Election fever has set in with a vengeance. I’ve done a pretty good job avoiding the news for some time now but the energy of the Big Day is pouring over me, now, and I’m finding it very difficult to focus. No surprise that the day’s shorty is lackluster. It was inspired by my last texture prompt, a small die (as in one of a pair of dice) that the husband handed me this morning. For some reason after pressing my thumb into each side of it I began to tap my fingernails on it. That reminded me of the sound of high heels on a hard floor, so that wound up prompting the story. Yes, I know, a sound, not a texture. What can you do.
Working Title: Phyllis Power
1st Sentence: We always know when Phyllis is on a tear, because we can hear the frantic clip-clopping of those heels from a mile away, like a horse galloping on marble.
Favorite Sentence: She says this frightens her but she doesn’t seem frightened when she talks about the probing.
Word Length: 906
Photo of Egyptian dice (600-800 BC) by Swiss Museum of Games.
I put something over four hard hours into this one. I had three starts that refused to grow, so then I just made myself try to blend them. I cut one and made a story out of the other two. Didn’t really work—get comfortable on that hard drive, story # 188—but I always hope the sweat equity counts for something. The texture, today, came from one of those small, air-filled plastic pillow thingies used to cushion shipped goods. I was trying to get a good picture of it when someone came along to make enquiries. Don’t know what Maria thought of it, but holding this thing made me think of tearing into a bag of chips.
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.
Many years ago—I think I was still in high school—a man in our rural neighborhood plowed under his wife’s strawberry patch as punishment for something they had argued about. She was known for the amazing strawberries she harvested every summer, which might have been the problem—they were deeply religious and he often cited her pride for those berries and other accomplishments (she was an incredible seamstress and a wonderful cook) as regrettable sin she should repent. As even I know, despite two thumbs that will never shade green, it takes many years of devotion to get really sweet, fat berries, so when he destroyed her patch he was destroying years of work and love. I cried when I heard the story, because it struck me as such a cruel, hateful thing to do. The wife, also known for her unbreakable good cheer, replanted and carried on. Back to the present: The texture of the day was a small, soft, squishy puffball. It reminded me of cat fur and so inspired the first sentence of my story.
The husband handed me a piece of a geode this morning (it looks almost exactly like this picture I pulled from the Web), the texture (and inevitably the look) of which inspired one aspect of the protagonist of this gleefully short story. Yesterday the look of my “texture prompt” definitely inspired the story more than the feel of it. Maybe I should do my best to lock onto my story idea while holding my texture prompt with eyes closed, so that it’s more likely I’ll focus on the sense of touch in the inspired story? Or maybe I should just be glad every time I get an idea that develops into a story and not give into the temptation to grade my process. Yeah, that.
I am shocked and thrilled that I have written a story every single day for six months straight. And honestly, I’m afraid to say much more than that. Taking this project one day at a time has been crucially important since, oh, I finished May, so I’m not going to change tactics now. As for my virtual celebration treat, is it not exquisite?? I wanted to put up a picture of caramel apples—my all-time favorite Halloween treat—but although I bought the stuff to make them, I wound up devoting that time to watching a couple of Halloween-themed shows the husband and I love. And I couldn’t find a good picture online that I was free to use. So this fabulous caramel apple cheesecake will just have to do. I can’t say I’m disappointed. As for the day’s shorty, it was inspired both by a “page weight” my husband handed me this morning, an object archivists use to hold down the page of a book that shouldn’t be touched by the reader, and by Halloween. The page weight looks and feels like nothing so much as an oddly weighted shoe string, which inspired the first line of the story.
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.
And a fond farewell to Week 26! One of my all-time favorite treats is pistachio ice cream—enjoy it with me as I celebrate another completed week of the Daily Shorty challenge. The last inspiration I pulled from my mystery box was part of the top of a corroded aerosol can, which got me fixated on the thought of hairspray. I covered three pages with various ideas and story starts related to hairspray—I couldn’t shake the image of it—and finally landed on a story as list using that number again: 7. Many thanks, again, to Jen Hicks. I love saying this: I owe you one!
