Using the Summer Stories Short Story Competition put together by the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and Shanti Arts Publishing as a source for prompts this week. Maine writers are invited to write and submit (by March 1) short stories inspired by a series of paintings by Maine artist Leslie Anderson. The day’s shorty was inspired by Anderson’s “Narrow Gauge.”
Working Title: The Conductor
1st Sentence: The red caboose was not, as everyone around him thought, Jeffrey’s favorite toy.
Favorite Sentence: When the babysitter thinks he’s nuzzling, even kissing the red caboose—ohmygod so adorable—he is, in fact, whispering instructions.
Word Length: 900
Photo by Ktb615 5/2010.
Another day inspired by the Summer Stories Short Story Competition put together by the 
Maine writers, look sharp! The deadline is drawing near for the Summer Stories Short Story Competition put together by the 
Finally, a break! This one didn’t land in my lap whole but I got it in two reasonable sessions and even had time to polish it up a bit before evening fell. Very rare, these days. And goodbye to another week of this challenge! Celebrating with this picture of a “banana royale.” If it were real I could down it in about 2 minutes flat, I think.
Again, many false starts. Much gnashing of teeth. Finally, a decent little shorty. Awarding myself these tulips for all the recent especially hard work. Very tired.
Very nearly beaten by this one. Many false starts, much exhaustion, no direction, pure frustration. So I played free-association with a scene I didn’t know how to end… and then forced an ending. Done.
I woke up thinking morbid thoughts. So… morbid shorty.
Sometimes I just have to start with nothing. My mind roams and I type words or sentences and then delete them and type more and delete again and more and again until an image holds, for no reason I can divine, and I stop deleting as the sentences spin out into a larger whole.
I don’t think people threaten kids with what might appear on their Permanent Record anymore. But it was something I heard a lot growing up. Don’t even think of doing X or it’ll wind up on your Permanent Record! Strangely, this threat had teeth, at least for me. But I’ve always been a coward. Today’s shorty is another written in the form of a list of 7 things.
I neglected to celebrate the completion of Week 36 in January 7th’s story post below. Likewise, I began this week forgetting that I should use a writing prompt to keep up with my practice (for some time now) of alternating weeks using writing prompts with weeks of coming up with ideas entirely randomly. Well, that’s how it’s been, lately. I may have to accept that I’m not going to regain a normal-ish level of energy for the remainder of this challenge. Major mental fatigue has settled in and seems to abate somewhat for only a couple of days at a time. I do continue to write stories that surprise and delight me, at least one every week. How long can I go? I guess we’ll find out. For now enjoy with me this turtle fudge to celebrate another week of shorties. The day’s story was inspired by a conversation I had recently with a friend about fertility treatments.
Not the first time I’ve spun a story from my focus on one word and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Woke up this morning thinking too many things at once, which produced a few false starts. So I closed my eyes and said, “Silence, that’s what I need.” After a few minutes of a quiet mind I typed the word silence into my Word file. And the shorty was born. Almost more of a prose poem.
One of my favorite and really intense memories from very young childhood is of the occasional Sunday breakfast made up of fried salt herring, eggs, and biscuits. (Yes, probably that should be “salted” herring, but I remember that we never said it that way.) We didn’t have much money, so only rarely–after a good paycheck with overtime–did my father get that craving and drive out early on a Sunday to hit a local place that sold the fried salt herring. I have no idea how the rest of my family felt but I was always Daddy’s little girl, certainly with regard to food, and I remember practically vibrating in anticipation, waiting for his return. He’d come back with brown paper packages containing the just-fried fish. My mother would open the packets on the table, add freshly baked biscuits and scrambled eggs, and we’d be off and running, eating our food from the paper. Half-meal, half-sport. After a few false starts on a shorty, this memory came to me. I asked my husband, also raised in Virginia but by parents who are not native to the state, if he’d ever had this breakfast and he said no. I did a Google search for “salt herring breakfast” and every hit I got specifically for that phrase came from a Virginia diner or a Virginia Moose lodge or Ruritan club. I copied the menu item above from the 
Woke up thinking about aversion therapy and then I started laughing about how aversion therapy might be attempted for someone like poor Charlie Brown, who realizes with Lucy’s help in “A Charlie Brown Christmas” that he fears everything. Brought all this to the page and had fun with it.
