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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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 
More treats! I know we just gorged on chocolates, but today we must celebrate the completion of Week 48! For that we indulge in a chocolate cupcake with raspberry icing. YUM. Now on to today’s shorty: I had to randomly select from my collection of small pieces of paper, each labeled with one of the five senses (and a sixth labeled “ESP” for fun), to determine which sense I’d have to repeat for my seventh day. I selected “smell.” As it happens, I wrote the day’s shorty while at a writing session with friends, using the prompt of a sentence randomly selected from a book. Then I revised the story to make the sense of smell factor into the plot in some way. I made it work, so for once my job was done early in the day. Happy April!
Enjoy a trip to the chocolate shop with me to celebrate the close of another month! Yeehaw! I can hardly believe it. Want to make a year fly by? Promise to do some difficult thing every single day of it. While you’re slogging through the day, the week, while you’re looking ahead to how much time you still have to go, you feel like you’re walking through mud up to your hips. But in the big picture, when you glance out the window and notice the days are getting longer (or shorter), when you realize Thanksgiving is just around the corner—or Christmas or Easter—you’ll be shocked at how quickly it all slipped by. As for the day’s shorty, my prompt was the sense of taste. I wrote a non-narrative piece based on the four flavors we can detect plus the taste of “savory-ness” I hear cooks talking about, “umami.” I like the framing but I hope I can make a better piece out of it when I come back for revision.
The day’s prompt: smell. Oh, how I wanted to write about the scent of frying bacon or Thanksgiving Day’s roasting turkey, but happy smells wouldn’t take hold and inspire story.
Today’s prompt was sight. Mercifully, the idea and outline of this story came to me almost immediately this morning. Can’t remember the last time a shorty was this easy. Is it good? Oh, now, remember—this project isn’t about being good! Good is for revision.
Tuesday my prompt was sound, Wednesday it was ESP, and now touch. After trying to woo inspiration several times in the day, a goofy sentence occurred and I went with it. The conventional wisdom says never to begin with a sentence so over-the-top that you have nowhere to go and I almost threw this sentence away for that reason. But I decided to challenge myself to take it seriously and puzzle out why someone would ever be in the position to say such a thing. I did my best to capture a moment in this poor person’s life. And now I will write the single most over-used sentence for, oh, a few years now: It is what it is.
Today my prompt was the “6th sense,” ESP. Writing session 1: Nothing, during which actually I did something, which was rejecting lots of stupid ideas and coming up with a couple that might fly but needed mulling. Writing session 2: Almost nothing, then frustrated forcing of SOMETHING. I chose one of the mulled ideas, then wrote a harmless sentence referencing a horoscope. I stared at it for a while, then wrote a few more sentences. Then I called writing session 2 “done.” Writing session 3: Scramble, push, scramble… done. Honestly at this point I think I could teach a workshop on how to write a very short fiction in 3 brief-ish writing sessions. You might not love it but it’ll be complete. And you might love the one you write tomorrow….
I’ve admitted somewhere before on this blog that I have a fondness for putting cats in my stories. I think it’s been a while, though, since I have indulged. I like the idea for the day’s shorty, which has a cat front and center, but the execution wasn’t so great. I’ll come back to it. In the meantime, congratulations to me for completing Week 47! I’m a sucker for Easter candy, which always includes for me Jordan almonds. I’ve been eating far too many of them these last few days. Just one more small handful to celebrate another completed week.
I grabbed something from the idea file and made it work well enough. I actually kind of like it but this shorty will need some reworking if it’s going to be a keeper. It’s a third recent piece inspired by a traditional fairy tale.
Ever get fixated on a phrase or an image but you don’t know why and can’t seem to do anything with it? Just let it marinate. When it’s ready to frame a story it will. That’s what happened to me with the day’s shorty, which I like but don’t love. Hopefully I’ll hit gold in revision.
I don’t think there’s a connection between St. Patrick’s Day and the ugly vibe I’ve got going in this story. I don’t know why I sometimes write about the violence men do to women. I guess because I’ll never figure out how so many of us can be so cruel.
Look, my hard drive needs friends, too. I’ve produced work at every level during this challenge, including a nice collection of stories that can live peacefully in their hard drive community, never disturbed in any way. The day’s shorty is one of them.
Daily Shorty 