My nano project.
Dec. 14th, 2010 12:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amand_rSo my goal was 50,000 words of original short stories,each inspired by a fortune from a fortune cookie. I got the fortunes, I got the files, and the openings, but not one of them is finished. In fact, my nano final word count was well under 5K. But I'm going to finish them all. But I have no idea what to work on. So here are the openings, and if you care to read them, let me know which ones you'd like to see more of, and I can priortise them.
NOVEMBER 1: Cherry thinks that it's fortuitous that her fortune would tell her to be a kid again just as she's thinking about digging into her child's Halloween candy. Dexter is only three, and there's no way in hell he's going to eat all that candy himself, so really, it's her Halloween candy, right? That she had let him go trick or treating two nights in a row in two different places was in no way a reflection on her greed for the can-day.
NOVEMBER 2: Whippoorwill Jones merely hated her name until the first time she saw it in print on her WANTED poster. Then she fucking detested it.
NOVEMBER 3: "That heating blanket doesn't work," I told Carl over breakfast. "It was so hot that I had to throw it off. I kept turning it down."
Carl licked the underside of his spoon, but didn't make a response. I wasn't allowed to talk to him before nine-thirty, but I did anyway, and he ignored it.
NOVEMBER 4: The plaque on the far wall directly in my eyesight each and every day says, "EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH: Alice Shand," accompanied by a girl's blond haired, blue-eyed visage staring sullenly at the camera. It's not me. I've only been working here for three months.
Alice has been dead for seven. Still, employee of the month.
NOVEMBER 5: Additionally, my mother has informed me that she's started having visions. Because that's what every child wants to hear.
NOVEMBER 6: Bert is a traffic cop who hates speeding, red lights, pylons, and anyone behind the wheel of a vehicle. This is not to say that he hates you per se. If you met him on the street and waved a hand, shouting a cheery "Hello there!" you'd probably only get a grunt, but grunts doth not equal hate.
NOVEMBER 7: The best thing for the Cracker Barrel, Dodi thought, was to set it on fire. She never would, but she could dream about it.
NOVEMBER 8: They come to the church bake sale with pies and smiles. They leave with empty hands and sense that they have done something to make the world better.
NOVEMBER 9: In the middle of the fever dream, when the most astounding and insane of images failed to surprise me, I had a moment of lucidity not unlike the eye of a hurricane. I knew that Liddy was somewhere in the room, and I knew that I was very ill; the smell of camphor and mustard was all but overpowering.
NOVEMBER 10: This stretch of road is dark. There used to be street lights, or maybe they were never there. Sometimes it's hard to tell what's memory and what's wishful thinking, and the two become fused like a transparency of a picture over the same picture in a different way.
NOVEMBER 11: There's a large skunk that lives under the porch. We call him Enrique Jones. I don't know what his real name is.
NOVEMBER 12: When hosting a dinner party, never empty the trash and set the full bag outside the front door. No matter how busy you are, excuse yourself, and walk it to the dumpster, or have your husband do it. That way, when your boss and her husband leave, they won't open the front door to a ripped open bag of ripped apart chicken bones and a nonplussed raccoon who is so used to people that he just flashes a gang sign and says, 'Yo. Sup?'
NOVEMBER 13: Everybody had wings but her, and Carol was going to do something about it.
NOVEMBER 14: The snow had moved in the wind, piling up in places and thinning out in others.
NOVEMBER 15: The nurses call him Tony Lestroney, and you think he's in the mafia until he actually comes up on your rotation, and you see his name: LeStrone, Anthony. That makes things clearer.
NOVEMBER 16: The only way to hide the unicorn, Betty decided as she stared blankly out the kitchen window, was to glue horns onto all the other horses' heads.
NOVEMBER 17: "I can't help but think that you might get more done about the house if you didn't spend the day playing video games," Rob said over his shoulder as he examined the carton of orange juice in his hand. There were lipstick prints on the paperboard rim. He didn't have a girlfriend, and as far as he knew, Joel hadn't moved from the couch for the last three weeks.
