More treats! I know we just gorged on chocolates, but today we must celebrate the completion of Week 48! For that we indulge in a chocolate cupcake with raspberry icing. YUM. Now on to today’s shorty: I had to randomly select from my collection of small pieces of paper, each labeled with one of the five senses (and a sixth labeled “ESP” for fun), to determine which sense I’d have to repeat for my seventh day. I selected “smell.” As it happens, I wrote the day’s shorty while at a writing session with friends, using the prompt of a sentence randomly selected from a book. Then I revised the story to make the sense of smell factor into the plot in some way. I made it work, so for once my job was done early in the day. Happy April!
Working Title: Steak Dinner
1st Sentence: Fire!
Favorite Sentence: Multiply by 1,000 and that’s what apocalypse smells like.
Word Length: 443
Photo by Flickr user Whitney 2/2010.
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.
The day’s prompt: smell. Oh, how I wanted to write about the scent of frying bacon or Thanksgiving Day’s roasting turkey, but happy smells wouldn’t take hold and inspire story.
Today’s prompt was sight. Mercifully, the idea and outline of this story came to me almost immediately this morning. Can’t remember the last time a shorty was this easy. Is it good? Oh, now, remember—this project isn’t about being good! Good is for revision.
Tuesday my prompt was sound, Wednesday it was ESP, and now touch. After trying to woo inspiration several times in the day, a goofy sentence occurred and I went with it. The conventional wisdom says never to begin with a sentence so over-the-top that you have nowhere to go and I almost threw this sentence away for that reason. But I decided to challenge myself to take it seriously and puzzle out why someone would ever be in the position to say such a thing. I did my best to capture a moment in this poor person’s life. And now I will write the single most over-used sentence for, oh, a few years now: It is what it is.
Today my prompt was the “6th sense,” ESP. Writing session 1: Nothing, during which actually I did something, which was rejecting lots of stupid ideas and coming up with a couple that might fly but needed mulling. Writing session 2: Almost nothing, then frustrated forcing of SOMETHING. I chose one of the mulled ideas, then wrote a harmless sentence referencing a horoscope. I stared at it for a while, then wrote a few more sentences. Then I called writing session 2 “done.” Writing session 3: Scramble, push, scramble… done. Honestly at this point I think I could teach a workshop on how to write a very short fiction in 3 brief-ish writing sessions. You might not love it but it’ll be complete. And you might love the one you write tomorrow….
So here’s the thing about writing a story every day for 329 days. On the 330th day, you ask yourself: What have I not done yet? A gazillion things, of course, but the brain that has written a story every day for 329 days doesn’t FEEL like there are a gazillion ideas and approaches out there. That brain says, are you shitting me? But then Rude Brain does actually think of something she hasn’t done yet. With the help of a prompt, of course. This week (my DS weeks begin on Tuesdays), I’ve decided to focus on a different sense each day, adding the “sixth sense” for fun, and re-doing one of the senses for the seventh day. I drew randomly to determine the order and today I had to focus on sound. So I wrote a story that was framed around a “sound” word. That made me want to blend text, so I found a way to mix in quotes from a Shakespeare play. I don’t think the resultant shorty-stew works so well but it was fun to just be a goof.
I’ve admitted somewhere before on this blog that I have a fondness for putting cats in my stories. I think it’s been a while, though, since I have indulged. I like the idea for the day’s shorty, which has a cat front and center, but the execution wasn’t so great. I’ll come back to it. In the meantime, congratulations to me for completing Week 47! I’m a sucker for Easter candy, which always includes for me Jordan almonds. I’ve been eating far too many of them these last few days. Just one more small handful to celebrate another completed week.
I grabbed something from the idea file and made it work well enough. I actually kind of like it but this shorty will need some reworking if it’s going to be a keeper. It’s a third recent piece inspired by a traditional fairy tale.
Ever get fixated on a phrase or an image but you don’t know why and can’t seem to do anything with it? Just let it marinate. When it’s ready to frame a story it will. That’s what happened to me with the day’s shorty, which I like but don’t love. Hopefully I’ll hit gold in revision.
I think I said recently that again and again I’ve gone to the childhood well to save myself in times of extreme desperation? Sometimes that works out and I write something I really like. Most of the time it goes the way it went today. That’s two stories in a row destined to live only on my hard drive.
Sometimes if I spin out from one simple sentence, I can make something I really enjoy. Other times… I just keep spinning.
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.
Well, I’ve started Week 47 with a bang. Or something. This story is… frantic, feverish, and not a little silly. It makes me laugh but also puzzles me. This is not my best work—I think it could use a bit more depth and punch. But I can’t think of another time when I’ve written something that both tickles and pokes me this much. If it takes, what, 323 straight days of writing a story every new day to accomplish that, then I’ll just go ahead and declare this whole challenge a success, even if I wind up not making it to the end. So a bouquet of flowers goes to me for this version of success. But I do really want to make it to the end….
