Childhood Memories II

27 May

Working Title: War of the Roses
1st Sentence: First it was about the roses.
Favorite Sentence: Her hair sat on her head like a dull cherry Jello salad, the artificial red a chemical marvel.
Word Length: 1,336

Photo by Stan Shebs 4/2005

More Therapy!

26 May

I think this is the third story of the month in which a therapist figures prominently. Is my subconscious trying to tell me something?

Working Title: Doctor Uncle
1st Sentence: Just before she left the apartment, she had to pull out her wallet, touch her driver’s license, count the small amount of cash she carried, then tuck the wallet back into her purse.
Favorite Sentence: Maybe they could stop and rest a little, now and again, review an intense but irrelevant memory of 4-H camp, say, just for a breather?
Word Length: 1,483

Clunker Time

25 May

Working Title: Nutshelling
1st Sentence: My father’s teeth were so strong he could shell walnuts with them.
Favorite Sentence: My father’s teeth were so strong he could shell walnuts with them. (Yes, same sentence. cg)
Word Length: 293

Photo by J. Dncsn 9/2009

Three Easy Ones in a Row

24 May

Working Title: His Laugh
1st Sentence: She rejected Anton because he had too much nose, Richard because he could never remember what personal stories he had told her and which he had not, Ellis because he wore sneakers with khakis.
Favorite Sentence: Week after week slid by and there was Thomas, hanging around Marsha’s elbow—was he shrinking?—double-dipping the crudités, gnawing at a chicken wing like a starved jackal for Christ’s sake.
Word Length: 681

Happy Birthday Pat!

23 May

As part of my birthday present to you, dear husband, I dispatch today’s shorty in record time. I even made it creepy, just for you.

Working Title: Script
1st Sentence: If the cab doesn’t seem right—something is off with the paint, the design, you’re not sure, but it’s not quite right….
Favorite Sentence: If the man looks everywhere but at you until finally, as you lean into the back, you catch his eye, but he’s not looking at you so much as he is taking you apart at the joints, he’s gauging where to place the tip of the knife so that he can lay the heel of his hand on the butt to push down, down, through the bone, a quick and easy cut, a child could do it….
Word Length: 228

Photo by Puschinka 2009

Launching week 4!

22 May

Smilie The Clown


Working Title: Empty Stage
1st Sentence: There is a name for the fear of clowns.
Favorite Sentence: Fear of white gloves that make your hands look like napkins.
Word Length: 361

Photo by Steve Smilie Norman

Week 3 done! And still more yellow.

21 May

A virtual piece of lemon chess pie for me, to celebrate the completion of week 3! And this pie saves us from another block of yellow. Surely three stories about yellow are enough to cleanse the mental palate?? Again, I pushed really hard to get something I like. But also again—probably not destined for submission, this story. Check out May’s Story Facts + page for a geeky look at the week.

Working Title: Woman on a Bench
1st Sentence: A woman rests on a park bench.
Favorite Sentence: Because she is so young and lovely, because the yellow in her dress is the same melted butter shine reflected in her sunglasses, because that tomato is so summer sweet and about to burst its tight skin, no one, passing by, sees beyond her, the shopping bag.
Word Length: 1,040

Photo by Flckr user Stacy, March 2010

More Yellow

20 May

A yellow hangover from yesterday. I pushed hard to get something that would please me a little. So not a total clunker but it would take a strong revision to turn this one into a keeper.

Working Title: Michelle-O the Yellow Who Plays the Cello
1st Sentence: They are gathered in the girls’ bathroom.
Favorite Sentence: The day she showed up at PhysEd wearing the doctored shorts and tee—now muddy brown with orange splotches wherever there had been yellow—the kids stared at first, then of course understood exactly why Michelle-O had messed with the clothes.
Word Length: 769

How To Kill a Story: The Big Idea

19 May

When I first started writing short stories, I’d start with a Big Idea. I’d want to write a story about redemption, or painful self-discovery. Then I’d work away at creating the characters and scenes that might get me there. I learned to avoid The Big Idea approach because if I try to work from the abstract to the concrete, I fail every time. Yesterday someone told me that the Fairy Tale Review is taking submissions for their Yellow issue and ever since then all I can think is yellow yellow yellow. No surprise, no good ideas took hold in my writing session today and I wound up having to just push through on a bad one. So another clunker. But even clunkers earn sweat equity, right?

