Daily Shorty

It’s fitting that today’s shorty is entitled “A Toast.” I remember when thinking of the number “100” in relation to this challenge made me want to bury my face in my hands. I’ll admit that I’ve limped these last couple of weeks to this particular mark. But I’m here. And… dare I say it… on to the next!

Working Title: A Toast
1st Sentence: She knew what she was supposed to say.
Favorite Sentence: Does an unhappy woman win Missus On The Go™ saleswoman of the year three times running?
Word Length: 289

Photo by Quinn Dombrowski, December 2007.

Really empty today. Sometimes I solve the empty-well problem by coming up with a neutral opening sentence, then adding whatever organic, pleasant-enough sentences come along to finish out a first paragraph. Then with the next paragraph, I write a strange line that makes me laugh—one that doesn’t appear to connect with the first paragraph. Then I have to make sense of it in the next lines and let the story build its quirky self from there. In this case I wound up with a shorty that reads like a bad translation of a story written in Poland in the 1950s.

Working Title: A Good Showing
1st Sentence: The weather turned that morning.
Favorite Sentence: Nodding, tipping his hat; after, at the house, attacking the cheese ball.
Word Length: 446

Nice to get an easy one today. Hopefully a sign of things to come! Let’s go, August, come on, let’s pick it up. Now, let’s see… what’s Michael Phelps doing tonight?

Working Title: Now What?
1st Sentence: She sat in the theater as the credits rolled.
Favorite Sentence: The Gofer, the Gaffer, the Candlestick Maker.
Word Length: 274

Photo by Belinda Hankins Miller, July 2007.

I just talked about the glories of pushing until you get something new and interesting. I wrote this shorty first thing, looked at it many times through the day, piddled with it for more than an hour tonight. Refused to be anything other than what I originally imagined. Okay. Moving on, then.

Working Title: Bridge
1st Sentence: He finds himself stuck on Memorial Bridge, unable to move his car—forward, backward, out of the damn way.
Favorite Sentence: He can’t move his car because he’s forgotten how.
Word Length: 250

Photo by Steve from Washington, DC, May 2007.

Best writing advice I ever got: Never do anything half-assed, courtesy of one of my literary and teaching heroes, Michael Martone. Wrote a harmless, trifling shorty this morning, too light to please me. So I tried again. I had just enough time to make a more interesting start on another story idea before running to and from other things, nonstop, for the rest of the day. But when I came back to Effort #2 tonight, nothing more would come. So instead I spent an hour on #1, replacing general references with concrete detail, stripping out repetitive sentences, polishing every phrase. It’s still a harmless trifle that may never see another ray of sunshine but it’s a much prettier trifle, dammit.

Working Title: For His Pancakes
1st Sentence: What she wanted—what she needed—were his pancakes.
Favorite Sentence: And as time went on, as breakfasts piled up, she got used to his passive people-pleasing, his habit of leaving the kitchen looking like the aftermath of the Dresden bombing, his refusal to see movies or attend concerts.
Word Length: 389

Photo by Lazarova.p, August 2009.

Feeling much better today, so enjoy with me my reward for yesterday closing out my 12th week of the Daily Shorty challenge! (Forgive me for tearing into my sweet potato pie before I’ve served yours. You see how delicious it is, how could I resist?) So, wow. 12 weeks. Both amazed and ho-hum. Amazed because I thought 1 week would be tough and 1 month likely impossible. Ho-hum because this challenge has become something I just have to do. Very tough day Sunday, though—I just didn’t want to write a story that day and resisted doing so until late. I’ve had a few tough days before but I was more adolescent about it Sunday. Not looking forward to worse days than that but of course they’re coming. And hopefully more days like today: The shorty came to me quickly, I wrote it with ease, and I like it. Thank you, can I have another?

Working Title: By the Numbers
1st Sentence: He’s not sure when the counting began but he knows it was while he was a child because he has a distinct memory of his mother hurling her usual fury at him in the kitchen—something about a dirty cereal bowl, a ring of milk on the counter—while he fixed his gaze to the ceiling tile.
Favorite Sentence: Their dining room floor is made up of 14 wide, wooden planks, burnished to silky blond-brown, gleaming with varnish—3 coats, he happens to know.
Word Length: 387

Photo by Ernesto Andrade, San Francisco, CA, November 2005

I was a child in the 1970’s so I remember very little of it—much more influenced by the 1980’s. But I do carry little snippets—more sense-memories than anything else and an overall feeling about the time. For some reason I woke up this morning with various bits and pieces from the 70’s  running through my mind. Macramé, bell bottoms, paisley. And the sentence, “I can’t argue that the 1970’s was a pretty decade,” a line that I included in the nicely short piece I wrote.

Working Title: He’ll Remember
1st Sentence: We get just one shot so we have to be right.
Favorite Sentence: You leaned into me, buried your head in my neck, and when I bent to kiss you my hair fell over us both like a silk scarf, that long, long hair, almost to my knees.
Word Length: 443

Photo by Saltmiser, November 2007.

I’m noticing that my shorties are getting much shorter, after the trend was LONG in June. Hmm. An odd one today with a head-scratching ending. On to the next!

Working Title: Inside the Apple
1st Sentence: She would love to live in that painting, roam those green velvet hills, bite into one of those plump, crisp, wine-sweet apples.
Favorite Sentence: They drop from his mouth like a scatter of fat raindrops and now so do hers, pelting her bare feet, bloody lumps of sodden decay.
Word Length: 269

Photo here.

This is the first day I’ve actively resisted the work. I know it’s because the husband is traveling and because we got some big news last night I haven’t absorbed yet. After too much dawdling, I wrote another quirky shorty I figured out as I went along. I couldn’t find a way to deepen this one, even after making up for the dawdling by sitting on it for quite some time. Still: Done!

