I neglected to take a photo of the Christmas cookies I baked this year. I usually bake 10 to 14 kinds but had to cut that in half or so because of this challenge. No matter, there was plenty of fancy sugar to go around. Anyway, my cookies are not as pretty as this plate, which nicely captures the spirit of all that fun in the kitchen and looks like the perfect collection of sweets to celebrate my 8th month. Photo by Till Westermayer 12/2010.
I’m celebrating the end of Week 35 with the tastiest looking picture of a Christmas pudding I’ve ever seen. Samuel Pepys would approve, I’m sure. As for the work of the day, I shouldn’t be surprised that 350 years ago on December 31, Samuel Pepys used his diary to assess his situation and that of his country as a new year dawned. It was a time of political unrest in England, and that got me thinking about the two words “resolution”—that word we obsess over whenever January 1 comes calling—and “revolution,” and how I might connect them. That was the germ for the day’s shorty, which is playful and not about much of anything. What a remarkable week! Many thanks to old Sam, to Phil Gyford, who runs the site where I read the diary entries, and to all the lovely people who have been leaving annotations on the entries. Even when I was exhausted, which is the whole week, I got such a kick out of thinking, ahh, Sam wrote his diary entry exactly 350 years ago today, and here I am, making a story inspired by what he wrote. It’s like I’ve been carrying around a bit of Pepys’s writer-DNA. Very satisfying.
Working Title: New Year Revolution
1st Sentence: At some point, probably in college, when she’d shattered the high school self so carefully constructed, emerged from the scraps of that shell like a fresh-skinned superhero on a righteous mission, Melanie decided that the birth of a new year called not for the formulating of resolutions, but for the fomenting of revolutions.
Favorite Sentence: Into her forties, now, the mother of middle-schoolers, the wife of a moody, detached, golf-loving dentist who keeps disappearing her Victoria’s Secret catalogs for purposes unconfessed, she is anxious as ever for more wins to tuck under her tightly cinched belt.
Word Length: 1,000
Photo by Man vyi 12/2006.
The liveliest of the diary entries yet! Pepys recorded a fat handful of juicy details on December 30, 1662, but the one I and my lowly mind entertained the most was a tidbit handed over during a heavy-drinking lunch by a couple of officers in the Dutch East India Company, who told Pepys about a method for increasing a man’s fertility used by the native peoples of the Cape of Good Hope. I had to read the annotations to discover what exactly this method entailed, because the editor of the edition used for this site had excised the details—too faint of heart. I don’t blame him. The method? “[W]hen they come to age, the men do cut off one of the stones of each other, which they hold doth help them to get children the better and to grow fat” (see 3rd annotation). I wasn’t likely to forget that but what stands out to me more than the mental images of gore and my horror at the pain these poor men endured is the realization by these people, so long ago, that a MAN could have something to do with fertility—an insight that escaped Westerners for quite some time. In any case, talk of “stones”—again, I wince for those men—was particularly good inspiration, apparently, because I’m very pleased with the day’s shorty.
Working Title: Good Girl
1st Sentence: He’d read somewhere, in one of those ridiculous pamphlets he picked up at that back-to-earth, commune outfit in the next county, no doubt, that walnuts enhance fertility.
Favorite Sentence: Should you want to spark a baby with a man who has left behind entirely the funny, sexy guy you married, to become this fretful, forehead-creased accountant of passing days, the keeper of the calendar logging everything that happens between your legs, the man-splainer who intones the word “menses,” when instructing you about your own goddamn cycle, who has forgotten entirely about your breasts but could write an epic poem about your ovaries?
Word Length: 628
Photo by Man vyi 12/2008. Inscription by “The Corporation of the City of London”: In a house on this site, Samuel Pepys, diarist, was born. 1632-1703.
On December 29, 1662, as Samuel Pepys was making his usual rounds about town, he heard about “the burning of Mr. De Laun, a merchant’s house in Loathbury, and his lady … and her whole family; not one thing, dog nor cat, escaping; nor any of the neighbours almost hearing of it till the house was quite down and burnt.” He found the story to be “a most strange thing” and so do I. How could a massive fire go unnoticed for so long? That’s the detail that inspired the day’s shorty. Too bad the shorty itself isn’t worth noticing. Make friends, dear shorty, because you will not be leaving my hard drive.
