the end date approaches—will I make it, is it possible, will I actually do this? Those questions are literally keeping me up at night and it’s not like I’m not already tired enough. Sadly, I’ve had to devote energy to just staying on the path and that’s energy I need for inspiration and focused critical attention to every sentence I write. So these days I am less demanding and I take what I can get. But even with that low standard… well. I wrote a story about a candy apple. Not how I was poisoned by a candy apple or how some old guy made a fortune in candy apples or how a bite of a candy apple brought a Proustian memory to some middle-aged woman but a simple meditation—and that is too elevated a word—on the humble candy apple itself. Why did I do that? Because the universe would give me NOTHING ELSE and I was, when I hammered it out in the wee hours of the morning after a frustrating day of sad nothings, well beyond caring if I ever wrote another intelligent word. What can you do. Perhaps it will entertain the other shorties destined to live out their lives on my hard drive.
In a recent post I mentioned that sometimes I look at my husband Pat and ask him what my story should be about and he tosses out some silly word or phrase that I sometimes use as my launching pad (or as a short writing exercise I then delete, mind warmed up, and head for story). I was at the office my friend Patty and I rent when I started the day’s shorty using the same trick. Patty, give me a word. She happened to be writing at the time and said she had just typed the word “overburdened.” Okay, then. Thanks Patty!
Love the idea for this story, which I woke up with and then thought about all day. I’ll describe it as a guardian angel tale gone awry. But the execution is sloppy and rushed, with some gaps I’ll need to fill when I come back. Still, I’m happy to see something fresh from my fevered mind. I had completely forgotten it, of course (I’m writing this story post 5 days later). Well, it’s good to leave something I’ll need to chew hard for later.
This shorty is about my reaction to the Boston Marathon bombings. I tried to capture a bit of what I was feeling. It took me two writing sessions and a handful of starts. One day it might be a strong prose poem.
I’m writing this story post on Monday, April 22. When I wrote the shorty for April 15, I started it at an afternoon writing session with my friend Patty. I tried three different ideas that afternoon. When I got home I discovered the news of the Boston Marathon bombing and couldn’t focus on work again until very late. When I did, I kept trying new starts until something finally took hold. I think it was 3:00-ish AM by the time I cut out the light, still sad from the day’s news. I suppose because my mind was on other things and the story was so hard to get out of myself, it’s a surprise to me now, reading it. Who wrote that? Anyway, it’s not terrible. With revision, maybe it can be good one day.
So… wow. When I wrote my April 15 shorty, I completed the 50th week of my Daily Shorty challenge. I couldn’t really appreciate the accomplishment because that was the day of the Boston Marathon bombings (I’m posting this on April 22). For the same reason, I can’t muster the usual enthusiasm I have for finding a fun photo of a treat to post as my reward. Instead I’ve chosen 
I find myself more than a week behind on story posts again (I’m writing this on April 22). This time I blame the delay on both my own fatigue and the news on April 15, which was the day of the Boston Marathon bombing. Boston feels very close to Maine and I know lots of people who once lived in Boston or the area, who have worked there, who have family there. Most of my friends take frequent day and weekend trips to Boston. And I was just there, in the same part of town where the bombing occurred, a few weeks ago, for the AWP conference. So the news reports felt intimate and I couldn’t turn away from the information and images, nor could I shake a sense of sadness the whole week. I know I’m not alone in that. In any case, I did keep up with my shorties, and I remember that the one I wrote on April 14 came to me without much trouble. The “Oh, who knows” refers to where I got the idea for this story, something I usually note in the Word file but not this time. I don’t know that it will ever be good enough to submit but I did mostly capture my (very small) vision.
When I wrote a shorty about Anastasia Romanov in March, I remembered that I’d written one about Anne Boleyn in June, and I wondered if I have a subconscious fascination with famous women who died famous and violent deaths. Of course names of women who fit that bill then came to mind, and ghoulish writer that I am—well, and there’s my need for a new story idea every single day—I tucked the names away. That thought adventure led to the April 12th piece on Mata Hari, and now to one about a very different sort of spy, who, from what I understand, very likely wasn’t a spy at all. (Maybe Mata Hari wasn’t either?)
I’m weathering another small crush of fatigue and I keep wondering just why this project is so tiring. On the one hand it seems like common sense that it would be—when I tell other writers I have written a story every day for these many months, they are stunned. Right, of course, because we know how hard it is to craft a complete piece. But on the other hand… why is it not just as hard to simply write for several hours every day? The pressure to create a new piece each day, plus the pressure to complete it, add up (after many weeks) to a very, very tired brain, but I have no idea if a pyschologist or neurologist could explain why those pressures should be so fatiguing. Anyway, I’m very pleased to say that for the first time in several weeks, I had a lot of fun writing the day’s shorty, which I approached in a really playful way, and that, this late in the game, feels like an enormous victory.
