Archive | Daily Shorty Year post RSS feed for this section

Hello Week 11!

10 Jul

I can’t believe I forgot to congratulate myself for completing week 10 yesterday! No wonder I was cranky today. No virtual treat. So a luscious brownie for me now. Anyway, today I drafted three-quarters of something that didn’t interest me but I put it aside in hopes of getting something better. I kept coming back to the page after taking care of other life-things, but nothing would budge. Then I went searching through unfinished stories (the kind you know you’ll almost certainly never finish) and found a sentence that had good spark. Two one-hour sessions (mostly consisting of staring but eventually producing a couple of paragraphs) and one two-hour session of heavy-duty writing late tonight and I have a new shorty that, again, probably only a mother can love. Actually I’m beginning to think I’m losing my ability to judge whether my stories work. And I can’t decide if that’s good or bad. Likely both.

Working Title: Menu Math
1st Sentence: If you love tuna sandwiches, you’re high-strung and needy.
Favorite Sentence: It’s not that they genuinely expect the world to spasm and then re-shape itself into their image every time they let out one of these farts, it’s just that they’re shameless and cheap.
Word Length: 1,046

Photo by Neumüller Ferdinand.

Getting shorter….

9 Jul

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.

Stubborn

8 Jul

Had a hard time finding something to stick, and once I did I struggled with a draft that pleased me. Wound up re-drafting this piece twice before finally getting something that has potential. Really hoping I’m going to feel more sparked soon. Lately despite some great brainstorming sessions the writing has felt more dutiful than joyful. Will I have to admit soon that I plain need a break from drafting a short story every day? I hope not because I have no intention of taking one.

Working Title: Things I Can Tell You Now That It’s Over
1st Sentence: What I was really thinking when we first met.
Favorite Sentence: “What a waste!” you’d say, “I could make a baby chicken out of that,”—always, always the thing about a baby chicken—and then you’d actually shove the bones into your mouth to suck and strip off the leftover bits.
Word Length: 556

7 Still on the Brain

7 Jul

I so love my vision for this one but the draft is a truly stunning failure. I’ll come back to it because dammit I have to be able to execute better than this. Frustrating.

Working Title: The 7 Wonders of Annabelle’s World
1st Sentence: Follow me, if you will, to Annabelle’s bookshelf, where we find the song book she made last Christmas.
Favorite Sentence: Note the detail on the center rocks, where Annabelle used red nail polish to paint hearts denoting her profound and abiding love for Milliker.
Word Length: 821

Image of the 7 wonders of the ancient world by Slof, August 2006.

Tags: ,

Searching for an ending….

6 Jul

I got to one but I don’t think it’s the right one. Hopefully revisions will steer me right.

Working Title: The Mom Game
1st Sentence: I’ve played the Mom Game since I was in college, where I discovered that reporting all the worst stories about your mother and rating them against other people’s black tales is a great way to get to know people.
Favorite Sentence: She qualified, so I replied to her alcoholism opener with a story about how my mother refused to let the dentist use Novacaine when filling my cavities because she feared it might be a gateway drug.
Word Length: 2,218

Painting “Tote Mutter” by Egon Schiele, 1910.

Still Thinking 7

5 Jul

I would like to be more original and be inspired by a cranky number like 11 or 17 but it’s “lucky 7” that keeps coming to me ever since reading the Michael Martone piece (at Cynthia’s blog Catching Days) that I mentioned in my July 2 post (just below). Today my shorty is a 7-part personality quiz, the really infuriating kind marketed to women at the checkout counter on the cover of a bad magazine showing off the puffed-up cleavage of some anorexic actress. Fun to write.

Working Title: Know Thyself
1st Sentence: Ladies, do you wonder what people are thinking about you?
Favorite Sentence: Your mother worries about your self-confidence and suspects that allowing the doctor to induce labor deprived you of as much as two crucial weeks of prenatal development; you would be a doctor, yourself, she thinks, if you’d had those two weeks, maybe a state senator.
Word Length: 489

Photo of the 7 Lucky gods of Japan by Steve from Nagoya, Japan, August 2007.

Still Tired but More Inspired

4 Jul

Happy July 4! Very quiet plans here, mostly working, working, working on the site…. As for today’s shorty, stuck with it for quite a while to try to make something of it and I do like this one. I’m noticing a trend of a sort of quirky narrative shape, lately. Maybe because for a while now—since the last week of June—I’ve been discovering my endings only just as I get to them, rather than stumbling onto them with almost the first line, as is my usual habit.

