Daily Shorty

Saying goodbye to Week 16, but I’ll have to delay my virtual treat by one day in favor of posting the picture I used for today’s shorty. This story came to me very quickly and whole, so was fun and easy to write. And I like it. Overall I consider my week of photo prompts very successful. The stories came out odd but I like that. I sometimes had trouble going deep but don’t I always.  I do think starting with the photo stripped a layer of effort or pressure from the shorty mission. To sum: I will do this again.

Working Title: When I See Her
1st Sentence: I want her to come to me in beautiful, blessed moments.
Favorite Sentence: Once when I was at a wedding party and a young woman in a scarlet dress dragged her partner to the dance floor, where they flung each other in circles, stamping their feet, the skin of her legs flashing, her skirt like whirling flame, I thought, there, in all that life, in all that breathless movement, she will emerge.
Word Length: 521

Thanks again to Cynthia, who posed for this picture on the Marginal Way in Ogunquit, Maine (July 2012), and let me share it here.

Another really tough one and again, doesn’t match up to my vision but there’s hope for when I can come back to it.

Working Title: Perpetually Undecided Woman
1st Sentence: I know why she picked me.
Favorite Sentence: But now she’s gone and I’ve got Daddy and Sam and Liddy, each one a double-stitched, double-dipped Delta Blue who can’t bear the thought of Mama going to heaven gnarled and black and unable to walk the gold-paved streets or eat the sugared oranges because she’s a piece of char.
Word Length: 983

Photo taken on Marginal Way in Ogunquit, Maine, July 2012.

I really like my vision for this but it didn’t come out so well. Hopefully I can ramp it up in revision.

Working Title: When It’s Over
1st Sentence: He can’t be lucky forever.
Favorite Sentence: I listen with my ears, sure, but with my closed eyes, too, my fingertips, my nose.
Word Length: 854

Photo taken outside the Breaking New Grounds coffee shop at the end of Perkins Cove in Ogunquit, Maine, July 2012.

Three starts today to get a shorty. And this is the third in my experimental “photo series” and today I’m really pleased with what I wrote. If forced to think like a critic I’m not sure how highly I’d rate this story but I went deep today, something I haven’t been able to do lately. You know when you’ve written something that matters. Not all stories that matter will be publishable, but in the end “publishable” is someone else’s lookout.

Working Title: Mr. Half-Caf
1st Sentence: You know the rule never to date where you work?
Favorite Sentence: And you know well that you should never eat popcorn around someone who doesn’t already love you, because there’s something about popcorn, you’ve never been able to eat it neatly, you are compelled to grab great fistfuls of it and cram it into your mouth and chomp it like a horse, your hands already digging around the bucket for more before you’re even close to swallowing.
Word Length: 914

Breaking New Grounds is a lovely coffee and tea shop at the end of Perkins Cove in Ogunquit, Maine. I took this picture of their logo inside the shop in July 2012.

Well, here’s what I can say so far about this experiment with photo prompts: Both yesterday and today I did come up with a shorty pretty quickly and I wrote each with relative speed and ease. They are both odd, and I like that. But both lack… depth and feeling. Of course it’s not like I never have that problem otherwise. And maybe the photo series shorties will get better. On to the next!

Working Title: Coffee Break
1st Sentence: Diane pulled her purse out of the lower desk drawer as she watched the digital clock rewrite the time from 9:59 to 10:00.
Favorite Sentence: The day Diane McCluskey doesn’t march out of the office at exactly 10:00 AM to fetch a café au lait is the day long-dormant volcanoes erupt, continents split, the heavens rain bullfrogs.
Word Length: 872

Photo taken outside a restaurant in Perkins Cove, Ogunquit, Maine, July 2012.

In the last few weeks I’ve been finding ways to defeat an increasing sense of mental fatigue. More on some of the tricks I’ve developed another time, but here’s my latest: I’ve brainstormed a list of types of prompts I can use to inspire shorties. On a given week I will use a particular kind of prompt every day. I fear that my mind will not love this kind of constraint and the overall quality of the shorties will suffer. But for now I want to see if using prompts reduces at least one kind of mental work by relieving me of the burden of creating  a story idea out of nothing and everything. My Daily Shorty weeks start on Tuesday so today I began a week-long story series using 7 selected photos from my recent trip to Ogunquit, Maine.

Working Title: Foot Eulogy
1st Sentence: Science can have everything but my foot.
Favorite Sentence: That’s not a problem with a flip-flop but since when would I (literally) be caught dead in a flappy, flat, half-assed parody of a shoe?
Word Length: 943

Thanks to my friend Cynthia, who let me take (and now post) this picture of her foot.