January was brutal, February was worse, and March is hardest yet (I’m writing this catch-up post 3/19). The wall is coming. This first March shorty will enjoy a long life on my hard drive.
Working Title: Getting Real
1st Sentence: It’s true, I had an anger problem, though I would call it more of a realism problem.
Favorite Sentence: I think the key is to stop noticing things.
Word Length: 658
Photo of March hare by norman hyett 3/2008.
And good riddance. January was brutal and February was worse, both because we had to euthanize our beautiful kitty—I’ve put up another of my favorite pictures of her, here—and because for the entire month I fought a kind of fatigue that just totally took over my mind. I used to be able to bounce back for weeks at a time. Now a good bounce lasts maybe a day. Well, I wanted to know what would happen to me if I wrote a story every day for a year, and now I’m finding out. The day’s shorty is a sad one about a grieving widow. Fitting.
Working Title: The Empty Half
1st Sentence: Without him I can’t speak, not coherently.
Favorite Sentence: Half of everything I want to say went ashes to ashes and now when I open my mouth to let words drop I find that I am part cluttered noise, part yawning empty, all confused garble.
Word Length: 334
My husband took this photo of our sweetie not too long ago.
I write a lot about people who seem to be losing it. Recently a friend recommended that I not submit a story about a patient in a mental institution to a contest because she thinks editors are leary of stories “about the disturbed.” My experience in publishing says she’s probably right about that, yet pretty often my characters mentally deconstruct on the page. What’s a girl to do? Anyway, I like this one. It’ll be fun to come back to it and better shape it, fill in the gaps.
Working Title: Message
1st Sentence: I’m seeing it everywhere, now.
Favorite Sentence: She was upset about the latest memo on comp-time specifying exactly what is meant by “comp-time” (hint: there is no such thing as comp-time).
Word Length: 1,025
Photo of Froot Loops by Zanastardust 10/2007.
This process continues to amaze me. Toward the end of a totally brutal month (I’m writing this catch-up post in March), I write a joke-story that makes me laugh. Thank goodness for the muse’s sense of humor.
Working Title: Bad Boy
1st Sentence: Here’s what people don’t understand about my dog Angus McPaw: He has the world’s most irresisitible sad face.
Favorite Sentence: If Mr. McPaw harbored malice he would have done far more damage to my boyfriend’s head with that skillet.
Word Length: 521
Photo by Oliver Watts 5/2011.
Easy ones are increasingly rare so I’m grateful for this shorty that wrote itself, a strange piece about a poet that came from who knows where. And I’m so happy to officially mark another week! I’m celebrating with my memory of the fabulous burgers I ate at B Good when I was in Boston last week for the AWP conference. Proud to say they buy their ground beef from farmers here in Maine!
Working Title: Telling the Truth
1st Sentence: She composed her poetry on cotton bed sheets with toothpicks dipped in ink because she felt that the physical act of writing should be as painstaking as the mental act.
Favorite Sentence: She said that time and detergent were perfecting her poetry, erasing words she had been too cowardly to say no to.
Word Length: 543
I neglected to take a photo of the burgers I ate in Boston but they looked a lot like this one. Thanks to cyclonebill 6/2005.
When I catch up on story posts—I’m writing this one about 3 weeks later—I use notes describing the writing session that I leave in the Word file created for the shorty. This file had no notes and I had no memory of the piece even as I read it just now. It’s refreshing, though, because it’s really strange and total fiction, unlike so many autobiographical pieces I wrote in February. The ending is a speed-written plunge with gaps (it’s obvious I was nodding off as I wrote it) and the ending scenario is very likely to change, but at least this one is well worth coming back to.
Working Title: My Savior
1st Sentence: There she was, my savior, standing at my door, wearing a pearl gray trench coat, a black fedora, and stilletto heels.
Favorite Sentence: Do not get between my savior and spicy peanut sauce.
Word Length: 997
Photo is a detail of a pin-up of Lauren Bacall for the November 24/26, 1944 issue of Yank, the Army Weekly.