Working Title: Keeping Time
1st Sentence: I was the first to notice.
Favorite Sentence: “Maybe they weren’t home,” whispered my Marnie.
Word Length: 688
Photo of engraving by Robert White, after a portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Engraving (with Pepys’s motto beneath) served as the frontispiece to Pepys’s ‘Naval Memoirs” (1690). Courtesy of the British Museum, London.
On this day 350 years ago, Samuel Pepys and his wife snubbed Lady Batten at church by leaving before her. According to the rules of etiquette, they should have allowed the higher-ranked woman to exit first. Ha! Very British hijinks likely ensued. He says only, “…which I believe will vex her.” That was the detail that tickled my brain all day as I tried to come up with a short story. Eventually, in desperation, I just started typing variations of the word “snub” over and over, which got me thinking about someone refusing to speak to a friend, which then made me think of a silent pet parrot.
Working Title: Hey, Sweetie
1st Sentence: My parrot will no longer speak to me.
Favorite Sentence: So if I give him more jelly beans, I’m disobeying the doctor, I’m knowingly imperiling my parrot’s sensitive birdie system.
Word Length: 1,030
Photo by John Salmon (12/2008) of a bust of Samuel Pepys outside Seething Lane, London EC3, the location of one of his homes. From the collection at geograph.org.uk.
On December 27, 1662, Samuel Pepys mentioned in his diary that he’d spent time that day in uninteresting company. The star of the day’s shorty is having a rough week that culminates in a nasty break of temper at a party he really wishes he wasn’t attending.
Working Title: Done
1st Sentence: It happened the first time at work, while he was on an important conference call with a client last week.
Favorite Sentence: All these shiny, over-tanned people with too-ready smiles and unnaturally bright hair put him on edge.
Word Length: 634
Photo of a page in H.B. Wheatley, ed, The Diary of Samuel Pepys: Pepysiana (London, 1899).
350 years ago today, Samuel Pepys noted in his diary that he saw the play “The Villaine.” After several false starts, his trip to the theatre inspired today’s shorty.
Working Title: Fame
1st Sentence: About midway through the second act, and with no warning, Bettina began to shed her clothes.
Favorite Sentence: These were his words getting lost in the curve of an inner thigh, his metaphors slipping down a cool shoulder and disappearing into the sssshhhh of falling cotton.
Word Length: 858
Photo of a book cover by Alfred Garth Jones for a 1902 edition of the published diary.
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 Phil Gyford has been publishing the diary entries every day since January 1, 2003, at this wonderful site (so as it happens, they’ll finish out the tenth year this December 31). Oh, how I love the interwebs! I decided to read the entry from December 25, 1662, as my inspiration for the day’s shorty, just because I like round numbers. On Christmas day in 1662, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that he had enjoyed “a mess of brave plum-porridge,” a detail that inspired a short story 350 years later. I wrote this one in the form of a recipe.
Working Title: Christmas Pudding
1st Sentence: 10 to 12 long, heavy sighs.
Favorite Sentence: 1 argument that involves more than two family members, lasts at least twenty-four minutes, and starts with a disagreement about whether garland is prettier than icicles OR whether colored lights are prettier than white lights, and ends with a reference to a sin committed by one of the arguers at least ten years ago.
Word Length: 241
Photo of 1666 Samuel Pepys portrait by John Hayls (1600–1679).
And another week locked away! I once posted a pic of a Dark Milkyway as my celebration treat and confessed then that my palate can be a very cheap date. My husband put Twizzlers in my Christmas stocking this year and I squealed with delight when I found them. So enjoy with me this very cheap treat as I say goodbye to another week. The day’s shorty was inspired by another scrap from the Idea File that I then mostly junked once the story took shape. The story’s got some gaps–just barely makes it into my definition of “complete” for the purposes of this challenge–but it’s also got some good potential.
Working Title: What Perfect Looks Like
1st Sentence: What would a perfect world look like?
Favorite Sentence: In a perfect world the girl who walked her college campus in fluttery broom skirts and sandals, handing out flyers decrying the brutality of her own government’s spy games in South America and the Middle East, would not grow into a woman who worked for the U.S.’s largest private defense firm, up to its ears and bad toupees in dirty money and blowback-control.
