Well, I’ve started Week 47 with a bang. Or something. This story is… frantic, feverish, and not a little silly. It makes me laugh but also puzzles me. This is not my best work—I think it could use a bit more depth and punch. But I can’t think of another time when I’ve written something that both tickles and pokes me this much. If it takes, what, 323 straight days of writing a story every new day to accomplish that, then I’ll just go ahead and declare this whole challenge a success, even if I wind up not making it to the end. So a bouquet of flowers goes to me for this version of success. But I do really want to make it to the end….
Working Title: Ecstatic
1st Sentence: True, life has occasionally knocked her on her ass but always before in ordinary, “I should have seen that coming” ways.
Favorite Sentence: The nun is posted on the porch, a yard stick resting on her lap, keeping the reporters and the old boyfriend at bay.
Word Length: 721
Photo by Vimukthi 2/2011.
I don’t think there’s a connection between St. Patrick’s Day and the ugly vibe I’ve got going in this story. I don’t know why I sometimes write about the violence men do to women. I guess because I’ll never figure out how so many of us can be so cruel.
Look, my hard drive needs friends, too. I’ve produced work at every level during this challenge, including a nice collection of stories that can live peacefully in their hard drive community, never disturbed in any way. The day’s shorty is one of them.
I’m discovering that desperation can be a useful tool. Again, I worked late into the night to get something. And this shorty so wants to be good but can’t quite pull it off. I wrote it from a child’s point of view, something I almost never do, so I can be proud that I strayed from my usual path.
Like I said in a previous post, when I bounce back these days it’s only for a day or so. Mostly I’m just really, really, really tired, and often, as with this one, the story refuses to come until I’m so DONE with the day that I have to force something. But… this shorty is actually pretty good. Maybe.
This one didn’t come out quite right but it has potential. I have no idea how I stumbled onto that first sentence after struggling all day to come up with something that would hold. I know I was falling asleep and feeling pretty desperate by the time it came to me.
This piece started as a 5-minute writing exercise with my friends Patty and Joani, so I feel like they gave it to me. Thanks Ladies! It’s small and humble but I like it. The piece of biscotti I just bought and ate with a cup of coffee was not small and humble. I neglected to take a picture of my snack, so this photo will do as my official celebration for finishing another week. And this time the celebration, for me, is not just virtual. Yum.
Oh, the heartache of finding this story. Finally pulled it out but left some gaps. I think it’ll be a keeper when I can get back to it, though. This marks my last day of a week of prompts using the 
It took a long time for this one to arrive but once it did, it wrote itself. So, another gift in a tough week. I can’t tell how good this shorty is but I like it because I played with allusions to the old fairy tales about trolls guarding bridges. Inspired, of course, by the 
So this is the fourth time I’ve traveled during the DS challenge. I left Wednesday first thing for Boston, where AWP is holding its annual conference. I’d forgotten how hard it is to be in a different place and keep up with my story-a-day promise. Ergh. Anyway, if I can figure out what this piece is missing, maybe I’ll make some progress on how to write good stories that are fewer than 250 words. The shorty is almost good but… isn’t. And I have absolutely no idea how I got from this 
I’m always hesitant to say that I’ve learned any particular thing with regard to writing because I never know how the ground will shift tomorrow. But I think I can say that I have taught myself how to write very short. Not teeny-tiny, mind you—I don’t know that I will ever be able to write good pieces that are, say, 250 words or fewer. That is a feat I can barely comprehend. But I have now written a fat handful of pieces under 500 words that I like a lot. Given that I couldn’t do that at all before this challenge, I feel pretty excited. The shorty this picture of the day at 
This photo of a Russian palace, the picture of the day at 
My first sustained period of mental fatigue hit hard in August. I beat it back by using various kinds of story prompts for a while. Then I fell into the habit of a week of prompts, a week of no prompts, followed by a period of anything goes. I was feeling so exhausted as March began (I’m writing this catch-up post on March 19) that I reached again for prompts as a solution. My DS weeks begin on Tuesdays, so on March 5 I started a week using the “picture of the day” at 
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 remember loving the idea for this shorty about a man who for no reason starts hearing the thoughts of people who are speaking to him. A bad movie cliché, I know, but I like the way I’d envisioned the story unfolding. But the execution is terrible, and not just because I had to leave some gaps. Maybe I’ll come back to it, maybe I won’t.
I was in a better mood when I wrote this one and feeling more rested. I’ll enjoy coming back to it but I think in the end it will be a shorty only its mother can love.
January was brutal, February was worse, and March is hardest yet (I’m writing this catch-up post 3/19). The wall is coming. This first March shorty will enjoy a long life on my hard drive.
And good riddance. January was brutal and February was worse, both because we had to euthanize our beautiful kitty—I’ve put up another of my favorite pictures of her, here—and because for the entire month I fought a kind of fatigue that just totally took over my mind. I used to be able to bounce back for weeks at a time. Now a good bounce lasts maybe a day. Well, I wanted to know what would happen to me if I wrote a story every day for a year, and now I’m finding out. The day’s shorty is a sad one about a grieving widow. Fitting.
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.
This process continues to amaze me. Toward the end of a totally brutal month (I’m writing this catch-up post in March), I write a joke-story that makes me laugh. Thank goodness for the muse’s sense of humor.
Easy ones are increasingly rare so I’m grateful for this shorty that wrote itself, a strange piece about a poet that came from who knows where. And I’m so happy to officially mark another week! I’m celebrating with my memory of the fabulous burgers I ate at 
When I catch up on story posts—I’m writing this one about 3 weeks later—I use notes describing the writing session that I leave in the Word file created for the shorty. This file had no notes and I had no memory of the piece even as I read it just now. It’s refreshing, though, because it’s really strange and total fiction, unlike so many autobiographical pieces I wrote in February. The ending is a speed-written plunge with gaps (it’s obvious I was nodding off as I wrote it) and the ending scenario is very likely to change, but at least this one is well worth coming back to.
When I’m severely stuck, which is a state I’m living in far too often these days, I follow the advice to look for my material in my obsessions, gripes, fears. A huge gripe is the condescending things some mothers say to me when they discover I chose not to have children.
More and more, as I crawl through this challenge, childhood memory provides. This turned out to be a cnf piece about my mother’s strange predilection for noting the proper titles and occupations of anyone in the public eye.
This shorty is based on a taste memory I’ve been chasing, and it’s a great example of a piece that is very well done for what it is, but there’s kind of no there there. If I were more of a poet perhaps I could write a compelling shorty based only on taste. Next time!
There are bad shorties and then there are shorties that revel in their badness, mocking me with a smoker’s choked laughter, inviting me to question this project, my calling. Go ahead and laugh. No one else will ever hear you. Laugh while I move on to the next.
One of the ways I rescue a totally arid brain is to go back to childhood. This story about my mother using gasoline to light our wood stove fits nicely into a small package. Oh, the horror on my father’s face when he discovered she’d been doing that—maybe I’ll write that story sometime.
Well, I ended the week on a high note. I’m not sure this story is in its final form but it’s got a lot of energy and promise and it’s one I’ll enjoy coming back to. To mark the accomplishment of finishing Week 42, a piece of banana coconut cream pie with a cashew graham crust and chocolate and caramel sauce.
All the notes I took for this week of stories said things like “I’m tired” and “Still sad about [my cat] Maria” and “Not in the flow.” So it’s not surprising that this is the first story this week that feels right and whole.
Daily Shorty 