Got excited about this one but the draft turned out iffy. Hopefully I’ll hit this shorty’s potential when I can spend time on revision.
Working Title: Crying Money
1st Sentence: She had to be careful about rending garments.
Favorite Sentence: She originally studied to be a psychologist but clearly uncontrollable sympathetic crying would be a problem in such a profession.
Word Length: 434
Photo by Jiří Sedláček – Frettie, July 2011.
I almost always realize the ending to a story right away (but then I have to figure out how to get there by writing the story). Very rarely I have absolutely no idea how the story will end, and in that case I just figure it out on the page line by line. Today I wrote my shorty like that and I really enjoyed both the process and the result.
Working Title: In the Cookie Jar of Life
1st Sentence: In the margins Melissa wrote things like, “I sense that you know your characters well”—the narrator had told us that the wife would develop diverticulitis in twenty years and the husband had a flare of freckles on the back of each upper thigh, details that had no bearing on the story, and “That you loved your grandmother very much comes across clearly”—the young man had written four times, “I loved my grandma a lot.”
Favorite Sentence: What if it’s a really bad metaphor, like ‘his mousey bellow’ or ‘her runny lips’?
Word Length: 1,135
Photo by Matt Turner, December 2006.
Well, three tough days in a row. I’m reminding myself that the commitment is to draft a story every day, that to expect to please myself with each draft is just too much to ask. I looked through my notes and I see that the last time I was this disappointed with three in a row it was the second week of May. Will I bounce back again and will it last? Still, here I am, 8 weeks in the bag! A lovely dish of mango sorbet for me!
Working Title: Virtual Activism
1st Sentence: Will we let them win?!
Favorite Sentence: Mirette hit the link, signed the petition—Tell Gramps to go back to his rocking chair on the front porch, where he belongs!—and went back to her cereal, a job well done.
Word Length: 401
Photo by Flickr user stu_spivack.
Working Title: I’ll Give You Something To Cry About
1st Sentence: She’d like to say that she hates to hear the little girl’s screams and fits of tears because she feels sad for her.
Favorite Sentence: She’d like to say that her impulse is to run out of her apartment, snatch the girl from the bullying taunts of the older kids, cover her with her own strong back.
Word Length: 220
Photo by D. Sharon Pruitt, March 2009.
For the first time since I began this project, I feel daunted. I think (and hope) that I’m just reacting to putting this website together. I acquired the site in mid-June and started transforming my daily notes on the project into back-dated posts. Catching up has been extremely difficult—every day I write a new story that now has to be documented, so…. But what if my day of feeling overwhelmed is about the pressure to complete yet another story? Can’t think about that. Must take this project day-by-day or I’ll go fetal. Anyway. Today a very short one based on a memory. Enjoy your life on my hard drive, my dear story of June 23.
Working Title: Tuna Helper
1st Sentence: In those early days we ate nothing for dinner but tuna helper with peas, followed by the rare ice cream cone.
Favorite Sentence: I used the good olive oil to dress the steamed asparagus because when you can afford scallops and fresh asparagus, you own two kinds of olive oil and you know why and you know how to pick each kind.
Word Length: 418
Where did this one come from? In October, when I should be thinking “Halloween,” maybe I’ll write a story about strawberry picking. Anyway, when I needed a title for a story about a cursed house, I remembered the old movie The Amityville Horror. Such horrendous punning shouldn’t be allowed, I know, but I can’t help myself.
Working Title: Comityville Terror
1st Sentence: Marlena believed the neighbors stopped liking her when she slaughtered the steer.
Favorite Sentence: She held a notebook to her chest and repeated, over and over, part history, part horror, part social criticism, part immersion memoir.
Word Length: 1,883
Image from Open Clip Art Library, by Netalloy.
Trying to find the balance between i. keeping expectations reasonable and encouraging, so letting go when meeting my Daily Shorty challenge is all that needs to happen in a day, and ii. raising expectations when pushing hard will take me to a new place in a story, transforming a trifle into a keeper. Today I was stubborn and it paid off. When the Inner Critic can keep her voice down, she is a welcome visitor. Today she kept whispering, here, right here, that’s where you need to introduce tension….