NOVEMBER 18: Carl and Jasper found the bay in the emergency room easily enough. There were only five of them in the unit, and Maman's was the only one that was occupied, they could tell from the screaming. The blue-green curtain ruffled and something flew out into the hallway. Jasper glanced at Karl and shrugged.
"I saw you take the plates! I'll report you and spit on your carcass!"
"Ah," Jasper said, "she's in good form." It was no secret that Jasper wasn't fond of Maman
NOVEMBER 19: The tree was obviously growing outside, but sometime in the previous year, my brother Karl had opened the window so that one of the branches could grow right inside the house and stretch over the dining room table like a spectral hand asking for something.
NOVEMBER 20: Roger put Carla's torso into the baler and wondered what would happen when he pressed the operate button. He was wearing a trash bag just in case.
NOVEMBER 21: If you keep your hands on ten and two, and you stare at the road intently and glance at the speedometer every once in a while, and diligently in the rearview mirror right after, you can drive home buzzed without being pulled over or having an accident.
NOVEMBER 22: Lance was made to be a cowboy, from the shoes to the hat to the smile that went 'ting!' when he winked at the ladies. He was a fair hand at the lasso and he could stay on the back of the meanest bull for over thirty seconds at least.
Too bad he was in a coma.
NOVEMBER 23: "The pearl necklace is the greatest end shot of any porno," Bill said as he handed the clerk the stack of videos.
NOVEMBER 24: We never did learn to rebel. We always talked about it in the middle of the night, smoking onion skin cigarettes and waiting for the guards to make another round.
NOVEMBER 25: The prince has a winning smile, a castle and stock options, a bottle of Cristal and a dozen roses. He also has a raging case of herpes.
These are the things a modern princess has to consider when they ride up with their entourage of post pubescent "buddies" and wait on their horses outside the drawbridge. Your father stands there at your door while you peer through the frosted window at the man-boy and wonder if it's worth it. You can hear dad's dry skin as he wrings his hands together.
Herpes, financial security. Man-child, house in the country. Drinking buddies, relative independence. Hrm.
You sit back down and open the volume of Gray's Anatomy you got three weeks ago at the flea market. There's dried something on one of the pages and you hope it's viscera.
"Pass," you tell your dad.
"Oh for god's sake," he says.
"He's got VD," you say.
"I'll tell him you're dead," your dad says, turning abruptly and heading for the stairs.
NOVEMBER 26: Last night I walked the former Premier of a large world power to the toilet and wiped his ass. It's pretty nasty, but he's a good tipper. Also? He gets wasted and tells me stories about rimming Henry Kissenger.
NOVEMBER 27: Three weeks after the power cut off, we thought about burning all the board games. If we did that, we'd be warm and bored, as opposed to cold and entertained. Sarah explained that dice were hard to roll when you'd lost all your fingers to gangrene, and I had to admit that she had a point.
NOVEMBER 28: The end of the line was three blocks away. I'd slept in, and now I was going to have to go all the way to the end. That is the last time I let Boba Fett talk me into Yager bombs at the hotel bar.
NOVEMBER 29: I got a raise I got a raise I got a raise I got a raise. "I got a raise," I told the florist.
"Good for you."
"I got a raise."
"Yes, I heard. Daffodils again?"
NOVEMBER 30: "So if you're in jail, and you're on vacation, is that like free room and board?" Josh popped something in his mouth and spit it out. "This food is horrible. No wonder it's free."
"That's mattress stuffing."
NOVEMBER 31: I'm not sure if Brendan thinks his 'dutch oven' gag is actually funny, or if he thinks this is something guys are supposed to do. Brendan isn't good at this whole 'what guys do' thing, which is odd for a construction worker, queer or not. You'd think he'd absorb it through osmosis if he wanted to. And not that he should, because 'guy stuff' is lame. Well, the 'dutch-oven-football-watching-I-left-an-enormous-dump-in-the-toilet-seriously-go-look' guy stuff. Maybe that's what he learns at work.
Yeah?
NOVEMBER 1: Cherry thinks that it's fortuitous that her fortune would tell her to be a kid again just as she's thinking about digging into her child's Halloween candy. Dexter is only three, and there's no way in hell he's going to eat all that candy himself, so really, it's her Halloween candy, right? That she had let him go trick or treating two nights in a row in two different places was in no way a reflection on her greed for the can-day.
