So, writer friends, you know how people tell you these outrageous things about their family members and every time you hear one of these stories you get a half-thought that truly you’re going to have to use that batshit-crazy tidbit in a story someday and so you just keep it tucked away, waiting…? The day’s shorty was inspired by one of those tidbits.
Working Title: Old Soul
1st Sentence: When she first began to make the dolls, we were encouraging.
Favorite Sentence: It’s been a whole life of shrugging with that guy.
Word Length: 475
Photo by Somals of a doll exhibit in Budapest 2006.
The handful of you subscribed to this blog know that I missed a few days of posts (I’m writing this on Sunday, November 25). The Thanksgiving holiday overtook me, I’m afraid, but not entirely—I have kept up with my story-a-day commitment, and today I’ll catch up with my posts, backdating as usual so that the date I wrote the story matches the date of the post. I’m not using prompts this week, just letting inspiration come from wherever. This shorty was inspired by grocery shopping, though that doesn’t show in what I have here.
This challenge more and more shakes up my notion of what makes a story. I love this but just like all good educational experiences, the more I learn the more I discover my own cluelessness. Today’s shorty took hold once I settled on a playful conversation between a woman and her father, sitting at a dining table, waiting for dessert. And I found I wanted to stay firmly in that conversation—the story begins with the mother walking away from the dining table and ends when she returns. There is nothing approaching a traditional beginning, middle, and end, and there’s no story arc to speak of. I tried to develop an unspoken conversation beneath the surface of the exchanges, but I don’t know that I was terribly successful. And is this a story? It is a fiction and I was very conscious of my own decision about how to begin it and how to end it. But does that make it a story? All I know is that for the purposes of my Daily Shorty challenge, it is. And the photo today is pulling double-duty. The dessert our protagonists await is an apple pie. Let’s enjoy this gorgeous pie, too, as a celebration for completing Week 29. Yahoo!
This morning’s fragrance was… Worcestershire sauce. Nothing smells quite like it, yes? A big whiff of it made me think of my mother preparing the kind of food you take to a party—dips, sauces. Which in turn made me think of deviled eggs. Which in turn made me think of family reunions.
Oy, another tough one. The husband had trouble coming up with a scent for the day so when we went out this morning he drove to the gas station to fill up and I rolled down the window to get a whiff. Doesn’t show itself much in the shorty but the smell of gasoline was indeed its inspiration.
Having a really tough week because I’ve got other commitments that are taking a lot of time. I pulled this one out, inspired by the fragrance of a burning match, but only just. I think I’ve got something that could come good in revision, so okay. Onward!
My husband enjoys few things more than a huge bowl of Cheerios. Whenever he eats Cheerios, which is almost every day and often twice a day, I am struck by the very specific scent of that cereal and I have commented on it. So no surprise when I woke up to discover a giant box of Cheerios as the fragrance prompt the husband chose for my day. I opened the box and sniffed the cereal multiple times but in the end I couldn’t come up with a story until he came home and fixed a bowl for himself. And there it was, the smell I know so well. Maybe there’s something about his eating pleasure that adds to the scent.
Today’s fragrance was a “Christmas Cookie” scented candle from Yankee Candle that was hanging around our apartment somewhere. The husband left it at my bedside this morning. I smelled it. I smelled it again. And I was stumped. I smelled it once more. Still stumped. So I filled my day with other things and then very, very late, thoughts about baking cookies led to thoughts about candy led to a childhood memory led to a complete story. Ergh. Next.
Today marks the start of a week of shorties inspired by fragrance. This morning’s fragrance: freshly sliced orange. I also wave goodbye to Week 28, so I need to post a virtual treat. This lovely orange cake will do very well, yes?
At the gym, today, I sat on a mat and thought about all the grieving mothers and fathers. Later I wrote a story based on the notes I took.
You’d think that after 6 months of this I’d have so many tricks up my sleeve that I could just sling a story to the page and then waltz off to do whatever moves me. You’d be wrong. I still have days now and again where I work and work and work, all day long, taking food and small entertainment breaks, on getting one simple story to the page. But I did it, dammit, and I sort of like the story, too.
Nothing like writing a story every day for more than 6 months to make you find gewgaws in your childhood worth talking about. And that makes the very first time in my life I’ve ever used the word “gewgaws.”
Mine is not a family with a photographed history. My parents had a hard enough time keeping their kids clothed and fed—there was no money for reams of photos and no money, anyway, for the kinds of things people documented in those days, family trips and birthday parties and fancy Halloween costumes. Of course this marks my age, too. For quite some time, now, taking photos has been easy and cheap. People document a trip to Taco Bell, memorialize a hangnail. Not so when I was a kid, even less so when my parents were young adults. All to say that growing up I almost obsessively studied the very few, the precious photos taken of my parents, my brother, my sister, and myself before we were… us. I knew who we were as we lived and breathed, but who were these characters in the photographs? Today’s shorty was inspired by a few of those photos.
