Daily Shorty

I love it that the flu-stricken me really was trying to write well, despite knowing that I couldn’t. I remember noticing and accepting the total lack of creative interest in what I was doing. But the evidence is on the page: Throughout this shorty there are scratched-out phrases and sentences. So obviously I was still trying to uphold some kind of standard. My fever broke late the night I wrote this one, so this is the last shorty I wrote while seriously sick. As for the photo, I’m resorting again to photo therapy for my still-recovering self. One of the many things that makes me happy: fresh raspberries. Maine is justly known for blueberries but should be known for raspberries, too. But the summer feels awfully far away right now.

Working Title: Scraped Knee
1st Sentence: He’d slipped on the ice on the way to this car and scraped his knee.
Favorite Sentence: Once he was on the road to certain recovery, the knowledge that a scraped knee could have killed him grabbed him by the throat and he could take only short, shallow breaths.
Word Length: 804

Photo by Flickr user bluewaikiki.com 2008.

My main concern since I turned this project into a year-long challenge has been that I’ll get very sick and find myself unable to keep up the challenge while ill. I’m writing this a week later than the date you see, now mostly recovered from a bout with the flu. I’m happy to report that I did, just barely, maintain the commitment. On my worst days I kept a spiral notebook in the bed with me and took advantage of the more lucid moments to scribble. Honestly, I did question my dedication to the challenge. I asked myself why I was insisting on writing stories while so sick, when clearly there was no hope for good work to come of it. What’s the point of that? Where’s the gain? I still have no good answer. But I did it.

Working Title: First Christmas
1st Sentence: He’d told her how much he loves Christmas, how he likes to do something special with gifts.
Favorite Sentence: If there’s a flag that is just a black-ish rectangle, she’s pretty sure she wouldn’t want to visit that country.
Word Length: 746

Photo by Nevit Dilmen 2006.

Couldn’t focus. None of my usual tricks worked. Pulled something from my Idea File, finally, fleshed it out, made it as good as I could just to meet my requirements. And I began to suspect I had something worse than a cold. And yes, more photo therapy.

Working Title: On a Slant
1st Sentence: Mr. Coulter was known in our neighborhood as the elderly man who kept a great flower garden and loved little girls.
Favorite Sentence: We also went into the back room—they called it a mud room—where I rummaged through clothes so old they looked like costumes, dressed myself in an outlandish outfit, and then pranced around, putting on an extemporaneous play for Mr. Coulter, who would laugh and clap and then ask my character questions.
Word Length: 887

Photo by Stephan Brunet 11/2007.

I’m writing this day’s post a week later. When I can’t do a story post in the same day, I leave a line of notes in the story file (or on the notebook page) to remind myself of what I was thinking and feeling when I composed the draft. For this one I noted that I couldn’t focus and it took forever to pull something out. Part of the problem, I know now, was that I was coming down with the flu.

Working Title: Which?
1st Sentence: A woman, late thirties, alone in her office, looks up from her computer monitor as though she just heard something, something non-office.
Favorite Sentence: His father picks him up, so fast he almost doesn’t have time to pluck snail Mommy from the piece of bark but he does and slips her into his pocket while Dad carries him inside.
Word Length: 509

Photo by Jürgen Schoner 5/2005.

Very nearly beaten by this one. Many false starts, much exhaustion, no direction, pure frustration. So I played free-association with a scene I didn’t know how to end… and then forced an ending. Done.

Working Title: Staying Power
1st Sentence: What could she do but stare.
Favorite Sentence: She had read ALL of Proust and all of Balzac, and didn’t know another soul who could dit la même.
Word Length: 579

Photo of Czech edition of Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu by Hadonos 1/2010.

Woke up thinking about aversion therapy and then I started laughing about how aversion therapy might be attempted for someone like poor Charlie Brown, who realizes with Lucy’s help in “A Charlie Brown Christmas” that he fears everything. Brought all this to the page and had fun with it.

Working Title: Aversion Therapy
1st Sentence: Scared of snakes?
Favorite Sentence: She tries to remember to focus on her food whenever she eats but she’s like everyone else, she can forget herself, she’s been known to thoughtlessly hoover anything from stringy roast beef to melted mozzarella to eminently trachea-block-worthy popcorn.
Word Length: 505

Photo by bader wale 11/2012.

December kicked my Daily Shorty butt. I was in danger of shutting down multiple times, which is why I’m yet again backdating story posts. When I’m that fatigued, I can only keep up with the stories, and posts have to go by the wayside. Anyway, here’s to a more energetic 2013! Starting the year with a shorty about a topic alien to me: motherhood. I have been spared the duty of parsing mothering advice but I see my friends negotiating the deluge of shoulds coming from all quarters.

