This photo was the “picture of the day” at Wikimedia Commons. I have been particularly low-energy since Wednesday, so I took the whole day off and waited until midnight to even start this shorty. That puts a lot of pressure on the need to write a complete story just before turning out the light, of course, but the freedom to radically change my routine is the only thing that’s kept me going on this project. Sometimes I just can’t work on the story… until I absolutely have to work on the story. Anyway, I was totally stumped on this one. Then an old silly exercise came to me (see my “Try This” post above) and that saved my Daily Shorty butt.
Working Title: What Happened
1st Sentence: All the people you know and half-know and just barely recognize, the people milling in and out of your universe, those people, accept it now, will make up their own story about what happened.
Favorite Sentence: And when he gets to the more, the really funny stuff, the unbelievable ape-shit-crazy stuff, it will be hard to hear, knowing that you are the woman this story is about, you are the Lucille Ball of this hilarious anecdote, you are the punch line.
Word Length: 507
Photo of Hurricane Isabel taken by Astronaut Ed Lu from the International Space Station 9/2003.
The Bates College outdoor track inspired the day’s shorty. My friend Alicia and I walked for 45 minutes (which was not nearly enough time for a proper girl confab) while I reserved one small part of my brain for taking mental notes. I guess my notes weren’t so great because the resulting story is destined to live its life undisturbed on my hard drive.
Well, I’m very sad as I write this. I’m participating in this round of my friend 
I made FIVE false starts trying to write a shorty in response to the song “Walk of Life” by Dire Straits, one I very much enjoyed way way back in the 1980’s when I was so young and the world was before me… heavy sigh. Sometimes I have to just throw my hands up and write myself a joke story to meet my daily shorty commitment. Next!
Today’s song happens to be one I don’t care for, “Simple Man” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. I find it ironic that the singer belts out these lyrics about how important it is to be a simple man to soaring, anthem-like music, and that over-serious, too sincere framing drives me a little nuts. I was hoping that sense of irony might make it to my story, but no. A sad mother-daughter tale with a not-so-simple man at the heart of it. Meh. Next.
At Ogunquit again, this time with the husband and a Jacuzzi, for a long weekend in the last blush of summer. As I write, I’m sipping a “mocha choca,” an espresso-blasted hot cocoa prepared lovingly for me by a very nice young woman with an accent I can’t place at the Cafe Amore, one of my favorite places in the village. I’ll remember this when I’m trudging to the gym in thigh-high snow this winter. For now, I drink my buzzy cocoa and post Day 2 of my song stories: Today’s shorty was inspired by one of my all-time favorite singer-songwriters, Tracy Chapman, singing the sad, sweet “Give Me One Reason.” This shorty could not be more different from that song in tone, yet I wrote it while grooving to Tracy on a loop, so go figure.
Today I start a week of shorties inspired by songs. To select my songs I created a Pandora radio station and spent about 20 minutes entering singers and bands I like and giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to songs the site selected for me. Then I saved the station and went on with other things. Last night I went back to the station and wrote down the titles and artists of the first 7 songs Pandora gave me, whether I liked them or not. I bought the songs from iTunes and loaded them onto my iPod. Today I began my series by listening to “Little Bitty Pretty One” by Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers. Because this song is impossible to hear without dancing, I got up and danced like a fool for a good 20 minutes while replaying the song. Then I sat down at my computer, turned the volume down, and continued to replay the song while I wrote.
What I can say so far about using poems as prompts: I’m producing stories I feel I would never have come up with on my own. That was only rarely true when I used place and photos as inspiration. I wonder why? The day’s shorty was inspired by the poem 
I spent the day in Boston with my friend Mark. I took lots of pictures and tried to go thoughtful once in a while, but I never did take a few minutes out of our traipsing even to take notes for a story. Instead I carried my notebook to (an early) bed, reviewed my photos, and closed my eyes and waited…. As it happens, I have no photo to document the moment in our day that inspired this story. Instead I’ve posted here the favorite of my pictures. The shorty was inspired by the rest we took in the Public Garden, admiring the pretty lake and glimpsing from afar a big rock with… was that a mermaid??
A mocha, a cushy couch. Memories inspired by the man-sandles I saw on the guy sitting catty-corner to me. Oh, how my father would despise those shoes, I thought. And I was off and running.
Frontier is a wonderful example of how the old mill buildings so prevalent in Maine can be re-purposed. A combination restaurant-theater-gallery-performance center, Mainers have treasured this place since it opened in Brunswick not long after I moved to the state in summer 2006. I sat in their small theater scribbling ideas in my notebook for about 15 minutes before the showing of the film my husband and I came to see, “Queen of Versailles.” (I give the documentary a thumbs up but I have no idea why reviewers found it hilarious. It’s fascinating, disturbing, and very sad. I think I laughed three times.) I came back to my notes hours later to work my impressions into a shorty. Love the idea for it, but I’ll need good luck with revision to accomplish what I hoped.