Working Title: Yellow
1st Sentence: Yellow was her color.
Favorite Sentence: Ella felt as though she had lived her entire life trying to meet that expectation of sublime adorable, performing as one-half of a girl-boy twin team from the minute she was born.
Word Length: 465

Another Story with a Therapist

18 May

At the end of my second week, I wondered if there were only clunkers ahead of me. I’ve been rocking along ever since and today feel particularly excited about the work I’m doing. Pushing to complete a story every day has forced my Inner Critic to keep her mouth shut and I don’t miss her one bit. But what’s with the new focus on therapists? On another note, this may be the first story I’ve ever written with a dog in it.

Working Title: Little Ludwig: A Cautionary Tale
1st Sentence: Name a kid Ludwig, and what do you expect?
Favorite Sentence: Maybe he’d even get his own show, on the strength of being the first to teach a dog to play Sweet Home, Alabama on the harmonica, or to say the Pledge of Allegiance with right paw properly laid over heart.
Word Length: 2,218

Photo by Anna Utehina, May 2006

Group Therapy

17 May

Working Title: The Hostile Truth
1st Sentence: The first time Ellen woke up eating, she was ladling cocoa puffs into her mouth.
Favorite Sentence: To say that Sandy’s running commentary enraged her, to say that Ellen would very much like to slap Sandy across that sullen face would be… entirely accurate.
Word Length: 1,259

Photo by Evan-Amos, November 2010.

Memories

16 May

This marks the first Daily Shorty inspired by a memory. I’m certain it won’t be the last.

Working Title: Her First Job
1st Sentence: Her first job was at a fancy restaurant with Michelin stars dribbling from its pewter pitchers, swimming at the bottom of its champagne glasses.
Favorite Sentence: Anyway it’s impossible to put someone in his place when your uniform makes you look like a French maid.
Word Length: 594

Photo by flickr user alan.light 1989.

A Strange One

15 May

“Claire does not write realist fiction.” That appeared in one of my student evaluations when I got my MFA. I had a weirdly defensive reaction at the time—I think I read “true” or maybe just “real” rather than realist. When I met with my mentor I asked him what he meant by that and he looked at me, perplexed, and said, “Well, Claire, I meant… that you don’t write realist fiction…?” And of course I almost never do. Until now! For some reason—well, likely because I’ve been working on a very long, realist story for a couple of years, now—the shorties I’ve been cranking out are pretty earthbound. But today I got a nicely strange one.

Working Title: Glimpse
1st Sentence: It’s not true that I can see the future.
Favorite Sentence: The feel of the pages on her fingertips, the tickle of book dust in her nose, these good words, these pretty sentences spooling through her fingers, the bottomless promise of unmarked time, like a red carpet rolled out before her and disappearing into the distance.
Word Length: 830

Week 2 in the bag!

14 May

Virtual chocolate chip cookies to celebrate the end of Week 2! Check out May’s Story Facts + page for a geeky take on the week. I’ll say here that I’m not finishing the week in style. May 12 I wrote a clunker, May 13 a minimally pleasing story I don’t expect to revise into something I would submit, and the same today. Do I have only clunkers and unsubmittables ahead for May?

Working Title: Coat Closet
1st Sentence: So I like to spend a little time in the closet every day.
Favorite Sentence: Then Rachel comes over—no phone call and no knock on the door, just barges in—and when she hangs her coat up she sees my feet and screams like a banshee, like my feet are so hideous, like she’s never seen my scabby slippers, like a woman can’t meditate in her own damn coat closet if she wants to.
Word Length: 461

Photo by Rdsmith4

Christmas in May

13 May

Working Title: O Holy Night
1st Sentence: The scent of vanilla, the wood smoke, her hands.
Favorite Sentence: The director’s arms, our highest soprano and lowest bass, my belly, his nose, her trembling lips, his closed eyes, my feet pushing to tiptoe—we were just one gorgeous cascade of sound, one joyful noise.
Word Length: 457

Photo: I”m so proud of this wreath I made last Christmas. Not so proud of the picture….