Working Title: Lists
1st Sentence: Of the ten sights everyone should see in person, she has seen only one.
Favorite Sentence: And she realizes, as the speaker of Arabic must, as the speaker of Chinese surely does, that choosing the ten most important words of any language is foolhardy, absurd, unnerving, doomed, fickle, pedantic, unhelpful, conceited, preening, and overweening.
Word Length: 410

Got excited about this one but the draft turned out iffy. Hopefully I’ll hit this shorty’s potential when I can spend time on revision.

Working Title: Crying Money
1st Sentence: She had to be careful about rending garments.
Favorite Sentence: She originally studied to be a psychologist but clearly uncontrollable sympathetic crying would be a problem in such a profession.
Word Length: 434

Photo by Jiří Sedláček – Frettie, July 2011.

Well, three tough days in a row. I’m reminding myself that the commitment is to draft a story every day, that to expect to please myself with each draft is just too much to ask. I looked through my notes and I see that the last time I was this disappointed with three in a row it was the second week of May. Will I bounce back again and will it last? Still, here I am, 8 weeks in the bag! A lovely dish of mango sorbet for me!

Working Title: Virtual Activism
1st Sentence: Will we let them win?!
Favorite Sentence: Mirette hit the link, signed the petition—Tell Gramps to go back to his rocking chair on the front porch, where he belongs!—and went back to her cereal, a job well done.
Word Length: 401

Photo by Flickr user stu_spivack.

Working Title: I’ll Give You Something To Cry About
1st Sentence: She’d like to say that she hates to hear the little girl’s screams and fits of tears because she feels sad for her.
Favorite Sentence: She’d like to say that her impulse is to run out of her apartment, snatch the girl from the bullying taunts of the older kids, cover her with her own strong back.
Word Length: 220

Photo by D. Sharon Pruitt, March 2009.

For the first time since I began this project, I feel daunted. I think (and hope) that I’m just reacting to putting this website together. I acquired the site in mid-June and started transforming my daily notes on the project into back-dated posts. Catching up has been extremely difficult—every day I write a new story that now has to be documented, so…. But what if my day of feeling overwhelmed is about the pressure to complete yet another story? Can’t think about that. Must take this project day-by-day or I’ll go fetal. Anyway. Today a very short one based on a memory. Enjoy your life on my hard drive, my dear story of June 23.

Working Title: Tuna Helper
1st Sentence: In those early days we ate nothing for dinner but tuna helper with peas, followed by the rare ice cream cone.
Favorite Sentence: I used the good olive oil to dress the steamed asparagus because when you can afford scallops and fresh asparagus, you own two kinds of olive oil and you know why and you know how to pick each kind.
Word Length: 418

I hate to whine (well, not really) but this is the worst cold I’ve had in a long time. It’s just knocking me out. Anyway, I’m not sure it’s affecting the quality of the shorties, which just goes up and down as usual. Today I made a little something (and only a little something, as the title of my post suggests) out of another childhood memory. I have used personal experiences far more than usual since this project began and I’m sure that will continue, given the need for something new to write about every day.

Working Title: Match Lure
1st Sentence: What kid doesn’t succumb to fire?
Favorite Sentence: Even a plodding bookworm like me, a too-sweet-for-words little primp who took pride, even as a small child, on surpassing all expectation of goodness.
Word Length: 311

Photo by Sebastian Ritter (Rise0011), January 2006.

Actually, I’m being unfair, maybe. After writing two stories in a row that I found both funny and painful (my favorite combination!) I wrote one today that’s really just a joke. But it amuses me and I had fun writing it, so why am I complaining? As I keep reminding a friend who is thinking about taking the Daily Shorty Challenge for a month: I don’t write because I must write well. I write because I must write. If I let my Inner Critic have her way and try to demand—every single day—a draft that will ultimately be something I’m proud to submit, then I have lost the game entirely.

Working Title: Would You Rather Be Hitler or Stalin?
1st Sentence: If you had to kill someone—in self-defense, of course—would you rather deliver one sharp blow to the temple with a blunt object or pierce the heart with one easy jab of a very sharp knife?
Favorite Sentence: Jake from Michigan wants to know if blood would spurt from the wound when you stabbed the person, or would the cut be clean?
Word Length: 314

Photo of knife by Donovan Govan, April 2005; of bat by Jthoele2, October 2009.

I’m sick. A disgusting summer cold. Slept maybe 3 hours, woke up dazed. The words “Hog Hat Woman Wild with Hope” were in my head, so I went with it as a headline and wrote the accompanying fictional newspaper article as my story. Not a keeper.

Working Title: Hog Hat Woman Wild with Hope
1st Sentence: Denise Pelletier of Paris, Maine, is “wild with hope” as she takes her hat business national with a website launch this week.
Favorite Sentence: The hog hats, which come in six “moods”—Full & Happy, Fit & Savvy, Dream-Puss, Gloomy Gus, Steppin’ Out, and Grunt & Growl—are showing up all over central Maine and last week even made it to television when a man at a Boston Bruins game was pictured on camera, doing a victory dance with a Gloomy Gus snug on his head.
Word Length: 411

Photo here.

Working Title: She Cried
1st Sentence: She cried before the first line was out because when he sang his voice was not the voice she knew, brash and elastic, making chords out of truth and confusion and anger.
Favorite Sentence: She cried because he opened with his famous anti-war song and when he was done he shook his head and said he’d felt dumb for writing that song, because, he’d believed then, it was a song that wouldn’t hold up, that powerful men punching you in the face with the American flag would be an embarrassing memory in another decade, that he would have to explain how stupid people were then, how brutal.
Word Length: 282