Working Title: Mirror, Mirror
1st Sentence: To say that she fears mirrors is just unfair, it’s blowing the whole thing out of proportion.
Favorite Sentence: Does she know that it gives her smile a tiny notch, a cleft that makes him catch his breath, makes him think, what else do I know about her that she doesn’t know herself?
Word Length: 584

Photo by Jurii, May 2009.

Tags: , , ,

Too Tired To Be Inspired

3 Jul

After a great brainstorming session and a fun shorty yesterday I just slumped through my commitment today, sadly. Now that I’m caught up with posts, I’m pushing hard to put something on my static pages so I can make this site public. For the record, if you’re thinking of starting a blog I highly recommend it for documenting your work and reveling in whatever delights the Inner Geek, but know that it’s going to take a lot more time than you think to set it up. (Damn you, Cynthia.) Anyway, a shorty today that doesn’t please me but I stuck with it and did my best by it in any case. Poor Bill. Enjoy your life on my hard drive, Bill. And know that as my clunkers go, you are a stand-up guy.

Working Title: What Bill Read Today
1st Sentence: His watch.
Favorite Sentence: Between the dusty box of chamomile crap Erin left behind and the chocolate-scented confectioner’s sugar in the packet, every time the sugar.
Word Length: 757

Photo by Timur Voronkov, February 2010.

Goodbye to Week 9!

2 Jul

A frosty virtual piña colada for me in celebration of completing Week 9! Today’s shorty was inspired by Michael Martone’s visit to my friend and colleague’s blog, Cynthia Newberry Martin’s Catching Days. I’m a huge fan of Michael (see the “How To Be a Writer” project he inspired at Hunger Mountain) and I pay close attention to everything he says. More on what he says in that post another time but today what I took from it was a reminder to play with structure. He’s just written Four for a Quarter, a book of pieces based on the number 4. This morning I got hooked on the number 7. So… why is thinking “yellow” a Big Idea that ruins a story and thinking “7” isn’t? I’m not sure, but my guess is that I’m using “7” to suggest form, and form is just a constraint we can choose to work within or not. Whereas with “yellow” I wasn’t thinking form at all but about the abstract concept of the color yellow and about even more abstract associations with it (cowardice, age) and how I might do these ideas justice. For me, trying to go from the abstract to the concrete means ruination.

Working Title: 7 Ways To Tempt Your Man
1st Sentence: What man?
Favorite Sentence: For God’s sake don’t wear that flimsy pink number with the silky sash, it makes you look like an expensive bedroom slipper.
Word Length: 574

Photo by Portorricensis, June 2008.

A devilish start to July!

1 Jul

Check out the word length on this one! I had a lot of fun with this shorty.

Working Title: The Trade-Off
1st Sentence: A few weeks after we married, he asked me to stop leaving my shoes in the middle of the floor.
Favorite Sentence: “Clearly,” I said, one night, in the clutch of desire to save this relationship, “Clearly we have forgotten the power of The Trade-Off.”
Word Length: 666

Photo: I bought these awesome shoes at the Goodwill for 8 bucks!

Oh my! Two Months!

30 Jun

With all the excitement of getting the husband home from the airport and going out to dinner to celebrate his big promotion I… unbelievably… FORGOT that this is the last day of my SECOND month! A gorgeous banana split for me! My shorty today was quiet, a bit strange, and, yet again, one that I figured out with each new line. Maybe writing a story every day for this long mandates this new kind of process? Time will tell. Check out my Story Facts + page for a geeky take on the month of June.

Working Title: The I-Love-My-Kid Side
1st Sentence: 3:12 AM.
Favorite Sentence: Again she’s struck by how garish it is, mostly due to the glitter mixed into it but also because the shade of pink makes her think of cheap prom dresses, junk candy, Barbie shoes.
Word Length: 880

Photo by Newsum, July 2006.

More Lists! And some resistance.

29 Jun

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

Another Treasure Hunt

28 Jun

Again, I wrote this one line by line with no idea what would happen nor how the story would end. It’s a quirky piece that I actually like a lot but I have a feeling it’s a shorty only a mother could love….

