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.
Working Title: Today’s Menu
1st Sentence: For breakfast, you will feast on a generous bowl of Cheerios, served in a sturdy, delightfully lopsided old margarine tub, with skim milk, and, BONUS, the fresh, local blueberries your neighbor brought over yesterday!
Favorite Sentence: Whatever your choice, enjoy as you return from the snack room a cool slice of fuck-you, flung as you pass her cubicle by Jenny, who is still totally pissed off that you got the Hennicker account.
Word Length: 679
Photo by Conrad Irwin 2008.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I am shocked and thrilled that I have written a story every single day for six months straight. And honestly, I’m afraid to say much more than that. Taking this project one day at a time has been crucially important since, oh, I finished May, so I’m not going to change tactics now. As for my virtual celebration treat, is it not exquisite?? I wanted to put up a picture of caramel apples—my all-time favorite Halloween treat—but although I bought the stuff to make them, I wound up devoting that time to watching a couple of Halloween-themed shows the husband and I love. And I couldn’t find a good picture online that I was free to use. So this fabulous caramel apple cheesecake will just have to do. I can’t say I’m disappointed. As for the day’s shorty, it was inspired both by a “page weight” my husband handed me this morning, an object archivists use to hold down the page of a book that shouldn’t be touched by the reader, and by Halloween. The page weight looks and feels like nothing so much as an oddly weighted shoe string, which inspired the first line of the story.
Today’s inspiration: a torn piece from a catalog. On one side of the page is a lovely young woman with long blond hair in a prettified out-doors-ey outfit that includes a fancy scarf. On the other side, a sweet, girlish, hand-crafty bracelet at top and a rockin’ pair of studded harness boots at bottom. I studied both sides of the page for something around 5 minutes, then wrote a story that included none of these things but did feature a photographer trying to take pretty pictures. My silly image at the top of the post is a goofy catalog-page-like decoration that I assembled from pretty pics of things similar to what’s on my page scrap.
Back to the well of inspiration from the Leslie Anderson paintings posted at 
Maine writers, here’s a short story 
Maine writers, take note! The 
The husband points out a new theme in my shorties: cultish religion. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because I recently saw “The Master”?
Today’s shorty came right off the top of my head, inspired by something silly I said to my husband earlier in the day. And I like it!
Sometimes I get a story idea that I really like but I can’t produce a single decent sentence to get me going, so I type the idea into a running Idea File and move on. The idea that inspired this story occurred to me a couple of months ago, then went to the Idea File after I gave it a good try and failed to produce anything. I didn’t have to find it in the file, though, because it’s been sitting in the back of my mind, waiting for me to luck into that decent sentence. Today: Score!
I’m still getting a fair amount of shorties that come in odd packages. I’ve written a lot of stories in different narrative forms (e.g., cosmetic package instructions, a brochure), so I don’t mean that. I mean that once I got into my third month of shorties, I started getting these little globs of story that feel complete but don’t have an obvious story arc. Today’s shorty is one of these and it ends with a kind of word-tic that I would never have tried if I weren’t pushed to extremes by this project. But why not??
I want to know if the things I’ve learned in this experiment can help me with old problems. So far the answer is more yes than no. A story I started a couple of years ago came back to me today. I opened the old file, looked at all the text (something over 3,000 words) and notes about what I wanted to accomplish, and just felt tired. Then the truer bits began to show themselves and I realized that this was a clear case of “vision run wild.” There was a simple story trying to get out of all that mess. So I wrote that simple story as the day’s shorty.
I like the easy ones! Next!
Crème brûlée for me for finishing another week! Isn’t it lovely? Today I tried a new kind of reclaiming of material. I have been working on the foundation story for a linked collection for about three years. The story is over-ambitious, and, so far, un-write-able. I’ve produced something like a 100 pages of material but still don’t have the right draft—soooo frustrating and possibly responsible for this project. The last 5 months have been a welcome (if labor-intensive) break from The Unfinishable Story. Since I’ve been doing so much reclaiming, lately, I got it in my head today to grab a chunk of that story and try to create a shorty out of it. I had fun with it but I don’t think I was successful, really. It’s a complete shorty but it has no punch. Maybe I’ll try again or maybe I’ll write shorties for some of the other characters in that world. Or maybe that’s just playing with fire….
My dad’s a bit of a hoarder and I catch myself drifting that way occasionally. One day I might write a good story about hoarding. But not today. Next, please.
For this “non-prompt” week I’m formalizing a process that I’ve stumbled into before: Think of phrases and sentences until something takes hold. Then instead of exploring what that phrase/sentence brings to mind, beginning to sketch out how it might make a story, just write what flows from it. Then skip a space and do this again. And skip another space and do it again. Then develop transitions between the unconnected pieces until a narrative that feels alive begins to take shape. Cut anything that doesn’t serve the emerging story and write to an end. Go!
I was at Haystack for a cultural summit that took place over about a 24-hour period. When we summiters woke up the second day and headed to the dining hall, we discovered a treat: Some of our brethren (I think they were all men) stayed up late the night before and with the help of some high-octane inspiration they set to work on… chair sculptures! This is one of the four they made. The protagonist of the day’s shorty handcrafts chairs from reclaimed materials.
In the dining room the lovely folks at Haystack kept a huge cookie jar and a bowl of cider, as well as carafes of coffee and hot water for tea. When I discovered this a man was reaching into the cookie jar and looked at me, shouting, “World’s biggest cookie jar!”—I was annoyed that I didn’t have my camera handy. The next day the cookie jar was in the kitchen, so I snapped this photo through the pass-through. You can see the cookie jar on the counter next to the base of a food processor (as well as the reflection of it in the window). But you can’t tell how big it is. Just trust me that it’s enormous. And it was full of yummy chocolate cookies.
I just attended a cultural summit at 
I wrote part of this story during the 3-hour drive to Haystack. More on this beloved Maine institution very soon but for now I’ll just announce to the world that every delightful thing you’ve heard about it is TRUE. What an extraordinary treat. And amidst all the great pleasures of the day, I was able to find enough time to finish the story. My prompt was the photo of shells here, which I gazed at for a few minutes before packing the car. Then I meditated on my memory of the shells for a while and… wrote a story about Komodo dragons, of course!
I remember when I began to bust out shorties that I had strong affection for but that arrived in unfamiliar shapes and with endings that maybe weren’t endings. That started in July and all those unfamiliar shapes, as much as my busy days, have delayed my Story Facts and favorites pages for July and August. I just don’t know how to judge some of these stories. For now I think that must be a good thing—I have faith that I’m teaching myself something new. Or at least teaching myself how to wander into the tall weeds with less fear. Anyway, today’s shorty is one of these inscrutables, inspired by the photo above. I really like it, partly because two silly rhyming songs from my girlhood made an appearance. But is it good? I have no idea.
Daily Shorty 