It took this Daily Shorty project to teach me what a joy it can be to write in a parking lot. There’s something so… in between about that space, so not-place about it—it nicely empties your mind of whatever’s bugging you so story ideas can rush in. Now when I find myself in a parking lot, I see my time there as “found time” in the same way that I consider that five dollar bill I just pulled from the pocket of a jacket “found money.” I wrote today’s shorty in the lot of the local Hannaford while the husband, grateful to be free of my label-reading attention, restocked our pantry and fridge. My mystery box inspiration today was a black and white photo of a man in work clothes at a table covered in tools. Looks like he’s in a large space—a factory? And the photo looks period. Maybe the 1930s, 1940s? The tools inspired my story, so here I’ve put up a picture of a toolbox. One more day of the mystery box!
My week is going faster than usual, even, because I’m doing so much editing. Hoping for a much lighter November. I hand-wrote today’s shorty, which is something I haven’t done in a while. I highly recommend going back and forth between hand-writing and composing on the keyboard. There’s something so sensual about running a pen across the page—I think I access my writing brain a little differently. The photo shows today’s inspiration—a little notion that looks like a button (but isn’t) resting on the paper I used to write the story. The notion is embossed with the figure of a… moth… butterfly… dragonfly? I saw a dragonfly at first, so that’s what inspired my story. Now I’m not so sure, but the story, in any case, is a wrap.
Today’s inspiration: a torn piece from a catalog. On one side of the page is a lovely young woman with long blond hair in a prettified out-doors-ey outfit that includes a fancy scarf. On the other side, a sweet, girlish, hand-crafty bracelet at top and a rockin’ pair of studded harness boots at bottom. I studied both sides of the page for something around 5 minutes, then wrote a story that included none of these things but did feature a photographer trying to take pretty pictures. My silly image at the top of the post is a goofy catalog-page-like decoration that I assembled from pretty pics of things similar to what’s on my page scrap.
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.
And adieu to Week 25! Enjoy with me this pretty éclair as I celebrate another completed week of this project. Many thanks again to Leslie Anderson for her inspirational paintings posted at 
Back to the well of inspiration from the Leslie Anderson paintings posted at 
So thankful for these lovely paintings by Leslie Anderson and to 
I hope my Maine writer friends will be entering this short story 
Maine writers, here’s a short story 
Maine writers, take note! The 
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.
I was at Haystack for a cultural summit that took place over about a 24-hour period. When we summiters woke up the second day and headed to the dining hall, we discovered a treat: Some of our brethren (I think they were all men) stayed up late the night before and with the help of some high-octane inspiration they set to work on… chair sculptures! This is one of the four they made. The protagonist of the day’s shorty handcrafts chairs from reclaimed materials.
I was fascinated at Haystack by the rows and rows of wooden steps leading from the main campus area and down past the dorms and to the water’s edge. This is one of my many photos of them at various angles.
In the dining room the lovely folks at Haystack kept a huge cookie jar and a bowl of cider, as well as carafes of coffee and hot water for tea. When I discovered this a man was reaching into the cookie jar and looked at me, shouting, “World’s biggest cookie jar!”—I was annoyed that I didn’t have my camera handy. The next day the cookie jar was in the kitchen, so I snapped this photo through the pass-through. You can see the cookie jar on the counter next to the base of a food processor (as well as the reflection of it in the window). But you can’t tell how big it is. Just trust me that it’s enormous. And it was full of yummy chocolate cookies.
I just attended a cultural summit at 
Sure, you hear about Maine’s lobster and chowder, all those sweet blueberries, the gorgeous coastline, the rich history of great writing and art. But did you know that Maine boasts chocolate shops that will make you weep with gratitude? Well, I weep. Maybe you can indulge without tears. To celebrate my completion of another week in my Daily Shorty Challenge, enjoy with me this plate of chocolates I bought at Perkins Cove Candies in Ogunquit, Maine, which now holds the revered title of Claire’s Favorite Chocolate Shop, a coveted honor indeed. Pictured here are 3 orange creams, a peanut butter cup, a caramel, and their chocolate-to-slay-all-others, a cashew turtle. All in dark chocolate, of course. Oh, dear. I’m weeping.
I wrote part of this story during the 3-hour drive to Haystack. More on this beloved Maine institution very soon but for now I’ll just announce to the world that every delightful thing you’ve heard about it is TRUE. What an extraordinary treat. And amidst all the great pleasures of the day, I was able to find enough time to finish the story. My prompt was the photo of shells here, which I gazed at for a few minutes before packing the car. Then I meditated on my memory of the shells for a while and… wrote a story about Komodo dragons, of course!
This has been a very tough few days. Yet again I struggled to produce a complete story. Yet again I wrote a lot of words I had to toss. An easy one very soon, please?
Daily Shorty 