Working Title: Bucket List
1st Sentence: They were at a dinner party last night when the conversation turned to bucket lists.
Favorite Sentence: The piglet suited for Wimbledon has one of those old-style wooden racquets, and he’s wearing tennis shorts that are so long on his chubby little legs, they look like Capri pants.
Word Length: 1,271

Photo by 4028mdk09, October 2009.

High Hopes Dashed

27 Jun

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.

I’m back!

26 Jun

I almost always realize the ending to a story right away (but then I have to figure out how to get there by writing the story). Very rarely I have absolutely no idea how the story will end, and in that case I just figure it out on the page line by line. Today I wrote my shorty like that and I really enjoyed both the process and the result.

Working Title: In the Cookie Jar of Life
1st Sentence: In the margins Melissa wrote things like, “I sense that you know your characters well”—the narrator had told us that the wife would develop diverticulitis in twenty years and the husband had a flare of freckles on the back of each upper thigh, details that had no bearing on the story, and “That you loved your grandmother very much comes across clearly”—the young man had written four times, “I loved my grandma a lot.”
Favorite Sentence: What if it’s a really bad metaphor, like ‘his mousey bellow’ or ‘her runny lips’?
Word Length: 1,135

Photo by Matt Turner, December 2006.

Quietly wrapping up Week 8….

25 Jun

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.

Still Overwhelmed

24 Jun

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.

First Tough Day

23 Jun

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

A haunted house in June….

22 Jun

Where did this one come from? In October, when I should be thinking “Halloween,” maybe I’ll write a story about strawberry picking. Anyway, when I needed a title for a story about a cursed house, I remembered the old movie The Amityville Horror. Such horrendous punning shouldn’t be allowed, I know, but I can’t help myself.

Working Title: Comityville Terror
1st Sentence: Marlena believed the neighbors stopped liking her when she slaughtered the steer.
Favorite Sentence: She held a notebook to her chest and repeated, over and over, part history, part horror, part social criticism, part immersion memoir.
Word Length: 1,883

Image from Open Clip Art Library, by Netalloy.

Being Stubborn Pays Off

21 Jun

Trying to find the balance between i. keeping expectations reasonable and encouraging, so letting go when meeting my Daily Shorty challenge is all that needs to happen in a day, and ii. raising expectations when pushing hard will take me to a new place in a story, transforming a trifle into a keeper. Today I was stubborn and it paid off. When the Inner Critic can keep her voice down, she is a welcome visitor. Today she kept whispering, here, right here, that’s where you need to introduce tension….

Working Title: Steering Leslie Right
1st Sentence: Elton was just driving her in circles.
Favorite Sentence: She pulled into a gas station and fiddled with the GPS, the way she fiddled with that old TV when she was a girl—in those days a good slap could get you back to an episode of T.J. Hooker in time for the stand-off.
Word Length: 1,728

A Motivational Speaker

20 Jun

A keeper today!

Working Title: Yessiree Bob
1st Sentence: Idiots.
Favorite Sentence: Anyway, if a traveling salesman strutting the stage and spitting rapid-fire, high-gloss whup-ass into a microphone had to catch her boss’s attention, did it have to be this guy?
Word Length: 2,152

Photo by Brady Willette, 2010.

Ailing Me, Ailing Shorty

19 Jun

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.

Week 7 is complete!

18 Jun

I love fine chocolates (far more than I like the truffles that have been so hot at chocolate shops for what, at least a decade, now—people, do you have any idea how easy it is to make a scrumptious truffle at home?) But as I told my husband many years ago, proving once again that I have always been a cheap date, a dark Milky Way—I believe they’re calling it a “Midnight Dark” Milky Way these days—pleases me every bit as much as the finest chocolate I have ever tasted and I have tasted more than my share. So for this week I reward myself with a virtual “Midnight Dark.”

Working Title: What She Should Have Said
1st Sentence: This is what she thinks she should have said: “Take your fat paycheck and ram it, and take your sweet convertible and your season’s tickets and your front table at Marroque’s and your black and chrome espresso machine and ram those, too, because I am not your plaything, I am not your afternoon booty call, I am NOT an accessory, GET OUT!”
Favorite Sentence: I can’t wait to play his latest game, Bitch Hunter.
Word Length: 586

Photo by Evan-Amos, April 2011.

Still sick and now so is the shorty.

17 Jun

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 suffering but the shorties aren’t.

16 Jun

Really enjoyed yesterday’s and today’s shorties. But this cold is awful and I’m hardly sleeping. Makes no sense.