Working Title: Steering Leslie Right
1st Sentence: Elton was just driving her in circles.
Favorite Sentence: She pulled into a gas station and fiddled with the GPS, the way she fiddled with that old TV when she was a girl—in those days a good slap could get you back to an episode of T.J. Hooker in time for the stand-off.
Word Length: 1,728
A keeper today!
Working Title: Yessiree Bob
1st Sentence: Idiots.
Favorite Sentence: Anyway, if a traveling salesman strutting the stage and spitting rapid-fire, high-gloss whup-ass into a microphone had to catch her boss’s attention, did it have to be this guy?
Word Length: 2,152
Photo by Brady Willette, 2010.
I hate to whine (well, not really) but this is the worst cold I’ve had in a long time. It’s just knocking me out. Anyway, I’m not sure it’s affecting the quality of the shorties, which just goes up and down as usual. Today I made a little something (and only a little something, as the title of my post suggests) out of another childhood memory. I have used personal experiences far more than usual since this project began and I’m sure that will continue, given the need for something new to write about every day.
Working Title: Match Lure
1st Sentence: What kid doesn’t succumb to fire?
Favorite Sentence: Even a plodding bookworm like me, a too-sweet-for-words little primp who took pride, even as a small child, on surpassing all expectation of goodness.
Word Length: 311
Photo by Sebastian Ritter (Rise0011), January 2006.
I love fine chocolates (far more than I like the truffles that have been so hot at chocolate shops for what, at least a decade, now—people, do you have any idea how easy it is to make a scrumptious truffle at home?) But as I told my husband many years ago, proving once again that I have always been a cheap date, a dark Milky Way—I believe they’re calling it a “Midnight Dark” Milky Way these days—pleases me every bit as much as the finest chocolate I have ever tasted and I have tasted more than my share. So for this week I reward myself with a virtual “Midnight Dark.”
Working Title: What She Should Have Said
1st Sentence: This is what she thinks she should have said: “Take your fat paycheck and ram it, and take your sweet convertible and your season’s tickets and your front table at Marroque’s and your black and chrome espresso machine and ram those, too, because I am not your plaything, I am not your afternoon booty call, I am NOT an accessory, GET OUT!”
Favorite Sentence: I can’t wait to play his latest game, Bitch Hunter.
Word Length: 586
Photo by Evan-Amos, April 2011.
Actually, I’m being unfair, maybe. After writing two stories in a row that I found both funny and painful (my favorite combination!) I wrote one today that’s really just a joke. But it amuses me and I had fun writing it, so why am I complaining? As I keep reminding a friend who is thinking about taking the Daily Shorty Challenge for a month: I don’t write because I must write well. I write because I must write. If I let my Inner Critic have her way and try to demand—every single day—a draft that will ultimately be something I’m proud to submit, then I have lost the game entirely.
Working Title: Would You Rather Be Hitler or Stalin?
1st Sentence: If you had to kill someone—in self-defense, of course—would you rather deliver one sharp blow to the temple with a blunt object or pierce the heart with one easy jab of a very sharp knife?
Favorite Sentence: Jake from Michigan wants to know if blood would spurt from the wound when you stabbed the person, or would the cut be clean?
Word Length: 314
Photo of knife by Donovan Govan, April 2005; of bat by Jthoele2, October 2009.
Really enjoyed yesterday’s and today’s shorties. But this cold is awful and I’m hardly sleeping. Makes no sense.
Working Title: What’s a Little Water?
1st Sentence: Her mother is strapped to a chair suspended from the iron swing-arm that sticks out straight from the cement wall.
Favorite Sentence: The woman hovering in a puffy cloud of pastel knits, her white hair piled into an old-fashioned grandma bun, her stout legs bottoming out to sensible, thick-soled shoes, takes Jessica’s hand in both of hers, her palms warm and soft as dinner rolls.