Sometimes before a writing session I turn to my husband Pat and say, “Okay, tell me what today’s story is going to be about.” He says something silly like “Monkeys on the moon!” and I laugh and then find inspiration another way. Occasionally whatever he spits out does actually inspire the story I write, as in this case. He said, “The mighty fork!”
On April 7 (see my story post further down the page) I used my friend Natalia Sarkissian’s story prompt, a photo of a red door, for inspiration. When I e-mailed Natalia to ask if I could use the image for the blog, she said yes and mentioned that she had used this same prompt before as well. I want to highlight her piece here both because I enjoyed it and because you can see from what I posted of my story that she and I took radically different approaches. That’s one of the joys of a prompt, that it can inspire such different stories. So rather than using her photo in my story post, I’m showing it here, and 
Kitty pictures. References to Jane Austen. Yes, I know I’m a cliché. I remember affectionately a shorty I wrote in July that featured members of a Jane Austen club. It has no resemblance whatsoever to the day’s shorty, which is a meditation on the complaint I hear sometimes that Jane painted too pretty a picture of romantic engagement. I’ll just say here that for every happily married heroine waltzing off into the misty bliss, Jane gives us at least one painful marriage portrait, in fact definitely more than one, and a handful of jilted lovers besides.
After a week of prompts I’m going without a net again. I’ve been thinking anxiously about how I’ll frame my writing time after this year—what will I use to inspire discipline when I’m not driven by my goal? I’m also currently looking for a house and preparing to adopt two sister kittens to fill the hole my sweet Maria left behind. I suppose all of this led me to write a shorty about a woman entering another phase in her life. The piece has promise.
And another week of shorties is behind me! Enjoy these gorgeous lemon squares with me as I celebrate seeing the back of Week 49. As for the day’s shorty: I cheered my friend Lynn through a Daily Shorty week in March. She wasn’t able to send me a prompt by the end of my “friendly prompts” week, so before my writing session I thought about her, re-read our e-mail exchanges over the course of that week, and then closed my eyes and started a story. It’s the oddest of the week, I think, which is saying a lot. Can’t tell if it has promise or not, so I’ll wait for clearer eyes to judge that. I’m sorry I didn’t get to use a specific prompt passed along by Lynn herself, but many thanks to her for being a part of my year-long challenge and serving as my unwitting inspiration for the day’s shorty!
My friend Natalia Sarkissian did a Daily Shorty week in early March. She loves writing prompts and sent me a handful. I chose a photo of a red door (similar to the one pictured here) that I couldn’t get out of my head. In fact that red door took up so much of my brain space that it took me many, many tries to get anything on the page that would hold. Finally I was able to get something out before falling asleep in the wee hours. It’s got some promise but I had to force an ending that doesn’t work. Maybe it will grow into something better one day. If the staying-power of that photo is any indication, it will. Many thanks to Natalia!
My friend Cheryl Wilder, whose first writing love is poetry, did a Daily Shorty week with me in February. She provided me with a 
My friend Suzanne Farrell Smith did a Daily Shorty week with me in January. The prompt she gave me for this week is a writing exercise, asking me to create a scene focused on an animal of some kind but not a pet or a zoo attraction. I wasn’t allowed to put any human beings in the scene but I could add other animals. My main goal was to follow these directions and somehow write a complete piece rather than just a scene that would be part of a larger whole. I’m not sure how complete the shorty feels but it meets my basic requirements and it was fun to write. Many thanks to Suzanne!
My friend Stephanie Friedman did a Daily Shorty week with me last fall. She suggested that I choose a piece of art by Chicago artist Jason Brammer as my prompt for the day, and sent me to his 
My friend Gwen Mullins took the Daily Shorty Challenge with me last summer. She sent me this story prompt: “Gaudi’s most famous church, Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, has been under construction for a hundred years. In some photos of the church, the cranes and scaffolding are digitally removed.” I’ll just say right now that I didn’t do this prompt justice, maybe because I was too charmed by it. In any case, the shorty I began to write reminded me of an old story I had begun several years ago, so I went back to that material and used several sentences from it as my foundation. I don’t think it works yet—probably needs to be longer, maybe much longer. But it’s a nice start. Many thanks to Gwen!
A very nice man named Paul has twice e-mailed me during this journey to encourage me to stay on the path. He’s suggested some story ideas, too, which inspired me to do a week of prompts from friends. I used one of Paul’s ideas for the day’s shorty. Six writer friends have done a Daily Shorty week with me, so for the rest of this week I’ll use prompts offered by each of them. For this shorty, I chose Paul’s suggestion to incorporate some notion of time travel into a story. I played on the idea by having a woman open a trunk her 20-year-old self had packed for her own 60th birthday. I was intrigued by the potential clash of what we consider important at 20 versus 60. I don’t think I did enough with this first draft, but maybe I can make something good of it in revision. Many thanks to Paul!
Daily Shorty 