Word Length: 1,168
Photo by Evan-Amos 11/2010.
Several starts got me nowhere and my mind felt blank, so I went looking for something interesting in stories that are unfinished or finished but bad. I stumbled over a paragraph that I’d tacked onto the end of a poor story I’ve never been able to rescue in the four or five years of occasionally playing with it. That (now re-worked) paragraph sparked the day’s shorty.
Working Title: In the End
1st Sentence: If she’d been asked to predict what she’d think about in her final moments, she would have said, of course, her loved ones.
Favorite Sentence: Béchamel, béchamel—like a lapping wave of sun-warm water, the light lick of perfume spray, the soothing tones of that wind chime hung on the porch in North Carolina, where she spent a month every summer with Grandma, where the sleeping is best out in the cool breeze, the slippery air.
Word Length: 346
Photo of white sauce (béchamel) on the stovetop by Roozitaa 10/2012.
It’s been a while since I’ve written a shorty for sheer amusement. Feels good!
Working Title: 7 Reasons To Go Zombie
1st Sentence: 1. You never have to run.
Favorite Sentence: 4. By nature the zombie is a social animal who bonds with his zombie fellows and travels in packs, so you will never again stare at your bright red Fiesta-ware dinner plate inherited from your mother, sawing at a slap of ham by candlelight, reviewing all the choices you made that brought you here, alone at this table, on Christmas night, with “Joy to the World” playing on a loop.
Word Length: 429
Photo by Jeremy Keith 10/2007.
Ahh, back to that long, over-ambitious, unfinish-able story that partly launched this challenge. Not long after getting my MFA, I started on a linked collection of stories set here in Maine (I’m a transplant from NC). I poured my heart into it and I have written, oh, 60 or 70 pages of material for the “launch” story and other characters and situations I want to develop. But almost three years later I still hadn’t completed that first story and couldn’t find my way out of it. Nor could I finish any other story-in-progress, which is mostly why I committed to writing a story every day in May, yada yada. The day’s shorty is a re-worked excerpt from that unfinished story. I have no idea why, in the middle of working on a lackluster something-else, I remembered this chunk and was inspired to make a shorty of it, but there you go.
Working Title: Watching Her
1st Sentence: She waits.
Favorite Sentence: Yes, of course she points, of course she will not speak unless you look directly into her frosted eyes, a girl like that.
Word Length: 314
Photo credit.
I tend not to provide much setting in my stories. My characters could be any sort of people, located Anywhere, USA. So one of the things always lurking in the back of my creative brain is the desire to incorporate local landscape and culture into my writing more. In one small effort, today’s shorty grew from a description of the river that bordered the back of our property growing up. That bit has been in my idea file for a while, so it needed its own space.
Working Title: Our River
1st Sentence: A narrow river ran through the woods behind our house.
Favorite Sentence: The “swimming part” would be a place for the kids to get away from the Virginia sun, a place to grow long and sleek, to revel in owning not just a hunk of earth but a river.
Word Length: 328
This photo of a swimming spot on the Squannacook river in NH (by Ivan Massar, 1924-, for EPA 8/1973, NARA record: 2543545) looks a lot like our small swimming spot on the North Anna in Louisa Co., VA.
Over the years taking various kinds of writing workshops and classes, I’ve found that when teachers offer writing prompts, the prompts often contain an image or phrase that is particularly clever or strange or otherwise arresting. I find that this sort of prompt is unhelpful because it claims so much energy for itself and the point of the subsequent writing winds up being about trying to make sense of the prompt rather than really letting story take hold and carry the writing someplace new and interesting. An ordinary sentence can make a better prompt because it allows more space for invention. Today’s shorty was inspired by this simple prompt that came to me while searching for an idea: She should have left him when X.
Working Title: When He Left
1st Sentence: She could have, probably should have left him when he blew through their savings in Aruba with that gal his department had just hired to help with the year-end audit (her hire had a lot more to do with rear-end than year-end).
Favorite Sentence: It wasn’t so much the faking of her signature on the contract for the house or the flirtation with being homeless that made her hate him so intensely for about nine minutes, it was more that he was discovering the fad of “juicing” twenty years too late.
