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The Idea File

9 May

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

A cat appears!

8 May

Maria, aka “Mussolin-a”

In my third semester of my MFA program, my mentor wrote on a story, “I begin to believe you can’t write a story without a cat in it.” I eliminated the cat from the story I was drafting when I read his note and I have tried not to over-use cats ever since. But they do sneak in…. I mentioned a cat in May 1’s story but only as part of a simile. A cat appeared in the story I wrote for May 3 but it was only just a mention, the cat didn’t even get a name. Ditto May 5. But a cat with a name shows up, here. I think waiting a whole week to include a cat-as-character shows excellent restraint.

Working Title: Madame Asbury, Knower of All Secrets
1st Sentence: Her first pair of gloves were crisp white linen.
Favorite Sentence: A dirty palm would flutter in the cradle of her sweating, velvet hand, while she flung words she had learned from old movies and silly paperbacks her mother had left untended, while she traced life lines and counted creases and soothed or baffled or bedeviled, whatever her mood of the day.
Word Length: 1,707

First week done!

7 May

A virtual cupcake for me, to celebrate my first full week! Yahoo! See May’s Story Facts + page for a geeky round-up of the week’s work.

My first week has been much easier than I expected. I write for a good 1.5 to 2 hrs each morning, getting a draft down, then come back at night for 1 to 2 hours to revise that morning’s story or one I wrote on a previous day. True, I’m finding it hard to maintain any balance in my days, but it’s high time my writing is the thing I’m doing too much….

Working Title: Gabriel Calling
1st Sentence: Here’s why I can’t stop thinking about the Apocalypse.
Favorite Sentence: Last week my alphabet soup spelled out GoatMan.
Word Length: 717

Photo by Kristin Ausk, February 2009.

Thanksgiving in May

6 May

Working Title: Middle Child
1st Sentence: Of course Sissy brought sweet potatoes.
Favorite Sentence: His fork stopped on the way to his plate—piled high with a second helping of those damn sweet potatoes—and I thought go ahead, you fat bastard, eat another marshmallow, see if I don’t divorce your pig-ass just for that.
Word Length: 840

Picture from We Have Internets!

With the Hypnotist “El Spirito”

5 May

When I was a kid I’d hear about hypnotists who traveled from city to city, putting on shows in front of huge audiences. Invariably someone would claim that the hypnotist called a member of the audience to the stage, put him under, and made him walk like a chicken for everyone’s amusement, clucking and flapping his arms like wings. Supposedly the chicken-walker never remembers the experience. Finally built a story on that very powerful (and very silly) image.

Working Title: Like the Chicken She Is
1st Sentence: You, there, the lady in the pale green….
Favorite Sentence: Disappearing into the cradling dark, the easy easy nothing.
Word Length: 877

Update: My friend Amy Souza came calling not long after I wrote this story, wondering if I could contribute a short fiction to her latest round of SPARK. “Like the Chicken She Is” served as the inspiration for the piece pictured above, “Vanishing Act” by Sandy Coleman, and for a piece by Amanda Brainerd (page down past the art and you’ll see the story in its entirety). Beautiful work, Ladies!

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For My Friend Dre

4 May

When my friend Dre saw a Rebounder trampoline in my apartment, it reminded her of something she’d heard—that when these tiny trampolines first came out, Amish women were excited about them and tried to use them for exercise. Sadly, their skirts got in the way. I jotted this anecdote down and promised to write a story about it one day.

Working Title: For the Glory of God, Rebound
1st Sentence: They hardly talked about it when they picked it up.
Favorite Sentence: “You could walk just fine on ugly legs.”
Word Length: 1,004

Inspired by a 10-Year-Old Scrap

3 May

Latté Foam Art

Working Title: Love with a Limp
1st Sentence: At a table too small to hold them, a man and a woman are arguing about flying pie pans.
Favorite Sentence: Fuck Foam.
Word Length: 742

Photo by Takeaway, Latté art at Doppio Ristretto in Chiang Mai 2011.

An Easy One

2 May

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.

Jumping off the cliff!

1 May

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

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