When I’m severely stuck, which is a state I’m living in far too often these days, I follow the advice to look for my material in my obsessions, gripes, fears. A huge gripe is the condescending things some mothers say to me when they discover I chose not to have children.
Working Title: Mommifying
1st Sentence: “You will never know real love,” she warned me.
Favorite Sentence: If “good” is condescending, if “good” is thinking you know what’s best for a woman you barely know, if “good” means you learned how to apply makeup in and oil-painting class, then, yes, you’re good, you’re very, very good.
Word Length: 426
Photo of empty bird’s nest here.
More and more, as I crawl through this challenge, childhood memory provides. This turned out to be a cnf piece about my mother’s strange predilection for noting the proper titles and occupations of anyone in the public eye.
Working Title: R.I.P. Bill Bixby
1st Sentence: I have nothing against the late Bill Bixby.
Favorite Sentence: Yet my small, sad roster of “I remember when’s” includes Bixby’s death because when I got home from school that day, my mother turned from the kitchen sink and said, “Actor-Director Bill Bixby died, today.”
Word Length: 827
Photo of Bill Bixby as Tony Blake from the NBC television program The Magician.
This shorty is based on a taste memory I’ve been chasing, and it’s a great example of a piece that is very well done for what it is, but there’s kind of no there there. If I were more of a poet perhaps I could write a compelling shorty based only on taste. Next time!
Working Title: Crabapples
1st Sentence: Over the years in odd moments, when she’s thinking of nothing in particular, she remembers the look and taste of small, preserved, bright red apples.
Favorite Sentence: She savors thick, spicy, syrup-sweet skin and dense yellow flesh.
Word Length: 298
Photo from thekitchen.com, where there’s a recipe for wine-poached crabapples that looks DELICIOUS.
There are bad shorties and then there are shorties that revel in their badness, mocking me with a smoker’s choked laughter, inviting me to question this project, my calling. Go ahead and laugh. No one else will ever hear you. Laugh while I move on to the next.
Working Title: Raspberry Pie
1st Sentence: Just-picked Maine raspberries, check.
Favorite Sentence: She was a task-master, that woman—no, not cuddly at all—but pie is pie and life is short.
Word Length: 352
Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/rexroof/ 2/2013.
One of the ways I rescue a totally arid brain is to go back to childhood. This story about my mother using gasoline to light our wood stove fits nicely into a small package. Oh, the horror on my father’s face when he discovered she’d been doing that—maybe I’ll write that story sometime.
Working Title: Morning Fire
1st Sentence: We were cold, we had been so cold all morning, and she couldn’t get the fire going.
Favorite Sentence: Goddess of Flame, Keeper of the Sun and Moon, Juno throwing her bolt of lightning.
Word Length: 441
Photo by Sebastian Ritter 1/2006.
Well, I ended the week on a high note. I’m not sure this story is in its final form but it’s got a lot of energy and promise and it’s one I’ll enjoy coming back to. To mark the accomplishment of finishing Week 42, a piece of banana coconut cream pie with a cashew graham crust and chocolate and caramel sauce.
Working Title: The Manifest
1st Sentence: Judith had just emerged from the swimsuit section—where she had stared at and occasionally handled various suits but had been unable to summon the will to actually try one on—when a young, ponytailed woman in jeans and a plain teeshirt walked over to her, holding out a piece of paper.
Favorite Sentence: But right now, in this small, sun-warm pause in years of icy clutch, she forced herself to meditate on the answer to Senior’s question.
Word Length: 986
Photo by Katherine Lynch 1/2009.
All the notes I took for this week of stories said things like “I’m tired” and “Still sad about [my cat] Maria” and “Not in the flow.” So it’s not surprising that this is the first story this week that feels right and whole.
Working Title: Rapture
1st Sentence: She saw a hat in the middle of the street, an old fedora, and the first thing she thought was, Daddy wore a hat like that.
Favorite Sentence: If she didn’t keep smiling into the radiance of the sun, if she didn’t bear the twitching muscles, the tight shoulders, she might be overlooked.