Word Length: 423
Photo of a juicer-blender by RanjithSiji, 12/2010, permission cc-by-sa-3.0,GFDL.
Recently a friend asked me how I can come up with something new every day. I said by relying on what’s not new. I tune in as much as I can to what’s going on around me, always toting paper and pen for taking notes, but I also review my idea file, use prompts of course, and scour whatever comes up in my mind when free-associating words and images. When fishing for ideas leads to childhood I have to follow, because I need everything I’ve got to keep this challenge going. Lately I’ve been alternating between a week of prompts and a week of random inspiration. Today marks the first day of a non-prompt week. Somehow I stumbled onto the memory of spelling bees in elementary school, and that inspired the day’s shorty.
Working Title: How To Bee
1st Sentence: She loved words and how they grouped themselves.
Favorite Sentence: Yet despite her love for the words, despite carrying them in her candy-pink purse, in her lunch tote nestled against the bologna sandwich and the brownie from scratch, in her coat pockets, tucked behind her ears, in the hollows of her elbows and knees, slipped into the back of her shoes between the shine of the patent leather and the sock’s lacy frill folded neatly around the ankle, despite brimming with words, despite trailing them, finding them stuck in her hair and clinging to her sweater, despite weeping words and sneezing words and finding words under her fingernails, that girl never, NEVER won a spelling bee.
Word Length: 726
Photo of Norman Rockwell painting, “Cousin Reginald Spells Peloponnesus (Spelling Bee),” 1918, courtesy of the Google Art Project.
Congrats to me for finishing off Week 33! Crème caramel all around! And the best sound of the week served as the day’s story prompt: gargling, selected by the husband from findsounds.com.
Working Title: The Test of Time
1st Sentence: So at first it was like the bunny slippers and the way she said “YAY-hoo” when she meant “YAH-hoo” and how she always slid her movie ticket into her left jeans pocket, then every once in while, between popcorn grabs, she’d slip a finger into the pocket to reassure herself that the ticket was still there.
Favorite Sentence: Like you’re supposed to achieve multiple pitches while gargling, like you’re supposed to communicate a range of emotion while gargling, like the main point of gargling is to see how long you can gargle.
Word Length: 517
Photo by Miansarri66.
The day’s sound prompt was sleigh bells, selected by the husband at findsounds.com. Meditating on the sound took me past Christmas to horses, which inspired the shorty.
Working Title: Ponytalk
1st Sentence: I couldn’t have a pony because, my father said, you can’t eat ponies.
Favorite Sentence: Eventually you get used to the awful images of mustang loaf, chicken-fried hoof, Clydesdale casserole, pickled horse lips.
Word Length: 655
Photo by Engle & Smith 3/2010.
Applause! I started my day with a round of clapping, chosen by the husband at findsounds.com.
Working Title: Bravo
1st Sentence: They say that you will see a light, that it will appear far away, at first, a pinprick that you can’t help but follow, but as you rush toward it, the light glows brighter, it becomes a sunburst, and it is the light, the light, that you become.
Favorite Sentence: There was something about the way she read it from her list in the morning, once everyone was seated, once Stephen Clough’s sobbing body had been dragged to his desk and draped over the seat where he could more tidily mourn the loss of his mother, again.
Word Length: 622
Photo by Evan-Amos 1/2011.
The husband chose the sound of a cash register from findsounds.com to prompt the day’s shorty. I went literal and got an idea I like, but it was tough to execute. I have hope this one will come alive with revision.
Working Title: Cashier
1st Sentence: Here comes somebody’s granny, a little snap-bean buttoned up in a coat much too warm for the season and topped with a red knit cap, sporting it like a sundae with a fat cherry on top.
Favorite Sentence: She had a huge head festooned with spiky ribbons in her thin brown hair, ribbons that shone no more than her intense, ink-black eyes, eyes that you wouldn’t want to see under a street lamp on a dark night, eyes you wouldn’t want following your unprotected back, eyes that even now wanted to consume Angie whole.
Word Length: 1,328
I wish cash registers still looked like the one in this photo by Kroton 5/2011.
The sound prompt for the day was boiling water, selected by the husband from findsounds.com. Naturally I thought of a witch stirring a brew.