Okay, I wrote today’s shorty before I got to the gym but that’s because I woke up thinking “gym” and I’m so familiar with the place—and I’ve already written several shorties there—that my mind started working on the sights and sounds right away. Within minutes I was scribbling.
Dear Home Depot: What story will you bring me? One about a husband who’s getting a bit too handy around the house, of course. I had to fight hard for this one—lots of starts and stops. It’s okay, probably not a lot of potential for being publishable. Onward.
Saying goodbye to Week 16, but I’ll have to delay my virtual treat by one day in favor of posting the picture I used for today’s shorty. This story came to me very quickly and whole, so was fun and easy to write. And I like it. Overall I consider my week of photo prompts very successful. The stories came out odd but I like that. I sometimes had trouble going deep but don’t I always. I do think starting with the photo stripped a layer of effort or pressure from the shorty mission. To sum: I will do this again.
Another really tough one and again, doesn’t match up to my vision but there’s hope for when I can come back to it.
I really like my vision for this but it didn’t come out so well. Hopefully I can ramp it up in revision.
Three starts today to get a shorty. And this is the third in my experimental “photo series” and today I’m really pleased with what I wrote. If forced to think like a critic I’m not sure how highly I’d rate this story but I went deep today, something I haven’t been able to do lately. You know when you’ve written something that matters. Not all stories that matter will be publishable, but in the end “publishable” is someone else’s lookout.
Well, here’s what I can say so far about this experiment with photo prompts: Both yesterday and today I did come up with a shorty pretty quickly and I wrote each with relative speed and ease. They are both odd, and I like that. But both lack… depth and feeling. Of course it’s not like I never have that problem otherwise. And maybe the photo series shorties will get better. On to the next!
In the last few weeks I’ve been finding ways to defeat an increasing sense of mental fatigue. More on some of the tricks I’ve developed another time, but here’s my latest: I’ve brainstormed a list of types of prompts I can use to inspire shorties. On a given week I will use a particular kind of prompt every day. I fear that my mind will not love this kind of constraint and the overall quality of the shorties will suffer. But for now I want to see if using prompts reduces at least one kind of mental work by relieving me of the burden of creating a story idea out of nothing and everything. My Daily Shorty weeks start on Tuesday so today I began a week-long story series using 7 selected photos from my recent trip to Ogunquit, Maine.
I keep wondering when I’m going to run out of easy days. More, please. For now, you’re welcome to one of these amazing macaroons. I’ll have the other as a reward for completing Week 15. Mmmm. I love coconut.
I have to do more of this. Went looking on my hard drive for lost bits and pieces and found a nugget I wrote a year ago using an exercise provided by the fabulous 
Jen: You said, “creamed corn, creamed corn, creamed corn.” I listened. Re the shorty, this a perfect example of a story I can’t imagine having written before this story-a-day experiment. Very little happens, it’s kind of sentimental, and it has a pleasant little ending. So… elaborate, snarky, slightly foul-mouthed Hallmark greeting card? Or small, worthy story about a quiet moment between a (snarky, slightly foul-mouthed) couple with a defiantly positive ending in a world clogged with disillusion? Probably the former. Either way, another day marked off and on to the next.
Two easy ones in a row, after a couple of weeks of feeling drained, and talk of limping in my last post. I learned in May that I can write a story even while totally exhausted. I learned in June that I can do it even if I’ve been exhausted for days. I’m still amazed by that. I suppose the next—sad—question is: Can I write a story if I’ve been exhausted for weeks? I hope I don’t have to find out.
To celebrate finishing a quarter of stories, I took the day off from everything but my shorty. Which is good, because it took me ALL DAY to put this little thing out. I started three stories, even wrote three pages for one that I just threw away. But finally, finally, August sets sail.
Hell yes! A quarter! I’ve written a story a day for an ENTIRE quarter! And just to add to my bliss, I really enjoyed working on my story today. Took a while to get the idea but I was patient and kept revisiting it. Finished it up with a nice polish tonight. Yeehaw! Now stand back while I cut this gorgeous “tiramisu cake” that appeared at a fabulous wedding reception attended by my friend Mark.
Enjoy with me a delicious, custardy shortcake, to celebrate the close of another week. I’m feeling… Olympian. And resourceful because I started this shorty in the parking lot while waiting for a doctor’s appointment, added to it in the grocery store parking lot while waiting for the husband to fetch one more thing, and finished it at home during the commercial breaks from men’s gymnastics. True, I took a huge hop on the landing, but that’s just a one-tenth deduction….
I have not changed my official 
Daily Shorty 