Word Length: 431
Photo by Clément Bucco-Lechat 11/2012.
Sometimes when I’m fishing for story I hook a word that I don’t want to let go. The word I caught for this shorty was “figment.” I developed a really strong beginning from that word but then totally fizzled on the ending. Hopefully I can pick up the thread in revision and do a much better job.
Working Title: Figment
1st Sentence: She just doesn’t believe in that ghost shit, never has.
Favorite Sentence: How to describe “dubious” emerging from the writ-in-air face of a shimmering, transparent, apparently former man?
Word Length: 1,056
Photo here.
My husband’s family likes to tease his younger brother about his greatest fear when he was a child, which was that a meteor might fall on him. I wonder if he felt vindicated when he heard about the meteor that fell in Russia and saw the amazing video. My shorty doesn’t measure up yet but it might in revision.
Working Title: Meteor Stories
1st Sentence: She was in the hallway upstairs—the only spot in the house where she wouldn’t be near a window—half-awake after a late night of grading papers, plodding from bedroom to bathroom, her mind on the leftover chocolate cake she’d brought home from a birthday party last night.
Favorite Sentence: Whatever just hit, whatever has been destroyed and set aflame, he knows how to tame it.
Word Length: 717
Photo of a Campo del Cielo meteorite by Beatrice Murch 4/2007.
When I was a kid, one of every year’s major concerns was whether my father would please my mother with an appropriate gesture on Valentine’s Day. We kids teetered on the line between dread and excitement as we waited for Dad to come home and prove himself to be worthy or unworthy. It was always a close-run thing. I didn’t quite get it right in this shorty but it’s a strong start.
Working Title: Love Test
1st Sentence: Mom couldn’t give my father’s alleged devotion the once-over on Valentine’s Day, because paying full price for a heart-shaped box of chocolates and a card as big as a bed sheet is just dumb.
Favorite Sentence: Box as big as a platter, check.
Word Length: 607
Photo from The Scrapping Cottage, where there instructions for how to make this lovely box!
Occasionally I see a pretty tattoo and I think, “Why not?” You only live once. But then I think… PERMANENT. And that word is enough to scare me away. Just further proof that I was born with the sensibility of a middle-aged woman in mom-jeans. Anyway, thinking about tattoos today led to a piece that isn’t great but has potential when I can come back to it.
Working Title: Tats
1st Sentence: When you are 20 and your ass is a couple of round rocks carried high on your hips, it seems like a great idea to decorate those sweet cheeks with a couple of pretty tattoos.
Favorite Sentence: At that age you think nothing of sleeping on concrete to make a statement against oppression—shit, you’ll sleep on concrete just to get better concert tickets.
Word Length: 445
Photo by Bur 4/2005.
Really struggled and it shows. This one will live on the hard drive.
Working Title: Games
1st Sentence: I have never been good at games.
Favorite Sentence: But wanting to win is not the only reason a person might cheat.
Word Length: 326
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.
Working Title: Story by Committee
1st Sentence: Notes on Final Draft of “When I Wasn’t Looking” by Sharona Weekly
Favorite Sentence: By slim majority and against the wishes of the recording secretary, we decided to eliminate your epiphany ending to this story.
Word Length: 1,533
Photo by Itisdacurlz 12/2010.
I wrote this shorty on the day we had to euthanize our sweet kitty. We took her to the animal hospital early and then spent the day crying over her. Late that night I couldn’t summon any desire to write but I had to, so I produced a story by grabbing at various stray thoughts. And I have to say that when I read this one, I remember that I did become interested in it, despite myself. I remember, too, that I was soothed by the writing that night. And I’m surprised to find that the story has a lot of promise. Again, no heart for a photo.
Working Title: Unverified
1st Sentence: Scar. She has a vertical quarter-inch scar just above the left side of her upper lip.
Favorite Sentence: The dream is beginning to feel more reliable than her memory.