Working Title: Seeking Witch
1st Sentence: Dear Hiring Committee: I write to apply for the position of Assistant Director Witch at Berkitt House.
Favorite Sentence: Enclosed please find three spells I have crafted for a range of needs, from damning individuals who catch our attention by happy accident, to orchestrating grand political feats through the meticulous application of curses designed specially to pull the levers of power.
Word Length: 430
Photo of an illustration by Alexander Sharp from The Goblins’ Christmas by Elizabeth Anderson (1908).
For the day’s shorty prompt, my husband chose from findsounds.com the sound of one of those old car horns, the kind that sounds like, “Ayoogah.” Meditating on that led me to the folk song I learned and sang as a child, “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” because of the line “Dinah won’t you blow your horn.” That in turn led to another song I loved to sing as a kid, “Polly Wolly Doodle.” I always loved that song because of the image of a grasshopper “pickin’ his teeth with a carpet tack” while sitting on a railroad track. That and the rhyme “LOO-siana” and “Suzy-Anna.” Anyway, that song inspired this story.
Working Title: Polly Wolly Doodle
1st Sentence: My third grade teacher loved to schedule singing time most every day, when she set herself up on a stool with a guitar and led us in various folk songs.
Favorite Sentence: “Okay,” she said, “like a melly-belly-merripoose, then.”
Word Length: 615
Photo by Powerkites 16, 10/2008. I can’t see the grasshopper….
I’m writing this on December 18 but per usual, I’m back-dating to match the day I wrote the story I’m documenting in this post. First a word on this ongoing story-a-day challenge: This last week has been the hardest full week so far. I absolutely could not do anything more on this project than just get each day’s story written, and many days that was a close-run thing. But I did it. And I’m building a little energy again for documenting the process. The shorty for December 11 was inspired by the sound of a cricket chirping, which my husband selected from the site findsounds.com. The sound reminded me of an unpleasant childhood memory that I spent something like two hours avoiding, because I knew it wouldn’t inspire a good story. So I took notes and tried various brainstormed sentences. I associated from cricket to something else to something else to something else. Nothing would take hold, so I gave in and wrote the memory-story as best I could. I was right, it’s no good.
Working Title: Cricket
1st Sentence: “Don’t kill it,” I said, “he’s not hurting anything. I’m going to take him outside.”
Favorite Sentence: He didn’t know that this mystery, this cool slick surface under his feet, will never be solved.
Word Length: 396
If I knew anything at all about the game cricket, I might have let my mind wander to a story about it. Damn. Photo of cricket ball by Marie-Lan Nguyen, 2005.
With this pretty platter of peanut brittle, one of my favorite treats, we celebrate another week of the Daily Shorty challenge. Mmmm. As for the day’s shorty, I can’t say much for it except that it kept itself nicely short. I seem to be going shorter all the time, which I find really interesting.
Working Title: Trash
1st Sentence: If he could stop thinking of me as one of his reclamation projects, we might get somewhere, me and Ira.
Favorite Sentence: He touched my hair, tilted my face to the sun, measured my wrist with finger and thumb.
Word Length: 250
Photo by Mackinac Fudge Shop 12/2008.
Back to the idea file to find another bit that’s been eluding me. Today it stopped eluding me.
Working Title: Here I Stand
1st Sentence: I never wanted to do the coffee shop, that was his idea.
Favorite Sentence: Did I look so… unraveled? so… flung?
Word Length: 575
When I wrote this shorty, I was thinking of Breaking New Grounds in Ogunquit.
I toss story-starts all the time, but if a start to a piece actually takes hold—I see the shape of the whole story, I know how to sweep to its end, the story has, in a way, taken on its own life—then I finish it as the day’s shorty, and if I still don’t like it, I just walk away knowing that one will never be on my submissions list. But before I walk away I craft, and re-craft, and craft again, rendering my crummy story as carefully as I can. It’s a strange feeling, tweaking something I don’t like, but I believe in making anything I write as good as it can be, even if it will never see the light of day.
Working Title: Broken
1st Sentence: Fake it ‘til you make it!
Favorite Sentence: The road to hell is paved with blood spatter, with black eyes covered by makeup, with guns stuffed under the driver’s seat, with stolen pensions, with lies.