Word Length: 1,554
Note the word length on this one. I’m backdating posts right now (I’m typing this on June 30), importing notes I took when I originally wrote the shorties. If I’d documented the word length of this story on June 15, it would have been much shorter. I go back and revise previous shorties every day, often filling in small blanks that require research. Occasionally I realize a small blank is a big one, as with this story. Anyway, I like it a lot, so yet another keeper!
Working Title: Thank You, Sir, May I Have Another?
1st Sentence: She arrives precisely fifteen minutes early, tugging at the lapels of the black blazer she has owned for seventeen years.
Favorite Sentence: Ms. Michaud, are you the sort of person who sniffs a sandwich before biting into it?
Word Length: 3,486
Photo here.
I’m sick. A disgusting summer cold. Slept maybe 3 hours, woke up dazed. The words “Hog Hat Woman Wild with Hope” were in my head, so I went with it as a headline and wrote the accompanying fictional newspaper article as my story. Not a keeper.
Working Title: Hog Hat Woman Wild with Hope
1st Sentence: Denise Pelletier of Paris, Maine, is “wild with hope” as she takes her hat business national with a website launch this week.
Favorite Sentence: The hog hats, which come in six “moods”—Full & Happy, Fit & Savvy, Dream-Puss, Gloomy Gus, Steppin’ Out, and Grunt & Growl—are showing up all over central Maine and last week even made it to television when a man at a Boston Bruins game was pictured on camera, doing a victory dance with a Gloomy Gus snug on his head.
Word Length: 411
Photo here.
Working Title: Your Pretty Lies
1st Sentence: You were not kidnapped by a crazy neighbor lady while your mother was at work.
Favorite Sentence: Your mother did not slice open your small, thin-ribbed chest, scoop out your heart, and leave it, shivering, on a cold, metal table, slick with blood and starved of oxygen.
Word Length: 876
Photo by Frank Vincentz April 2011.
The quality of my daily shorties seems to go up and down in small cycles—I’ll write 2 or 3 in a row that I really enjoy (even if they’re not destined to be publishable) then 2 or 3 that bore me and make me nervous about continuing this project. Then something good will pop up again. I spent a lot of time on today’s shorty, which emerged from a childhood memory, hoping to push it into something good. Didn’t happen. I think I need to keep faith that I will always write another story I love. Just maybe not today.
Working Title: Looking Sharp
1st Sentence: The sweater vest was the showpiece—four broad stripes of fuzzed yarn plush as a cat—pale blue, then orange, then yellow, then dark blue.
Favorite Sentence: Our teacher, a certified nutjob who sometimes liked to punish us by choosing to remain silent for an entire class period (yeah, that really hurts) and other times berated us nonstop for things our parents and grandparents had done—voting for Nixon, inventing plastic, bombing anyone small and dark—agreed, saying, “I know, so awful.”
Word Length: 1,517
This gorgeous little tart is my virtual treat for completing SIX WEEKS of the Daily Shorty Challenge! I wrote for almost six hours straight, today, both working on today’s shorty and revising those from previous days. My story today wasn’t inspiring but I wanted to see how hard I could push a mediocre piece with the hope of finding myself on new ground. It never really happened with this one but maybe when I go back to revise?
Working Title: Believing in Abundance
1st Sentence: She has promised herself that she will not finish this glass of wine.
Favorite Sentence: Since when did “enough” become so threadbare, so uninteresting, since when was “enough” a sign of failure?
Word Length: 845
Photo by Flickr user Jessica Spengler April 2006.
Pat and I have a very long-running joke that goes like this: I tell him I just read a great book and he says, “Okay, but did it have any pirates in it?” Or he suggests we see a movie and I say, “Well I would say yes but it sounds like there are no pirates in it….” When we make this joke we then pepper our next few sentences with “Yar!” or “Har ye mateys!” or the like. This joke waned during the Pirates of the Caribbean years because of course there was just too much pirate in the air. But it’s made a comeback lately. When I announced to Pat that I had successfully met my Micro May challenge of writing a daily shorty every day of the month, he said, “That’s so great, Honey. But did you write any stories about pirates??” So I promised a pirate story. I actually like this draft a lot, but it didn’t come easy. Notice the word length.