Total Lemon

12 May

I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner. The first 11 stories of my Daily Shorty project please me. Either I consider them worth revising and likely one day submittable or I know they will amuse a loved one or a friend. Or the story makes me laugh or scratches an itch or contains a character or a sentence I love. This story? None of the above.

Working Title: Honey Peas
1st Sentence: Do you know that old rhyme about peas and honey?
Favorite Sentence: And I wave her across the street, watching those long linen skirts she favors brushing her ankles above the leather lacework of her sandals.
Word Length: 349

Photo by Bordercolliez, June 2011.

What clichés do you lean on?

11 May

I noticed a couple of years ago that I have a thing about men’s watches (but only as a writer). If I want to show that a man is full of himself, I give him a Rolex. If I want to show that he doesn’t care about someone he’s talking to, I make him glance at his watch. It pays to notice what clichés you tend to lean on, not just so you can better your habits—I go back and strip out most of my references to watches—but so that you can look for gold in what obsesses you. This morning I thought about my watch habit and decided to build the day’s shorty around a man who can’t stop looking at his watch.

Working Title: My Very Own Fairy Tale
1st Sentence: On actual bended knee.
Favorite Sentence: I couldn’t think how to get it back, how to shape my tongue to the vanishing glide of  the letter Y, much less the E, much less the S.
Word Length: 608

Why sports?

10 May

Hockey figured prominently in May 3’s “Love with a Limp.” And now football. Not even a full two weeks of stories yet and already two sports (that I have never played and barely watch).

Working Title: Football Jenny
1st Sentence: In her hair she wears football barrettes.
Favorite Sentence: So she can watch Rayvon Gardner run his tight ass into the end zone and spike the football, do a dance for Jesus, pay another fine for God?
Word Length: 650

Photo by Torsten Bolten, March 2007.

The Idea File

9 May

I’ve been working harder at keeping up my idea file and that work paid off today. If you consider taking on the Daily Shorty challenge—say a story a day for a week or a story a day for a month—I highly recommend sprucing up your current idea file, first, and then adding to it regularly. I’m finding that because I have to come up with something new every day, I’m tuning in more to what’s happening around me, to overheard snippets of conversation, interesting people-watching, and so on. I’m remembering to carry a small notebook and pen with me everywhere, these days.

Working Title: Future Perfect
1st Sentence: Lately everybody looks like somebody I’ve seen before.
Favorite Sentence: Don’t you just wish, I heard on her breath as she walked away, waving at the counter boy to come take my order, me going crimson to the toenail.
Word Length: 417

A cat appears!

8 May

Maria, aka “Mussolin-a”

In my third semester of my MFA program, my mentor wrote on a story, “I begin to believe you can’t write a story without a cat in it.” I eliminated the cat from the story I was drafting when I read his note and I have tried not to over-use cats ever since. But they do sneak in…. I mentioned a cat in May 1’s story but only as part of a simile. A cat appeared in the story I wrote for May 3 but it was only just a mention, the cat didn’t even get a name. Ditto May 5. But a cat with a name shows up, here. I think waiting a whole week to include a cat-as-character shows excellent restraint.

Working Title: Madame Asbury, Knower of All Secrets
1st Sentence: Her first pair of gloves were crisp white linen.
Favorite Sentence: A dirty palm would flutter in the cradle of her sweating, velvet hand, while she flung words she had learned from old movies and silly paperbacks her mother had left untended, while she traced life lines and counted creases and soothed or baffled or bedeviled, whatever her mood of the day.
Word Length: 1,707

First week done!

7 May

A virtual cupcake for me, to celebrate my first full week! Yahoo! See May’s Story Facts + page for a geeky round-up of the week’s work.

My first week has been much easier than I expected. I write for a good 1.5 to 2 hrs each morning, getting a draft down, then come back at night for 1 to 2 hours to revise that morning’s story or one I wrote on a previous day. True, I’m finding it hard to maintain any balance in my days, but it’s high time my writing is the thing I’m doing too much….