NOVEMBER 2: Whippoorwill Jones merely hated her name until the first time she saw it in print on her WANTED poster. Then she fucking detested it.
NOVEMBER 3: "That heating blanket doesn't work," I told Carl over breakfast. "It was so hot that I had to throw it off. I kept turning it down."
Carl licked the underside of his spoon, but didn't make a response. I wasn't allowed to talk to him before nine-thirty, but I did anyway, and he ignored it.
NOVEMBER 4: The plaque on the far wall directly in my eyesight each and every day says, "EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH: Alice Shand," accompanied by a girl's blond haired, blue-eyed visage staring sullenly at the camera. It's not me. I've only been working here for three months.
Alice has been dead for seven. Still, employee of the month.
NOVEMBER 5: Additionally, my mother has informed me that she's started having visions. Because that's what every child wants to hear.
NOVEMBER 6: Bert is a traffic cop who hates speeding, red lights, pylons, and anyone behind the wheel of a vehicle. This is not to say that he hates you per se. If you met him on the street and waved a hand, shouting a cheery "Hello there!" you'd probably only get a grunt, but grunts doth not equal hate.
NOVEMBER 7: The best thing for the Cracker Barrel, Dodi thought, was to set it on fire. She never would, but she could dream about it.
NOVEMBER 8: They come to the church bake sale with pies and smiles. They leave with empty hands and sense that they have done something to make the world better.
NOVEMBER 9: In the middle of the fever dream, when the most astounding and insane of images failed to surprise me, I had a moment of lucidity not unlike the eye of a hurricane. I knew that Liddy was somewhere in the room, and I knew that I was very ill; the smell of camphor and mustard was all but overpowering.
NOVEMBER 10: This stretch of road is dark. There used to be street lights, or maybe they were never there. Sometimes it's hard to tell what's memory and what's wishful thinking, and the two become fused like a transparency of a picture over the same picture in a different way.
NOVEMBER 11: There's a large skunk that lives under the porch. We call him Enrique Jones. I don't know what his real name is.
NOVEMBER 12: When hosting a dinner party, never empty the trash and set the full bag outside the front door. No matter how busy you are, excuse yourself, and walk it to the dumpster, or have your husband do it. That way, when your boss and her husband leave, they won't open the front door to a ripped open bag of ripped apart chicken bones and a nonplussed raccoon who is so used to people that he just flashes a gang sign and says, 'Yo. Sup?'
NOVEMBER 13: Everybody had wings but her, and Carol was going to do something about it.
NOVEMBER 14: The snow had moved in the wind, piling up in places and thinning out in others.
NOVEMBER 15: The nurses call him Tony Lestroney, and you think he's in the mafia until he actually comes up on your rotation, and you see his name: LeStrone, Anthony. That makes things clearer.
NOVEMBER 16: The only way to hide the unicorn, Betty decided as she stared blankly out the kitchen window, was to glue horns onto all the other horses' heads.
NOVEMBER 17: "I can't help but think that you might get more done about the house if you didn't spend the day playing video games," Rob said over his shoulder as he examined the carton of orange juice in his hand. There were lipstick prints on the paperboard rim. He didn't have a girlfriend, and as far as he knew, Joel hadn't moved from the couch for the last three weeks.
NOVEMBER 18: Carl and Jasper found the bay in the emergency room easily enough. There were only five of them in the unit, and Maman's was the only one that was occupied, they could tell from the screaming. The blue-green curtain ruffled and something flew out into the hallway. Jasper glanced at Karl and shrugged.
"I saw you take the plates! I'll report you and spit on your carcass!"
"Ah," Jasper said, "she's in good form." It was no secret that Jasper wasn't fond of Maman
NOVEMBER 19: The tree was obviously growing outside, but sometime in the previous year, my brother Karl had opened the window so that one of the branches could grow right inside the house and stretch over the dining room table like a spectral hand asking for something.
NOVEMBER 20: Roger put Carla's torso into the baler and wondered what would happen when he pressed the operate button. He was wearing a trash bag just in case.