Working Title: No. 1 Fan Demands Pirate Story
1st Sentence: PirateDude79.
Favorite Sentence: Does he stare meaningfully into the benign indifference and arch an eyebrow because he is a man born to melodramatic gesture and his name is a coincidence, or does his name force him into it?
Word Length: 2,861
Image from Open Clip Art Library.
Working Title: Made You Miss
1st Sentence: When they’d played tennis he couldn’t get it through his thick head that the point—the whole reason they were out there in the first place—was to get a good workout.
Favorite Sentence: The tennis ball bounced lightly to her right, slow and high, hanging in the air like a neon green face begging to be slapped.
Word Length: 1,674
Photo by nao2g June 2008.
Working Title: She Cried
1st Sentence: She cried before the first line was out because when he sang his voice was not the voice she knew, brash and elastic, making chords out of truth and confusion and anger.
Favorite Sentence: She cried because he opened with his famous anti-war song and when he was done he shook his head and said he’d felt dumb for writing that song, because, he’d believed then, it was a song that wouldn’t hold up, that powerful men punching you in the face with the American flag would be an embarrassing memory in another decade, that he would have to explain how stupid people were then, how brutal.
Word Length: 282
Really happy with what I’m calling my June Story-Jam so far. A couple of stinkers in the beginning that nevertheless served an important purpose because I was trying new things in them. Now on the seventh day of June I see that I’ve written already four or five shorties so far this month that may be strong stories when I revise them. And yesterday and today I was more intentional than usual about process and my own daily and writing rhythms. Will that continue?
Working Title: Did Cleopatra Wear Her Hair Up?
1st Sentence: We saw a show about Cleopatra.
Favorite Sentence: I told her about the woman at the pharmacy who couldn’t shut up about her new dog, then I rattled off all the details I knew she’d want—“a poodle but she’s not going to do that stupid cut, gray, girl, shy of other dogs, really affectionate, Mimsy, Purina Puppy Chow with a little bologna for a treat.”
Word Length: 713
Photo by Eslam17.
Pushed hard to make something of the first lines and images that came to me. Getting stubborn about wanting something I like to happen on the page. This is good and bad. Bad if I forget how to let go when I need to, bad if I let the Inner Critic get too loud, again—she was overbearing before I started this project. Good because I should always push.
Working Title: Scrabble Night
1st Sentence: We were falling behind, Jane and I.
Favorite Sentence: The stuff looked like a big, fat urine sample on ice.
Word Length: 1,245
Photo: I will never admit to how long that took.
I didn’t reward myself with a virtual treat yesterday for completing Week 5 because I wanted to illustrate that post with a picture of Anne Boleyn. So delayed (virtual) gratification delayed no more: An ice cream cone for putting another week in the bag.
Working Title: To the Skeptics
1st Sentence: This is how I know Madame Talantua is for real: She never once told me what I wanted to hear.
Favorite Sentence: She gasped, kind of, and her eyes popped open to look at me so hard it felt like she was pinning something to my face, and I thought, goddamn, now she’s seeing right into me, like I’ll never be able to see myself, this is the best twenty bucks of my life.
Word Length: 1,246
Photo by ElinorD July 2007.
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies surely brought this shorty to me today. I highly recommend both novels. On another note, big congrats to me for finishing Week 5!
Working Title: God Save Our Queen
1st Sentence: What if Anne Boleyn knew all along?
Favorite Sentence: When Nurse tries to show her how to fold the kerchief back, like a blanket, so dollie can breathe, Anne shakes her head no, pulls the fabric back over the head, presses it to the doll’s face with a flat palm.
Word Length: 1,039
Photo at Wikimedia Commons here.