This story was born because I woke up thinking about the words wholly, holy, and holey (hole-y), which got me thinking about how holiness is generally considered a plus but holeyness (hole-i-ness) not so much (although for some things, like Swiss cheese and colanders, a good thing). As for the shorty, still dark stuff but at least there’s a little word play in this one and I think this shorty might turn out to be a keeper.
It seems the fatigue is producing some pretty dark stuff and not with the usual relief of humor. I read the day’s shorty again just now and winced. Moving on to the next and hoping for light.
I’m writing and back-dating story posts now, and when I consult my notes to see what I was thinking when I wrote each day’s shorty, I mostly see “I’m tired.” Today’s shorty might or might not come good when I have a chance to go back to it, but anyway I’m grateful for it because my favorite sentence gives me an excuse to post a photo of potato chips. Mmmmm.
December kicked my Daily Shorty butt. I was in danger of shutting down multiple times, which is why I’m yet again backdating story posts. When I’m that fatigued, I can only keep up with the stories, and posts have to go by the wayside. Anyway, here’s to a more energetic 2013! Starting the year with a shorty about a topic alien to me: motherhood. I have been spared the duty of parsing mothering advice but I see my friends negotiating the deluge of shoulds coming from all quarters.
I’m celebrating the end of Week 35 with the tastiest looking picture of a Christmas pudding I’ve ever seen. Samuel Pepys would approve, I’m sure. As for the work of the day, I shouldn’t be surprised that 350 years ago on 
The liveliest of the diary entries yet! Pepys recorded a fat handful of juicy details on 
On 
On this 
On December 27, 1662, Samuel Pepys 
350 years ago today, Samuel Pepys 
If I’m ever feeling full of myself for writing a story every day for so many months, I need only remind myself of Samuel Pepys to prevent ego-bloat. The man wrote a diary entry every single day for 10 years, from January 1, 1660, until the end of 1669. Now THAT is a commitment! I’ve been alternating story-prompt weeks with non-story-prompt weeks, and it’s time for prompts again. In brainstorming possible prompts, I thought of old Sam’s diary, which I’d always heard was pretty lively. Turns out, a man named 
And another week locked away! I once posted a pic of a Dark Milkyway as my celebration treat and confessed then that my palate can be a very cheap date. My husband put Twizzlers in my Christmas stocking this year and I squealed with delight when I found them. So enjoy with me this very cheap treat as I say goodbye to another week. The day’s shorty was inspired by another scrap from the Idea File that I then mostly junked once the story took shape. The story’s got some gaps–just barely makes it into my definition of “complete” for the purposes of this challenge–but it’s also got some good potential.
Several starts got me nowhere and my mind felt blank, so I went looking for something interesting in stories that are unfinished or finished but bad. I stumbled over a paragraph that I’d tacked onto the end of a poor story I’ve never been able to rescue in the four or five years of occasionally playing with it. That (now re-worked) paragraph sparked the day’s shorty.
It’s been a while since I’ve written a shorty for sheer amusement. Feels good!
Ahh, back to that long, over-ambitious, unfinish-able story that partly launched this challenge. Not long after getting my MFA, I started on a linked collection of stories set here in Maine (I’m a transplant from NC). I poured my heart into it and I have written, oh, 60 or 70 pages of material for the “launch” story and other characters and situations I want to develop. But almost three years later I still hadn’t completed that first story and couldn’t find my way out of it. Nor could I finish any other story-in-progress, which is mostly why I committed to writing a story every day in May, yada yada. The day’s shorty is a re-worked excerpt from that unfinished story. I have no idea why, in the middle of working on a lackluster something-else, I remembered this chunk and was inspired to make a shorty of it, but there you go.
I tend not to provide much setting in my stories. My characters could be any sort of people, located Anywhere, USA. So one of the things always lurking in the back of my creative brain is the desire to incorporate local landscape and culture into my writing more. In one small effort, today’s shorty grew from a description of the river that bordered the back of our property growing up. That bit has been in my idea file for a while, so it needed its own space.
Daily Shorty 