Working Title: Gabriel Calling
1st Sentence: Here’s why I can’t stop thinking about the Apocalypse.
Favorite Sentence: Last week my alphabet soup spelled out GoatMan.
Word Length: 717

Photo by Kristin Ausk, February 2009.

Thanksgiving in May

6 May

Working Title: Middle Child
1st Sentence: Of course Sissy brought sweet potatoes.
Favorite Sentence: His fork stopped on the way to his plate—piled high with a second helping of those damn sweet potatoes—and I thought go ahead, you fat bastard, eat another marshmallow, see if I don’t divorce your pig-ass just for that.
Word Length: 840

Picture from We Have Internets!

With the Hypnotist “El Spirito”

5 May

When I was a kid I’d hear about hypnotists who traveled from city to city, putting on shows in front of huge audiences. Invariably someone would claim that the hypnotist called a member of the audience to the stage, put him under, and made him walk like a chicken for everyone’s amusement, clucking and flapping his arms like wings. Supposedly the chicken-walker never remembers the experience. Finally built a story on that very powerful (and very silly) image.

Working Title: Like the Chicken She Is
1st Sentence: You, there, the lady in the pale green….
Favorite Sentence: Disappearing into the cradling dark, the easy easy nothing.
Word Length: 877

Update: My friend Amy Souza came calling not long after I wrote this story, wondering if I could contribute a short fiction to her latest round of SPARK. “Like the Chicken She Is” served as the inspiration for the piece pictured above, “Vanishing Act” by Sandy Coleman, and for a piece by Amanda Brainerd (page down past the art and you’ll see the story in its entirety). Beautiful work, Ladies!

Tags: , , , ,

For My Friend Dre

4 May

When my friend Dre saw a Rebounder trampoline in my apartment, it reminded her of something she’d heard—that when these tiny trampolines first came out, Amish women were excited about them and tried to use them for exercise. Sadly, their skirts got in the way. I jotted this anecdote down and promised to write a story about it one day.

Working Title: For the Glory of God, Rebound
1st Sentence: They hardly talked about it when they picked it up.
Favorite Sentence: “You could walk just fine on ugly legs.”
Word Length: 1,004

Inspired by a 10-Year-Old Scrap

3 May

Latté Foam Art

Working Title: Love with a Limp
1st Sentence: At a table too small to hold them, a man and a woman are arguing about flying pie pans.
Favorite Sentence: Fuck Foam.
Word Length: 742

Photo by Takeaway, Latté art at Doppio Ristretto in Chiang Mai 2011.

An Easy One

2 May

Working Title: Manda’s Intervention
1st Sentence: One thing we want to get straight right away: You’re always asking—“Is it me?”
Favorite Sentence: To Manda’s intervention, Donald wore red corduroy bell bottoms, a three-inch-wide white plastic belt, white pleather shoes, a long-sleeved polyester shirt patterned like a muddy rainbow and open to the navel, and sunglasses with lenses as big as a wheel of cheese.
Word Length: 322

Photo by Eugen Nosko.

Jumping off the cliff!

1 May

Incredibly busy week publishing a huge project at Hunger Mountain. Actually pulled an all-nighter last night. But I had to start my Daily Shorty project today, so I stayed up a bit later….

The discussion of rhythm in Dave Jauss’s book on craft, Alone With All That Could Happen, had me shouting, “I thought I was the only person who did that!” (See 2. Syntax as Soundtrack in the essay “What We Talk About When We Talk About Flow.”)

I write in rhythm when I can hear the way the story should progress but I can’t find the words. “Like a blah and a blah blah,” she said, tossing her hair again—again!—and flounced away, her blah and blah blah blahing. My brain wouldn’t come up with some of the words for this first shorty, so “rhythm writing” had to serve. Day 1 in the bag!

Working Title: Like Shit on a Cracker
1st Sentence: Like a fine merlot.
Favorite Sentence: Like a hooker late on a slow night and behind on her rent.
Word Length: 481

Tags: , ,

Newer Entries →