Um… I’ll call it a prose poem. I wish this thankfully short piece a very happy life on my hard drive.
Working Title: Scarlet House
1st Sentence: I live in a scarlet house on the horizon.
Favorite Sentence: They subsisted on duty and the graceful line.
Word Length: 189
Photo by McGoldrick Art & Photography 5/2011
A virtual piece of chocolate cake for finishing Week 4! See May’s Story Facts + page for a geeky round-up of the week. As for fact-free impressions, this has been a particularly good week. Wrote a clunker on the 24th but otherwise this is a nice little crop of stories.
Working Title: Honeysuckle
1st Sentence: Occasionally we have them in Maine, days laden with the scent of honeysuckle, scattered with birdsong, shot through with the low hum of bees.
Favorite Sentence: And when we do I move through it at a Carolina pace, relaxed and hopeful, looking for butterflies, wishing I had a cool slice of watermelon so dark-pink ripe, like kissed lips.
Word Length: 457
Photo by CdnStar
Working Title: Nutshelling
1st Sentence: My father’s teeth were so strong he could shell walnuts with them.
Favorite Sentence: My father’s teeth were so strong he could shell walnuts with them. (Yes, same sentence. cg)
Word Length: 293
Photo by J. Dncsn 9/2009
As part of my birthday present to you, dear husband, I dispatch today’s shorty in record time. I even made it creepy, just for you.
Working Title: Script
1st Sentence: If the cab doesn’t seem right—something is off with the paint, the design, you’re not sure, but it’s not quite right….
Favorite Sentence: If the man looks everywhere but at you until finally, as you lean into the back, you catch his eye, but he’s not looking at you so much as he is taking you apart at the joints, he’s gauging where to place the tip of the knife so that he can lay the heel of his hand on the butt to push down, down, through the bone, a quick and easy cut, a child could do it….
Word Length: 228
Photo by Puschinka 2009
Smilie The Clown
Working Title: Empty Stage
1st Sentence: There is a name for the fear of clowns.
Favorite Sentence: Fear of white gloves that make your hands look like napkins.
Word Length: 361
Photo by Steve Smilie Norman
When I first started writing short stories, I’d start with a Big Idea. I’d want to write a story about redemption, or painful self-discovery. Then I’d work away at creating the characters and scenes that might get me there. I learned to avoid The Big Idea approach because if I try to work from the abstract to the concrete, I fail every time. Yesterday someone told me that the Fairy Tale Review is taking submissions for their Yellow issue and ever since then all I can think is yellow yellow yellow. No surprise, no good ideas took hold in my writing session today and I wound up having to just push through on a bad one. So another clunker. But even clunkers earn sweat equity, right?
Working Title: Yellow
1st Sentence: Yellow was her color.
Favorite Sentence: Ella felt as though she had lived her entire life trying to meet that expectation of sublime adorable, performing as one-half of a girl-boy twin team from the minute she was born.
Word Length: 465
Virtual chocolate chip cookies to celebrate the end of Week 2! Check out May’s Story Facts + page for a geeky take on the week. I’ll say here that I’m not finishing the week in style. May 12 I wrote a clunker, May 13 a minimally pleasing story I don’t expect to revise into something I would submit, and the same today. Do I have only clunkers and unsubmittables ahead for May?
Working Title: Coat Closet
1st Sentence: So I like to spend a little time in the closet every day.
Favorite Sentence: Then Rachel comes over—no phone call and no knock on the door, just barges in—and when she hangs her coat up she sees my feet and screams like a banshee, like my feet are so hideous, like she’s never seen my scabby slippers, like a woman can’t meditate in her own damn coat closet if she wants to.
Word Length: 461
Photo by Rdsmith4
Working Title: O Holy Night
1st Sentence: The scent of vanilla, the wood smoke, her hands.
Favorite Sentence: The director’s arms, our highest soprano and lowest bass, my belly, his nose, her trembling lips, his closed eyes, my feet pushing to tiptoe—we were just one gorgeous cascade of sound, one joyful noise.
Word Length: 457
Photo: I”m so proud of this wreath I made last Christmas. Not so proud of the picture….
I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner. The first 11 stories of my Daily Shorty project please me. Either I consider them worth revising and likely one day submittable or I know they will amuse a loved one or a friend. Or the story makes me laugh or scratches an itch or contains a character or a sentence I love. This story? None of the above.
Working Title: Honey Peas
1st Sentence: Do you know that old rhyme about peas and honey?
Favorite Sentence: And I wave her across the street, watching those long linen skirts she favors brushing her ankles above the leather lacework of her sandals.
Word Length: 349
Photo by Bordercolliez, June 2011.
I’ve been working harder at keeping up my idea file and that work paid off today. If you consider taking on the Daily Shorty challenge—say a story a day for a week or a story a day for a month—I highly recommend sprucing up your current idea file, first, and then adding to it regularly. I’m finding that because I have to come up with something new every day, I’m tuning in more to what’s happening around me, to overheard snippets of conversation, interesting people-watching, and so on. I’m remembering to carry a small notebook and pen with me everywhere, these days.
Working Title: Future Perfect
1st Sentence: Lately everybody looks like somebody I’ve seen before.
Favorite Sentence: Don’t you just wish, I heard on her breath as she walked away, waving at the counter boy to come take my order, me going crimson to the toenail.
Word Length: 417
Working Title: Manda’s Intervention
1st Sentence: One thing we want to get straight right away: You’re always asking—“Is it me?”
Favorite Sentence: To Manda’s intervention, Donald wore red corduroy bell bottoms, a three-inch-wide white plastic belt, white pleather shoes, a long-sleeved polyester shirt patterned like a muddy rainbow and open to the navel, and sunglasses with lenses as big as a wheel of cheese.
Word Length: 322
Photo by Eugen Nosko.
Incredibly busy week publishing a huge project at Hunger Mountain. Actually pulled an all-nighter last night. But I had to start my Daily Shorty project today, so I stayed up a bit later….
The discussion of rhythm in Dave Jauss’s book on craft, Alone With All That Could Happen, had me shouting, “I thought I was the only person who did that!” (See 2. Syntax as Soundtrack in the essay “What We Talk About When We Talk About Flow.”)
I write in rhythm when I can hear the way the story should progress but I can’t find the words. “Like a blah and a blah blah,” she said, tossing her hair again—again!—and flounced away, her blah and blah blah blahing. My brain wouldn’t come up with some of the words for this first shorty, so “rhythm writing” had to serve. Day 1 in the bag!
Working Title: Like Shit on a Cracker
1st Sentence: Like a fine merlot.
Favorite Sentence: Like a hooker late on a slow night and behind on her rent.
Word Length: 481
can't thank the Maine Arts Commission enough for granting her their 2012 literary fellowship, which she used to launch Daily Shorty. Claire writes, edits, coaches other writers, and blogs in Lewiston, where she stays sane by working on her scraggly yard, running 5Ks as slowly as possible, perfecting cracker recipes, and playing badminton. She spends the remainder of her free time with her sweet husband and perfect cats. You can contact Claire at dailyshorty@gmail.com.
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