Yesterday I got whacked in the face by a badminton racquet. I play four times a week with faculty and staff at the local college and I’m the least athletic, so I am often where I shouldn’t be. Fortunately, it was a glancing blow because my playing partner saw my stupid face at the last second and did his best to pull back. Unfortunately, I was playing with our best player who is by far our hardest hitter. So today I woke up with a welt under my right eye, a tender bruise across the bridge of my nose, and a small, painful knot on my left eyebrow. And a headache centered around my eyes and nose. Story fodder!
The Halloween candy is long gone but the holiday’s imagery and themes linger. The phone pictured here looks a lot like the very first phone I can remember, back when I was about 3 years old. I loved the way that handle felt in my hand, and the noise the rotary dial made.
With all the election excitement, I clean forgot to celebrate my completion of another week of the Daily Shorty challenge yesterday. Doesn’t this cocoa look wonderful? Let’s drink a fond farewell to Week 27! And hello, week 28. Not starting the week with a barn burner, but… glad to be starting the week.
Election fever has set in with a vengeance. I’ve done a pretty good job avoiding the news for some time now but the energy of the Big Day is pouring over me, now, and I’m finding it very difficult to focus. No surprise that the day’s shorty is lackluster. It was inspired by my last texture prompt, a small die (as in one of a pair of dice) that the husband handed me this morning. For some reason after pressing my thumb into each side of it I began to tap my fingernails on it. That reminded me of the sound of high heels on a hard floor, so that wound up prompting the story. Yes, I know, a sound, not a texture. What can you do.
I put something over four hard hours into this one. I had three starts that refused to grow, so then I just made myself try to blend them. I cut one and made a story out of the other two. Didn’t really work—get comfortable on that hard drive, story # 188—but I always hope the sweat equity counts for something. The texture, today, came from one of those small, air-filled plastic pillow thingies used to cushion shipped goods. I was trying to get a good picture of it when someone came along to make enquiries. Don’t know what Maria thought of it, but holding this thing made me think of tearing into a bag of chips.
Today the husband dropped a Styrofoam ball into my outstretched hands. And in response I wrote a creepy story he much approves—the husband really enjoys creepy—which is only right.
Many years ago—I think I was still in high school—a man in our rural neighborhood plowed under his wife’s strawberry patch as punishment for something they had argued about. She was known for the amazing strawberries she harvested every summer, which might have been the problem—they were deeply religious and he often cited her pride for those berries and other accomplishments (she was an incredible seamstress and a wonderful cook) as regrettable sin she should repent. As even I know, despite two thumbs that will never shade green, it takes many years of devotion to get really sweet, fat berries, so when he destroyed her patch he was destroying years of work and love. I cried when I heard the story, because it struck me as such a cruel, hateful thing to do. The wife, also known for her unbreakable good cheer, replanted and carried on. Back to the present: The texture of the day was a small, soft, squishy puffball. It reminded me of cat fur and so inspired the first sentence of my story.
The husband handed me a piece of a geode this morning (it looks almost exactly like this picture I pulled from the Web), the texture (and inevitably the look) of which inspired one aspect of the protagonist of this gleefully short story. Yesterday the look of my “texture prompt” definitely inspired the story more than the feel of it. Maybe I should do my best to lock onto my story idea while holding my texture prompt with eyes closed, so that it’s more likely I’ll focus on the sense of touch in the inspired story? Or maybe I should just be glad every time I get an idea that develops into a story and not give into the temptation to grade my process. Yeah, that.
I am shocked and thrilled that I have written a story every single day for six months straight. And honestly, I’m afraid to say much more than that. Taking this project one day at a time has been crucially important since, oh, I finished May, so I’m not going to change tactics now. As for my virtual celebration treat, is it not exquisite?? I wanted to put up a picture of caramel apples—my all-time favorite Halloween treat—but although I bought the stuff to make them, I wound up devoting that time to watching a couple of Halloween-themed shows the husband and I love. And I couldn’t find a good picture online that I was free to use. So this fabulous caramel apple cheesecake will just have to do. I can’t say I’m disappointed. As for the day’s shorty, it was inspired both by a “page weight” my husband handed me this morning, an object archivists use to hold down the page of a book that shouldn’t be touched by the reader, and by Halloween. The page weight looks and feels like nothing so much as an oddly weighted shoe string, which inspired the first line of the story.