Word Length: 271
Photo by Anna Bauer.
Love this world-weary depiction of Santa (credit below). We’ve been decorating the apartment and otherwise getting ready for Christmas, which we always celebrate quietly but with great love and enthusiasm. So Santa is on my mind.
Working Title: My Santa
1st Sentence: He got the cats, the SUV, a bundle of money.
Favorite Sentence: Who takes Mr. and Mrs. Claus is their last decision, and making it would mean the beginning of forgetting.
Word Length: 380
Photo of Père Noël from Canadian Illustrated News, vol.XII, no. 26, 401. Reproduction à partir du site Web de la Bibliothèque nationale du Canada Nouvelles en images : Canadian Illustrated News.
The water-related memories I generated yesterday served up another shorty today.
Working Title: Fishing
1st Sentence: It fell to me.
Favorite Sentence: He had no interest in fishing any more than he could talk himself into camouflage, trade the steel-toed for hiking boots, and hit the woods behind our house with a hunting rifle.
Word Length: 802
Photo by Kintaiyo 9/2005.
UPDATE. River Styx published “High Water” in Issue 89. Many thanks! [As of 1/23/2017, the archives page at River Styx is not working. For now, see my story in full here.]
Including plenty to drink. I was 100% idea-free most of the day, and so went visiting in my idea file for help. I found a snippet I wrote about the river that ran behind the house I grew up in. A nice bit but one I have been unable to use. So… use it, I said to myself. I dropped it into a Word file and began free-associating. I wrote seven (there’s that number again) paragraphs about other water-related memories and finally, finally, one caught. As it turns out, I didn’t use that first bit, but it was the way to today’s shorty.
Working Title: High Water
1st Sentence: The water brought quiet, heaviness, a strained peace.
Favorite Sentence: He is Moses, his lime-green truck will split the Red Sea, all our worry, our polite, whispered, pretty-please, no-thank-you worry, is for nothing.
Word Length: 468
Photo by Des Blenkinsopp of floods near Newells Pond in the U.K., 2/2010.
Yesterday when I went to the gym I saw a lovely bird hopping around the twiggy branches of a denuded tree right outside the main door. I am terrible about identifying birds, so I have no idea what it was, but it looked nothing like the bird pictured here (photo credit below), I just love this picture so much I had to post it. The bird I saw had plenty of soft blue and its head was striped with a really vivid yellow. He looked skittery to me (and yes, like a “he”) so I spoke to him in a whisper and then went on my way. I suppose it was that bird that inspired today’s shorty, which is delightfully short.
Working Title: Fly Bird
1st Sentence: If you look closely you will see the bird in her hands.
Favorite Sentence: As though there is nothing to see, as though she doesn’t hold tight the cluster of warm feathers and slender, slick bones, at the center a throbbing heart.
Word Length: 162
Photo of a chestnut headed bee eater by Naseer Ommer from Kerala, India, 2/2008.
Do you know about whoopie pies? They’re traditional Maine treats, two pieces of cake sandwiched with a very thick layer of cream. I think the most common variety is chocolate cake with vanilla cream but they come in all flavors and they range from Hostess cupcake quality when bought at the grocery store (not that I am above that, believe me) to sublime, when bought from a good bakery. This one showcases one of my favorite flavor combinations–chocolate and orange–and so makes a perfect way to celebrate the completion of Week 31, my flirtation with postcards, which ended yesterday, December 3. The cream is “orange cream cheese buttercream” and you can see the zest if you look closely. Now I need a whoopie pie, stat.
Photo by Flickr user Joy, 3/2009.
Today’s inspirational postcard has a picture of Bates College’s Hathorn Hall (photo credit below). My husband works at Bates and we live within easy walking distance, so I’m on campus all the time. Hathorn is one of my favorite buildings. It just screams New England.
Working Title: My Girl
1st Sentence: The first time I saw her I was so sick with frustration and guilt that I didn’t notice her right away.
Favorite Sentence: This is what my girl in the stacks promises me, every time, with her pale eyes, her long hair I want to wind around my neck.
Word Length: 475
Photo of Hathorn Hall at dusk, from Bates College website.
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.
Daily Shorty 