Working Title: So Much Promise
1st Sentence: Out loud, Dana said this: Good morning, Bettina. How did you sleep, Bettina? Hmm? How did you sleep?
Favorite Sentence: The guidelines had been very clear about the difference, and how the first would create an angry, willful child who would come home from college and live in the basement until she was 40, whereas the second ensured that Bettina would become a world-renowned research scientist or ballerina or perhaps a multi-lingual diplomat.
Word Length: 619

Photo of a traditional baby bed in Mexico.

Recently a friend asked me how I can come up with something new every day. I said by relying on what’s not new. I tune in as much as I can to what’s going on around me, always toting paper and pen for taking notes, but I also review my idea file, use prompts of course, and scour whatever comes up in my mind when free-associating words and images. When fishing for ideas leads to childhood I have to follow, because I need everything I’ve got to keep this challenge going. Lately I’ve been alternating between a week of prompts and a week of random inspiration. Today marks the first day of a non-prompt week. Somehow I stumbled onto the memory of spelling bees in elementary school, and that inspired the day’s shorty.

Working Title: How To Bee
1st Sentence: She loved words and how they grouped themselves.
Favorite Sentence: Yet despite her love for the words, despite carrying them in her candy-pink purse, in her lunch tote nestled against the bologna sandwich and the brownie from scratch, in her coat pockets, tucked behind her ears, in the hollows of her elbows and knees, slipped into the back of her shoes between the shine of the patent leather and the sock’s lacy frill folded neatly around the ankle, despite brimming with words, despite trailing them, finding them stuck in her hair and clinging to her sweater, despite weeping words and sneezing words and finding words under her fingernails, that girl never, NEVER won a spelling bee.
Word Length: 726

Photo of Norman Rockwell painting, “Cousin Reginald Spells Peloponnesus (Spelling Bee),” 1918, courtesy of the Google Art Project.

Back to the idea file to find another bit that’s been eluding me. Today it stopped eluding me.

Working Title: Here I Stand
1st Sentence: I never wanted to do the coffee shop, that was his idea.
Favorite Sentence: Did I look so… unraveled? so… flung?
Word Length: 575

When I wrote this shorty, I was thinking of Breaking New Grounds in Ogunquit.

The water-related memories I generated yesterday served up another shorty today.

Working Title: Fishing
1st Sentence: It fell to me.
Favorite Sentence: He had no interest in fishing any more than he could talk himself into camouflage, trade the steel-toed for hiking boots, and hit the woods behind our house with a hunting rifle.
Word Length: 802

Photo by Kintaiyo 9/2005.

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.

Working Title: Stuck at the Gate
1st Sentence: All dentists are sadists, so goes the joke, who have found a safe way to indulge their perversion.
Favorite Sentence: When I was a small child I pressed hard on my crayon or pencil, drawing teeth in various shapes and sizes hanging from the lopsided mouths of barely rendered, slap-dash faces.
Word Length: 620

Photo of Paul Revere’s dental tools by Otis Historical Archives National Museum of Health & Medicine.

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?

Working Title: In the Chair
1st Sentence: The boy who made her miserable in middle school, who labeled her “Tammi Tuna” because, supposedly, her “pussy stank like fish,” has grown into a man who just swung himself into her dental chair and is telling her about the pain he’s been feeling in his right lower molar, the one in the very back.
Favorite Sentence: I would kill for such a powerful pussy, she wants to say now, a pussy like that could win the war on terror, negotiate peace between Israel and Palestine, orchestrate a world-wide nuclear freeze, a pussy like that could win the goddamned Nobel fucking Peace Prize you gigantic pimple-faced PRICK.
Word Length: 550

Photo of a dental chair in the University of Michigan School of Dentistry 3/2010.

UPDATE. This shorty is forthcoming at Hermeneutic Chaos Journal in March 2017 as “Where She Began.” I never thought I’d find a match until I discovered HCJ. A perfect home! Many thanks to Editor-in-Chief Shinjini Bhattacharjee.

Huh. Well, this is one of those shorties that just… happens. I’m tired, I’m empty, I wonder why the hell I’m still staring at my monitor, why the hell I’m writing another story. I think, shit. I’m done. I’m just done. And then a sentence comes to me—nothing special but it holds. And then that sentence gives birth to another one and I find myself firmly in this strange, associative place, writing a story about something I don’t fully understand (again, as I said in my October 30 post, I’m not in Barthelme’s house but I’m on the street outside, waving at his lit window). Then the sentences just fly from my fingers, writing themselves according to the confused logic of this “story” while I half-doze. Sometimes I can wake up, wrestle a story like that into something that has a clear meaning. Sometimes I can’t. Sometimes I just know when it’s done and I’m grateful I can check off another day. This is one of those times. Sometimes I love that story anyway. And this is also one of those times.

Working Title: Purple
1st Sentence: For more than a week she had been trying to get a handle on purple.
Favorite Sentence: Purple Prayerful Plumply Pimpley Peppermint Pots.
Word Length: 626

Photo by Booyabazooka 7/2006.