Trying a new set of prompts this week based on texture. I have asked the devoted husband to present me, each morning of this 27th week of my Daily Shorty challenge, with an object that has a notable and uniform texture. Today a rubber eraser, which inspired the first line of my shorty. After the first paragraph, the story went bonkers, in the same way that one of Barthelme’s really goofy, “What on earth is he on about” stories skip across the page just for fun. Not to suggest that my shorty lives in the same house as a Barthelme story. More to say that I thought of him as I wrote it. My story is out on the sidewalk, gazing up at a Barthelme story’s window, blowing kisses.
And a fond farewell to Week 26! One of my all-time favorite treats is pistachio ice cream—enjoy it with me as I celebrate another completed week of the Daily Shorty challenge. The last inspiration I pulled from my mystery box was part of the top of a corroded aerosol can, which got me fixated on the thought of hairspray. I covered three pages with various ideas and story starts related to hairspray—I couldn’t shake the image of it—and finally landed on a story as list using that number again: 7. Many thanks, again, to Jen Hicks. I love saying this: I owe you one!
It took this Daily Shorty project to teach me what a joy it can be to write in a parking lot. There’s something so… in between about that space, so not-place about it—it nicely empties your mind of whatever’s bugging you so story ideas can rush in. Now when I find myself in a parking lot, I see my time there as “found time” in the same way that I consider that five dollar bill I just pulled from the pocket of a jacket “found money.” I wrote today’s shorty in the lot of the local Hannaford while the husband, grateful to be free of my label-reading attention, restocked our pantry and fridge. My mystery box inspiration today was a black and white photo of a man in work clothes at a table covered in tools. Looks like he’s in a large space—a factory? And the photo looks period. Maybe the 1930s, 1940s? The tools inspired my story, so here I’ve put up a picture of a toolbox. One more day of the mystery box!
My week is going faster than usual, even, because I’m doing so much editing. Hoping for a much lighter November. I hand-wrote today’s shorty, which is something I haven’t done in a while. I highly recommend going back and forth between hand-writing and composing on the keyboard. There’s something so sensual about running a pen across the page—I think I access my writing brain a little differently. The photo shows today’s inspiration—a little notion that looks like a button (but isn’t) resting on the paper I used to write the story. The notion is embossed with the figure of a… moth… butterfly… dragonfly? I saw a dragonfly at first, so that’s what inspired my story. Now I’m not so sure, but the story, in any case, is a wrap.
Today’s inspiration: a torn piece from a catalog. On one side of the page is a lovely young woman with long blond hair in a prettified out-doors-ey outfit that includes a fancy scarf. On the other side, a sweet, girlish, hand-crafty bracelet at top and a rockin’ pair of studded harness boots at bottom. I studied both sides of the page for something around 5 minutes, then wrote a story that included none of these things but did feature a photographer trying to take pretty pictures. My silly image at the top of the post is a goofy catalog-page-like decoration that I assembled from pretty pics of things similar to what’s on my page scrap.
Inspiration sprang from my box today in the form of two rusty nails, which reminded me of one of the things my mother warned me about when I was a kid. Don’t go out barefoot or you’ll step on a rusty nail and then you’ll get lockjaw! I thought that was a really funny threat until I read a coming of age book set at the turn of the century or thereabouts, when young ladies wore bloomers and dresses and tied their hair back with ribbons, and, according to this book, planned their nuptials at the tender age of 14. The main character’s love—a feisty and loyal young man with raven hair—was thrown from a carriage and cut himself on the wagon wheel. And then died a gruesome, slow-motion death owing to, yes, lockjaw. She held his grotesquely grinning face to her budding breast and sobbed the same tears I silently shed under my bedcovers around 2:00 in the morning with my father’s filched mini-flashlight. How would our heroine ever know love again? Oh. Too, too cruel.
The lovely and talented Jen Hicks, writer friend and Hunger Mountain colleague, recently sent me a mystery box all the way from her home in St. Paul. She just said, hey, what’s your address, and a few weeks later comes a box with random goodies I can use for story prompts. What a treat! Today’s shorty was inspired by the first thing I fished out of the box, the button pictured very badly here because I wield a camera about as well as I can throw a ball—but get out of my way if I’ve got a Frisbee (just sayin’). The button says “Restore Monkey Island” and has a picture of a banana on it. Love it! The story I don’t love as much because I couldn’t compress my vision enough but it’s got a lot of potential for when I can come back to revise.
And adieu to Week 25! Enjoy with me this pretty éclair as I celebrate another completed week of this project. Many thanks again to Leslie Anderson for her inspirational paintings posted at 
Daily Shorty 