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.
Working Title: Flavor Profile
1st Sentence: Bitter. Like black coffee, dark chocolate, hoppy beer, grapefruit, like when you break up with your boyfriend after seven long years of “making it work” and not three full weeks later he’s dating someone else and already they’re committed.
Favorite Sentence: Salt is swagger.
Word Length: 315
Photo by frank wouters from antwerpen, belgium, 1/2003.
In Maine we’re getting our usual heavy doses of March snow when my bones are used to daffodils, so I’m posting a photo here to combat the chill. As for my shorties, I continue to have trouble, most days, coming up with an idea that will hold. Over and over I wind up settling into a story around midnight and then staying up another hour or two to complete it. This one, framed as a list of the most important facts of a person’s life, was fun, despite my falling asleep over it. I’ll enjoy coming back to it.
This hot chocolate looks so comforting. It’s the right virtual treat to enjoy as gratitude for completing the very, very difficult Week 41. As for the day’s shorty (I’m typing this post on February 21), I had no heart for writing the day after saying goodbye to our kitty. Late that night, when I couldn’t make anything in my idea file work, I looked through my file of unfinished stories and found a start to something I wrote more than four years ago. My “I really wish I didn’t have to think about this” approach helped me to zero in on why I never wrote more than a few paragraphs after a whole page of notes on what I wanted to accomplish: The story’s vision was far too complicated. I saw how to render a simplified version in much shorter form and pounded it out. It’s a joke-story in any case, probably destined to live on my hard drive. But it’s nice to check off another piece that had been languishing in my “unfinished” folder. And it was good to work on something meant to be humorous.
I don’t think people threaten kids with what might appear on their Permanent Record anymore. But it was something I heard a lot growing up. Don’t even think of doing X or it’ll wind up on your Permanent Record! Strangely, this threat had teeth, at least for me. But I’ve always been a coward. Today’s shorty is another written in the form of a list of 7 things.
If I’m ever feeling full of myself for writing a story every day for so many months, I need only remind myself of Samuel Pepys to prevent ego-bloat. The man wrote a diary entry every single day for 10 years, from January 1, 1660, until the end of 1669. Now THAT is a commitment! I’ve been alternating story-prompt weeks with non-story-prompt weeks, and it’s time for prompts again. In brainstorming possible prompts, I thought of old Sam’s diary, which I’d always heard was pretty lively. Turns out, a man named 
It’s been a while since I’ve written a shorty for sheer amusement. Feels good!
The handful of you subscribed to this blog know that I missed a few days of posts (I’m writing this on Sunday, November 25). The Thanksgiving holiday overtook me, I’m afraid, but not entirely—I have kept up with my story-a-day commitment, and today I’ll catch up with my posts, backdating as usual so that the date I wrote the story matches the date of the post. I’m not using prompts this week, just letting inspiration come from wherever. This shorty was inspired by grocery shopping, though that doesn’t show in what I have here.
And a fond farewell to Week 26! One of my all-time favorite treats is pistachio ice cream—enjoy it with me as I celebrate another completed week of the Daily Shorty challenge. The last inspiration I pulled from my mystery box was part of the top of a corroded aerosol can, which got me fixated on the thought of hairspray. I covered three pages with various ideas and story starts related to hairspray—I couldn’t shake the image of it—and finally landed on a story as list using that number again: 7. Many thanks, again, to Jen Hicks. I love saying this: I owe you one!
This has been a very tough few days. Yet again I struggled to produce a complete story. Yet again I wrote a lot of words I had to toss. An easy one very soon, please?
When I bought seven songs for my song-prompt week, I actually added an eighth “bonus track.” “Landslide,” by Fleetwood Mac, inspired the day’s shorty.
Daily Shorty 