Working Title: What’s a Little Water?
1st Sentence: Her mother is strapped to a chair suspended from the iron swing-arm that sticks out straight from the cement wall.
Favorite Sentence: The woman hovering in a puffy cloud of pastel knits, her white hair piled into an old-fashioned grandma bun, her stout legs bottoming out to sensible, thick-soled shoes, takes Jessica’s hand in both of hers, her palms warm and soft as dinner rolls.
Word Length: 1,554

Job Interview from Hell

15 Jun

Note the word length on this one. I’m backdating posts right now (I’m typing this on June 30),  importing notes I took when I originally wrote the shorties. If I’d documented the word length of this story on June 15, it would have been much shorter. I go back and revise previous shorties every day, often filling in small blanks that require research. Occasionally I realize a small blank is a big one, as with this story. Anyway, I like it a lot, so yet another keeper!

Working Title: Thank You, Sir, May I Have Another?
1st Sentence: She arrives precisely fifteen minutes early, tugging at the lapels of the black blazer she has owned for seventeen years.
Favorite Sentence: Ms. Michaud, are you the sort of person who sniffs a sandwich before biting into it?
Word Length: 3,486

Photo here.

Nonsensical Prompt

14 Jun

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.

Memories, again, but much better.

13 Jun

Working Title: Your Pretty Lies
1st Sentence: You were not kidnapped by a crazy neighbor lady while your mother was at work.
Favorite Sentence: Your mother did not slice open your small, thin-ribbed chest, scoop out your heart, and leave it, shivering, on a cold, metal table, slick with blood and starved of oxygen.
Word Length: 876

Photo by Frank Vincentz April 2011.

Mining More Childhood Memories

12 Jun

The quality of my daily shorties seems to go up and down in small cycles—I’ll write 2 or 3 in a row that I really enjoy (even if they’re not destined to be publishable) then 2 or 3 that bore me and make me nervous about continuing this project. Then something good will pop up again. I spent a lot of time on today’s shorty, which emerged from a childhood memory, hoping to push it into something good. Didn’t happen. I think I need to keep faith that I will always write another story I love. Just maybe not today.

Working Title: Looking Sharp
1st Sentence: The sweater vest was the showpiece—four broad stripes of fuzzed yarn plush as a cat—pale blue, then orange, then yellow, then dark blue.
Favorite Sentence: Our teacher, a certified nutjob who sometimes liked to punish us by choosing to remain silent for an entire class period (yeah, that really hurts) and other times berated us nonstop for things our parents and grandparents had done—voting for Nixon, inventing plastic, bombing anyone small and dark—agreed, saying, “I know, so awful.”
Word Length: 1,517

Finishing Week 6 with a Peep

11 Jun

This gorgeous little tart is my virtual treat for completing SIX WEEKS of the Daily Shorty Challenge! I wrote for almost six hours straight, today, both working on today’s shorty and revising those from previous days. My story today wasn’t inspiring but I wanted to see how hard I could push a mediocre piece with the hope of finding myself on new ground. It never really happened with this one but maybe when I go back to revise?

Working Title: Believing in Abundance
1st Sentence: She has promised herself that she will not finish this glass of wine.
Favorite Sentence: Since when did “enough” become so threadbare, so uninteresting, since when was “enough” a sign of failure?
Word Length: 845

Photo by Flickr user Jessica Spengler April 2006.

A Pirate Story for the Husband

10 Jun

Pat and I have a very long-running joke that goes like this: I tell him I just read a great book and he says, “Okay, but did it have any pirates in it?” Or he suggests we see a movie and I say, “Well I would say yes but it sounds like there are no pirates in it….” When we make this joke we then pepper our next few sentences with “Yar!” or “Har ye mateys!” or the like. This joke waned during the Pirates of the Caribbean years because of course there was just too much pirate in the air. But it’s made a comeback lately. When I announced to Pat that I had successfully met my Micro May challenge of writing a daily shorty every day of the month, he said, “That’s so great, Honey. But did you write any stories about pirates??” So I promised a pirate story. I actually like this draft a lot, but it didn’t come easy. Notice the word length.

Working Title: No. 1 Fan Demands Pirate Story
1st Sentence: PirateDude79.
Favorite Sentence: Does he stare meaningfully into the benign indifference and arch an eyebrow because he is a man born to melodramatic gesture and his name is a coincidence, or does his name force him into it?
Word Length: 2,861

Image from Open Clip Art Library.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →