I’m weathering another small crush of fatigue and I keep wondering just why this project is so tiring. On the one hand it seems like common sense that it would be—when I tell other writers I have written a story every day for these many months, they are stunned. Right, of course, because we know how hard it is to craft a complete piece. But on the other hand… why is it not just as hard to simply write for several hours every day? The pressure to create a new piece each day, plus the pressure to complete it, add up (after many weeks) to a very, very tired brain, but I have no idea if a pyschologist or neurologist could explain why those pressures should be so fatiguing. Anyway, I’m very pleased to say that for the first time in several weeks, I had a lot of fun writing the day’s shorty, which I approached in a really playful way, and that, this late in the game, feels like an enormous victory.
Working Title: Mata Hari’s Head
1st Sentence: Mata Hari’s head’s gone missing.
Favorite Sentence: In the first week of the timeframe in question, at least fourteen museum visitors carried a bag or backpack in which a plexiglass box containing a head might be concealed.
Word Length: 1,288
Photo is a scan from a magazine, 1910. Author unknown.
My friend Gwen Mullins took the Daily Shorty Challenge with me last summer. She sent me this story prompt: “Gaudi’s most famous church, Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, has been under construction for a hundred years. In some photos of the church, the cranes and scaffolding are digitally removed.” I’ll just say right now that I didn’t do this prompt justice, maybe because I was too charmed by it. In any case, the shorty I began to write reminded me of an old story I had begun several years ago, so I went back to that material and used several sentences from it as my foundation. I don’t think it works yet—probably needs to be longer, maybe much longer. But it’s a nice start. Many thanks to Gwen!
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 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.
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.
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.
Today’s prompt poem from 
A very difficult day. Hugely fatigued, couldn’t focus, headache. The shorty I produced has potential, though. By bedtime I was cursing the nasty cold that had settled in (I’m writing this a week later). This photo has no bearing on the post, I just need cheering up.
Coming to the end of my second week of stories prompted by Leslie Anderson paintings—just one more after this one. See the 
Another day inspired by the Summer Stories Short Story Competition put together by the 
Maine writers, look sharp! The deadline is drawing near for the Summer Stories Short Story Competition put together by the 
Finally, a break! This one didn’t land in my lap whole but I got it in two reasonable sessions and even had time to polish it up a bit before evening fell. Very rare, these days. And goodbye to another week of this challenge! Celebrating with this picture of a “banana royale.” If it were real I could down it in about 2 minutes flat, I think.
One of my favorite and really intense memories from very young childhood is of the occasional Sunday breakfast made up of fried salt herring, eggs, and biscuits. (Yes, probably that should be “salted” herring, but I remember that we never said it that way.) We didn’t have much money, so only rarely–after a good paycheck with overtime–did my father get that craving and drive out early on a Sunday to hit a local place that sold the fried salt herring. I have no idea how the rest of my family felt but I was always Daddy’s little girl, certainly with regard to food, and I remember practically vibrating in anticipation, waiting for his return. He’d come back with brown paper packages containing the just-fried fish. My mother would open the packets on the table, add freshly baked biscuits and scrambled eggs, and we’d be off and running, eating our food from the paper. Half-meal, half-sport. After a few false starts on a shorty, this memory came to me. I asked my husband, also raised in Virginia but by parents who are not native to the state, if he’d ever had this breakfast and he said no. I did a Google search for “salt herring breakfast” and every hit I got specifically for that phrase came from a Virginia diner or a Virginia Moose lodge or Ruritan club. I copied the menu item above from the 
On this 
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.
The husband chose the sound of a cash register from 
Once again I find myself catching up on posts (I’m writing this on December 3). I’ve been working hard on polishing some of these shorties to submit to a chapbook contest—yeehaw! Wish me luck. In the meantime, my third postcard, which inspired my November 29 shortie, is one showing two pages from a scrapbook Isabella Gardner made to document a trip to Japan. Pictured here is one of the pages shown on the postcard (photo credit below). I’m slightly embarrassed to say that my plodding brain produced a story about… a scrapbooker. But what can you do. Next!
I have a postcard with the image shown here (see photo credit below) of Barry Flanagan’s sculpture “Thinker on a Rock.” I meditated on this wonderful man-like hare for quite some time and then landed on a certain famous manlike bunny we all know well…. So the day’s shorty turned out to be my first fan fiction!
This time a physical description from a conversation with a friend about someone she had met recently inspired the shorty. This challenge is teaching me how to find story in just about anything.
Today the husband dropped a Styrofoam ball into my outstretched hands. And in response I wrote a creepy story he much approves—the husband really enjoys creepy—which is only right.