Word Length: 735
Had to say goodbye to my sweet girl this morning. Just a couple of months ago she was making a mess of the index cards I was using to help me organize a chapbook. She loved nothing more than to interfere whenever I or my husband was focused on a task. We miss her so desperately already. As for my daily shorties, I have kept up with them, barely. But right now I have no heart for anything else. I will catch up on story posts when I’m better.
The night I wrote this shorty (I’m typing this post on February 21) I was watching our kitty Maria very closely because she appeared to be going into a severe decline. That can happen very quickly for an elderly cat who has been slowing down more noticeably over the months, as she’d been doing. Most of that day she seemed much her usual self. Anyway, I was excited about this story when I started it—and I think it might one day be a keeper—but by the time I was writing the ending, which definitely needs work, I was almost certain we’d be saying goodbye to Maria the next day, and I didn’t much care about what I was putting on the page. No heart for a photo on this one because I associate so much sadness with this shorty.
Working Title: Little Lady Lucy
1st Sentence: New day, new e-dating site, new profile.
Favorite Sentence: Because HE is probably ugly, a pimply slob with a comb-over and a girl-butt!
Word Length: 954
Among the many, many lessons this challenge is teaching me so well: The idea file or writer’s notebook is an awfully good friend. I had to end this shorty badly, though, for lack of time to find the right ending.
Working Title: Validation
1st Sentence: When they dressed up like Robin Hood and Maid Marion, people thought he was an elf and she was a princess, but how does that make sense?
Favorite Sentence: When they were Dorothy and Toto, everyone got her right, there was no mistaking the ruby slippers, but they thought he was a werewolf.
Word Length: 307
Photo by RadioFan at en.wikipedia (10/2009) of the ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz (1939) on display at the American History Museum.
Again, a whole day of effort, but I got there. And the story is pretty good, maybe a keeper. The idea file is really coming in handy these days.
Working Title: Bitch-Beast
1st Sentence: The goal of the court-ordered therapy, they had agreed in the first session (though she had agreed less), was to bring Susan to a clear understanding and full acknowledgment of the behavior that had brought her here.
Favorite Sentence: How, when she gets angry now, she hardly notices because it’s a faint echo of that day, a plaintive cry to the bitch-beast who never comes.
Word Length: 804
Photo by Brocken Inaglory, 2006.
I like it when I can figure out how to build on the scraps I save in my idea file. Struggled the whole day then finally made something work. Not a keeper in present form but it has potential for when I come back to it.
Working Title: Fire
1st Sentence: Phase 1: Frat party, bouquet of roses, too much drunk sex, BIG WEDDING with poofy dress.
Favorite Sentence: He’s the kind of guy who gives fancy chocolates and really plush slippers on Valentine’s day, who replays that moment in the movie when our hero gets his tie stuck in the door seven times because he loves her screaming laughter, who brings treats for the cats when he comes over.
Word Length: 343
Photo from the website of Lamey Wellehan, where my husband bought me these awesome slippers for Christmas.
I was so directed yesterday, using contest guidelines to frame my composition. Today I didn’t count the number of starts I threw out. In the end I grabbed a paragraph from my idea file as a start and forced myself to build a narrative sentence-by-sentence. And an odd, creepy little narrative it is.
Working Title: Having the Heart
1st Sentence: That afternoon he had noticed one of his better students, Pauline, sharing her paper with that crap-kid Justin—the kind of kid he could imagine setting fire to stray cats—during a pop quiz.
Favorite Sentence: His ears were buzzing, his stomach too full, and he felt, just now, a bit weepy, a bit sad that his little girl had inherited his mother’s sharp nose, the nose that had sniffed every secret he’d ever tried to keep from her.
Word Length: 783
Image by Logan A. Williams 2/2006.