I don’t think there’s a connection between St. Patrick’s Day and the ugly vibe I’ve got going in this story. I don’t know why I sometimes write about the violence men do to women. I guess because I’ll never figure out how so many of us can be so cruel.
Look, my hard drive needs friends, too. I’ve produced work at every level during this challenge, including a nice collection of stories that can live peacefully in their hard drive community, never disturbed in any way. The day’s shorty is one of them.
I’m discovering that desperation can be a useful tool. Again, I worked late into the night to get something. And this shorty so wants to be good but can’t quite pull it off. I wrote it from a child’s point of view, something I almost never do, so I can be proud that I strayed from my usual path.
Like I said in a previous post, when I bounce back these days it’s only for a day or so. Mostly I’m just really, really, really tired, and often, as with this one, the story refuses to come until I’m so DONE with the day that I have to force something. But… this shorty is actually pretty good. Maybe.
This one didn’t come out quite right but it has potential. I have no idea how I stumbled onto that first sentence after struggling all day to come up with something that would hold. I know I was falling asleep and feeling pretty desperate by the time it came to me.
This piece started as a 5-minute writing exercise with my friends Patty and Joani, so I feel like they gave it to me. Thanks Ladies! It’s small and humble but I like it. The piece of biscotti I just bought and ate with a cup of coffee was not small and humble. I neglected to take a picture of my snack, so this photo will do as my official celebration for finishing another week. And this time the celebration, for me, is not just virtual. Yum.
Oh, the heartache of finding this story. Finally pulled it out but left some gaps. I think it’ll be a keeper when I can get back to it, though. This marks my last day of a week of prompts using the 
It took a long time for this one to arrive but once it did, it wrote itself. So, another gift in a tough week. I can’t tell how good this shorty is but I like it because I played with allusions to the old fairy tales about trolls guarding bridges. Inspired, of course, by the 
So this is the fourth time I’ve traveled during the DS challenge. I left Wednesday first thing for Boston, where AWP is holding its annual conference. I’d forgotten how hard it is to be in a different place and keep up with my story-a-day promise. Ergh. Anyway, if I can figure out what this piece is missing, maybe I’ll make some progress on how to write good stories that are fewer than 250 words. The shorty is almost good but… isn’t. And I have absolutely no idea how I got from this 
I’m always hesitant to say that I’ve learned any particular thing with regard to writing because I never know how the ground will shift tomorrow. But I think I can say that I have taught myself how to write very short. Not teeny-tiny, mind you—I don’t know that I will ever be able to write good pieces that are, say, 250 words or fewer. That is a feat I can barely comprehend. But I have now written a fat handful of pieces under 500 words that I like a lot. Given that I couldn’t do that at all before this challenge, I feel pretty excited. The shorty this picture of the day at 
This photo of a Russian palace, the picture of the day at 
My first sustained period of mental fatigue hit hard in August. I beat it back by using various kinds of story prompts for a while. Then I fell into the habit of a week of prompts, a week of no prompts, followed by a period of anything goes. I was feeling so exhausted as March began (I’m writing this catch-up post on March 19) that I reached again for prompts as a solution. My DS weeks begin on Tuesdays, so on March 5 I started a week using the “picture of the day” at 
I’m celebrating the official completion of another week (it’s not official until I post about it!) with thoughts of the apple fritter I too often get at Starbucks. It looks a lot like the apple fritter pictured here. So here’s to finishing Week 44! The day’s shorty about a woman who discovers she’s an online romance-advice columnist’s invented girlfriend is a good example of a story that fails because I needed much longer than a day to get it right. In the old days, when I was rested, I could have banged out a decent draft. But nowadays it almost always takes my exhausted brain multiple (mostly unproductive) writing sessions over the course of the entire day for me to get something I can work with on the page, and by then I’ve only got a little gas left. If the vision can’t be thoroughly rendered in 1000 words or fewer, the draft will suffer and probably severely. Currently this shorty is a crammed, distilled story with notes for where to expand and it just barely meets my DS criteria for completion (see My Rules under my About page). But I’ll enjoy coming back to it, I think, when likely I will need to double or triple its length.
I remember loving the idea for this shorty about a man who for no reason starts hearing the thoughts of people who are speaking to him. A bad movie cliché, I know, but I like the way I’d envisioned the story unfolding. But the execution is terrible, and not just because I had to leave some gaps. Maybe I’ll come back to it, maybe I won’t.
I was in a better mood when I wrote this one and feeling more rested. I’ll enjoy coming back to it but I think in the end it will be a shorty only its mother can love.
Daily Shorty 