I particularly enjoyed my writing session today. Wrote a light story purely for fun. I’m trying to think of published stories that are meant to serve as an entertaining, pleasant read, and right now the only ones I can come up with are short-shorts: Paul Theroux’s “Acknowledgments,” Robin Hemley’s “Reply All,” Patricia Marx’s “Audio Tour” and “Pledge Drive,” Tessa Brown’s “In Reference to Your Recent Communications” (all anthologized in one or another of the Sudden Fiction collections edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas).
Working Title: Pratfall
1st Sentence: First he tried to win her with his humor but Meredith doesn’t laugh much, mainly at her own jokes, otherwise mostly at slapstick.
Favorite Sentence: And then thirsty again and then angry again and damned if he didn’t upset her so much she snapped a nail, one of the more important ones, a thumb.
Word Length: 951
Photo from Wikimedia Commons here.
It’s been a while since I’ve spoken directly to the reader as author. It was fun and the story has potential possibly with a very strong revision, but I don’t need to repeat that experiment anytime soon.
Working Title: Algebra for Life
1st Sentence: A man runs out of a restaurant.
Favorite Sentence: It’s not a happy accident that I get to perk up my blond highlights.
Word Length: 2,005
Working Title: Why You Came Back as a Cat
1st Sentence: Jennifer says you came back as a cat because you always had to have your own way, and there is no living thing more insistent on imposing its will than the modern house cat.
Favorite Sentence: Yeah, it’s so very satisfying to know that I picked my skirt just right—long enough, well-made enough to say “successful professional”; short enough, fitted enough to say, “And a very happy day to you, Bucky-boy.”
Word Length: 608
Photo: Another excuse to show off my beautiful Maria!
A virtual box of chocolates to celebrate writing a daily shorty the entire month of May! Yeehaw! See May’s Story Facts + page for a geeky round-up of the month and some reflection on how the month went. I’ll say here that drafting a shorty every day for a month was shockingly easy. I looked forward to my writing session every day, I was constantly looking for time to revise stories I’d written in previous days, and the number of total clunkers is very low: 4, so an average of 1 per week. Which is not to say that the other 27 stories will all turn out to be submittable. Many of the stories escaped the label “clunker” because I tried something new and fun or because one element of the story really pleased me. I think 15 to 20 are well worth revising and at least 10 feel like they will become strong pieces I will be proud to submit. At least 3 are ready for submission now. These happy numbers FAR exceed my wildest expectations for May. Full steam ahead!
Working Title: Flower Diaries
1st Sentence: Buttercups.
Favorite Sentence: Her mother was furious that her teacher had allowed a damned Hare Krishna to cheat her daughter of lunch and a memento of the trip, so mad she’d practically slapped the flowers from her hands.
Word Length: 719
Photo by Hans Lindqvist 12/2008
Working Title: Everest
1st Sentence: She didn’t want to climb Everest just because it’s there.
Favorite Sentence: You swivel when you are meant to sashay, you Samba when you are meant to Salsa, your Cumbi-ya? Cumbi-no.
Word Length: 1,784
Photo by Pavel Novak.
Um… I’ll call it a prose poem. I wish this thankfully short piece a very happy life on my hard drive.
Working Title: Scarlet House
1st Sentence: I live in a scarlet house on the horizon.
Favorite Sentence: They subsisted on duty and the graceful line.
Word Length: 189
Photo by McGoldrick Art & Photography 5/2011
A virtual piece of chocolate cake for finishing Week 4! See May’s Story Facts + page for a geeky round-up of the week. As for fact-free impressions, this has been a particularly good week. Wrote a clunker on the 24th but otherwise this is a nice little crop of stories.
Working Title: Honeysuckle
1st Sentence: Occasionally we have them in Maine, days laden with the scent of honeysuckle, scattered with birdsong, shot through with the low hum of bees.
Favorite Sentence: And when we do I move through it at a Carolina pace, relaxed and hopeful, looking for butterflies, wishing I had a cool slice of watermelon so dark-pink ripe, like kissed lips.
Word Length: 457
Photo by CdnStar
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 