Big congrats to me for finishing Week 40! We’ve got a huge snowstorm going here in Maine and I’m craving comfort food, so my virtual celebration treat is savory. That’s the kind of plate I could swim in for a long time…. As for the day’s work, do you know about Brevity magazine’s flash nonfiction contest? There is no entry fee and the deadline is 2/14 so get on it! Rather than basing the day’s shorty on a poem as I have been doing all week, I answered Brevity’s siren call and generated a short piece recounting a strange memory from childhood. As it happens, I have written about this memory before at Daily Shorty, I think in August, and the word count was 1000+. I remember it as mediocre at best. This time the contest guidelines, which limit the submission to 500 words, forced me to be more targeted and I wrote a much better piece. Is it good? I don’t know. CNF is not my thing. But it’s pretty good and after several revisions (I’m writing this post on February 8), it is as good as I can make it. Many thanks to Brevity for the prompt and to my cherished, yellow walls friend Patty Weidler, who gave me excellent feedback on the first two drafts.
Working Title: Blood
1st Sentence: I lurked behind the couch, nursing a slapped face or kicked shin or twisted wrist.
Favorite Sentence: Missed me, I wanted to sing, but I was too high to form words, high on his twisted mouth, my lightness, high on sure-footed, dancing me.
Word Length: 500
Photo by Marshall Astor 6/2007.
My friend Cynthia Newberry Martin has a great craft essay at Brevity about making sure every sentence of your fiction is at least good. I agree with her that not every sentence can be great, but all sentences should meet a minimum standard or they shouldn’t be on the page. Here at Daily Shorty I force myself to celebrate something in every story by posting a favorite sentence. When I was just getting started with writing I promised myself that if I ever stopped making myself laugh with my own jokes or if I ever found myself writing a story that didn’t contain at least one sentence that knocks me out, I’ll stop writing. We really do have to write for ourselves FIRST or why would we ever put so much time and energy into it? Making each sentence good or great is the least effort we owe our own work.
This one didn’t come easy but it finally landed. A strange one with some potential when I go back for revision. Inspired by February 3rd’s poem at Poetry Daily, “My Knife,” by Dennis Hinrichsen, from Rip-Tooth, published by University of Tampa Press. First four lines as teaser: I keep a little Lear in my back jeans pocket / a little sorrow / like a doll or jackknife / to slice away at storms
Working Title: Hail Storm
1st Sentence: None of us had ever seen hail before.
Favorite Sentence: The laughs were rude, they sounded like barking, they split the air and felt wrong, wrong.
Word Length: 338
Photo by Mat Fascione 3/2008.
Oh thank goodness. I can’t remember the last time I got a gift shorty. I did have to spend some time thinking about the prompt poem I got from Poetry Daily, “Hawk” by Nick Norwood, from Gravel and Hawk at Ohio University Press, but then my mind started associating this to this to this until I stumbled on something that took hold and it was a joy to write. First four lines of the poem as a teaser: Lost in the woods with an air rifle, / a boy supposed to be after birds, / amazed by vines and wintering trees, / resigned, I fired my chambered pellet
Working Title: Last Night
1st Sentence: Last night I grieved for you.
Favorite Sentence: Last night I held your heart in my hand while I killed you, over and over, all the while rubbing my cheek against the bark of the redwood trees we will not see together, hearing the rush of Italian or French I will puzzle through without you, brushing from my hair the Maui sand that you will never feel.
Word Length: 716
Photo by Dori 1/2008.
Today’s prompt poem from Poetry Daily is “Five White Birds,” from LSUP’s Under the Pergola by Catharine Savage Brosman. With this shorty I got myself into a situation I had neither the time nor the brain power to get out of, nor did I have time to scrap the story and try to develop something else. So I spun for a bit and then wound out to an ending. The result is a shorty that is not just strange but, sad to say, pointless. I’ll go back to the idea for this one and the initial situation. I just need time to determine what should happen. Next! The first four lines of the poem as a teaser: Having seared the sky, the sun—a brazier—
/ smolders through the crumbling clouds / upriver; to the east, rich mounds of smoky / vapors, signifying rain tomorrow, drift on.
Working Title: Twizzler Pentimento
1st Sentence: I reported to her office at exactly 3:00 pm, as requested.
Favorite Sentence: She opened a pack herself, peeled off a strip of candy, and began to gnaw on it, looking at me with eyes narrowed.
Word Length: 1,106
Photo by Angela K. Kepler.
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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