Trying a new set of prompts this week based on texture. I have asked the devoted husband to present me, each morning of this 27th week of my Daily Shorty challenge, with an object that has a notable and uniform texture. Today a rubber eraser, which inspired the first line of my shorty. After the first paragraph, the story went bonkers, in the same way that one of Barthelme’s really goofy, “What on earth is he on about” stories skip across the page just for fun. Not to suggest that my shorty lives in the same house as a Barthelme story. More to say that I thought of him as I wrote it. My story is out on the sidewalk, gazing up at a Barthelme story’s window, blowing kisses.
Inspiration sprang from my box today in the form of two rusty nails, which reminded me of one of the things my mother warned me about when I was a kid. Don’t go out barefoot or you’ll step on a rusty nail and then you’ll get lockjaw! I thought that was a really funny threat until I read a coming of age book set at the turn of the century or thereabouts, when young ladies wore bloomers and dresses and tied their hair back with ribbons, and, according to this book, planned their nuptials at the tender age of 14. The main character’s love—a feisty and loyal young man with raven hair—was thrown from a carriage and cut himself on the wagon wheel. And then died a gruesome, slow-motion death owing to, yes, lockjaw. She held his grotesquely grinning face to her budding breast and sobbed the same tears I silently shed under my bedcovers around 2:00 in the morning with my father’s filched mini-flashlight. How would our heroine ever know love again? Oh. Too, too cruel.
The lovely and talented Jen Hicks, writer friend and Hunger Mountain colleague, recently sent me a mystery box all the way from her home in St. Paul. She just said, hey, what’s your address, and a few weeks later comes a box with random goodies I can use for story prompts. What a treat! Today’s shorty was inspired by the first thing I fished out of the box, the button pictured very badly here because I wield a camera about as well as I can throw a ball—but get out of my way if I’ve got a Frisbee (just sayin’). The button says “Restore Monkey Island” and has a picture of a banana on it. Love it! The story I don’t love as much because I couldn’t compress my vision enough but it’s got a lot of potential for when I can come back to revise.
A logical progression! But don’t think about that, think about this gorgeous baked Alaska you may share with me as I celebrate finishing Week 24!
I try to suspend judgment to some extent because this experiment is all about process and practice. We all write material we discard and we almost always produce our best work only after careful, thoughtful revision. But sometimes I can’t help but get cranky. Today’s shorty came from a scene I wrote a week or two ago then cut from a story because it didn’t belong. But the scene was good. I saw how to make something of it, so I did. I made a very nicely crafted, well-written piece of CRAP.
I love it when I can reclaim material. I wrote part of today’s story a few weeks ago but I couldn’t get into it. It stuck in my mind, though, and today I decided to give it another shot. This time: A story! Of course, that means I didn’t use today that process I talked about at the start of the week but I’m too excited to care.
Day 3 of this process of trying to force connections between three paragraphs generated in succession but without obvious surface connection, then developing story form there. For today’s shorty I wound up building the story from the first two and cutting the third original paragraph. I like the third paragraph so I’ll try starting the next story with that one.
I want to do a week with no prompts to see where my head is and how the process goes. If I can’t come up with something I’ll go looking for inspiration but for now it’s back to just letting my mind wander into story ideas.
I’m not sure this experiment of writing a week of stories inspired by Haystack (three of which I set in a Haystack-like place) did much for story-quality but I enjoyed immersing myself in the thoughts I had while at Haystack, as I flipped through my photos and notes in search of story. The day’s shorty was an odd one with a really forced ending but I have hope that some of the material can be reworked someday.
I won’t top this. I could not BE more satisfied with this project right now. Let the record show that at just before 1:00 AM, I completed the day’s shorty, which I worked on all day, off and on, and which just so happens to be the resurrection of a story I tried to write in the first half of 2009, and then returned to a number of times the last couple of years, failing each time to complete a draft. I didn’t even open those earlier Word files. I just re-imagined the basic idea of the story, which happened to come to mind because it fit so well with my trip to Haystack, and this time, after starting from scratch with a new opening image, I just insisted on finishing it. I really like it, too, but that could be all about the victory of the finished draft, and so what if it is. Ahh, happy days. And many thanks to Cheryl Wilder, who said, you want a little Emily Dickinson? I’ll give you a little Emily Dickinson. And I’ll do it in 5 minutes flat. Damn, Girl!
A bell tolls at Haystack at meal times and when it’s time to meet for a talk or someone has to make an announcement. That felt old fashioned and very… communal.
Daily Shorty 