NOVEMBER 21: If you keep your hands on ten and two, and you stare at the road intently and glance at the speedometer every once in a while, and diligently in the rearview mirror right after, you can drive home buzzed without being pulled over or having an accident.
NOVEMBER 22: Lance was made to be a cowboy, from the shoes to the hat to the smile that went 'ting!' when he winked at the ladies. He was a fair hand at the lasso and he could stay on the back of the meanest bull for over thirty seconds at least.
Too bad he was in a coma.
NOVEMBER 23: "The pearl necklace is the greatest end shot of any porno," Bill said as he handed the clerk the stack of videos.
NOVEMBER 24: We never did learn to rebel. We always talked about it in the middle of the night, smoking onion skin cigarettes and waiting for the guards to make another round.
NOVEMBER 25: The prince has a winning smile, a castle and stock options, a bottle of Cristal and a dozen roses. He also has a raging case of herpes.
These are the things a modern princess has to consider when they ride up with their entourage of post pubescent "buddies" and wait on their horses outside the drawbridge. Your father stands there at your door while you peer through the frosted window at the man-boy and wonder if it's worth it. You can hear dad's dry skin as he wrings his hands together.
Herpes, financial security. Man-child, house in the country. Drinking buddies, relative independence. Hrm.
You sit back down and open the volume of Gray's Anatomy you got three weeks ago at the flea market. There's dried something on one of the pages and you hope it's viscera.
"Pass," you tell your dad.
"Oh for god's sake," he says.
"He's got VD," you say.
"I'll tell him you're dead," your dad says, turning abruptly and heading for the stairs.
NOVEMBER 26: Last night I walked the former Premier of a large world power to the toilet and wiped his ass. It's pretty nasty, but he's a good tipper. Also? He gets wasted and tells me stories about rimming Henry Kissenger.
NOVEMBER 27: Three weeks after the power cut off, we thought about burning all the board games. If we did that, we'd be warm and bored, as opposed to cold and entertained. Sarah explained that dice were hard to roll when you'd lost all your fingers to gangrene, and I had to admit that she had a point.
NOVEMBER 28: The end of the line was three blocks away. I'd slept in, and now I was going to have to go all the way to the end. That is the last time I let Boba Fett talk me into Yager bombs at the hotel bar.
NOVEMBER 29: I got a raise I got a raise I got a raise I got a raise. "I got a raise," I told the florist.
"Good for you."
"I got a raise."
"Yes, I heard. Daffodils again?"
NOVEMBER 30: "So if you're in jail, and you're on vacation, is that like free room and board?" Josh popped something in his mouth and spit it out. "This food is horrible. No wonder it's free."
"That's mattress stuffing."
NOVEMBER 31: I'm not sure if Brendan thinks his 'dutch oven' gag is actually funny, or if he thinks this is something guys are supposed to do. Brendan isn't good at this whole 'what guys do' thing, which is odd for a construction worker, queer or not. You'd think he'd absorb it through osmosis if he wanted to. And not that he should, because 'guy stuff' is lame. Well, the 'dutch-oven-football-watching-I-left-an-enormous-dump-in-the-toilet-seriously-go-look' guy stuff. Maybe that's what he learns at work.
Yeah?
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Date: 2010-12-14 08:11 pm (UTC)Oh darn, the name of the show took after some biblical reference but was really awesome. Dang it! Must figure that out...
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Date: 2010-12-14 08:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-14 08:19 pm (UTC)stuck inemployed in such a village made me grin. Let me go look.no subject
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Date: 2010-12-14 07:31 pm (UTC)I also want whatever November 12's narrator is drinking.
And I could use a deeply terrifying, visceral horror story. So, November 26.
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Date: 2010-12-14 08:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-14 07:51 pm (UTC)I vote for 4, 10 and/or 18.
I love reading first lines for stories... so MUCH!!
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Date: 2010-12-14 11:51 pm (UTC)NOVEMBER 7: The best thing for the Cracker Barrel, Dodi thought, was to set it on fire. She never would, but she could dream about it.
But I really like Tony da Mafioso too...
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Date: 2010-12-15 02:07 am (UTC)You know what this reminds me of? That book illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. It has a gorgeous picture on one page and only a sentence or two "explaining" the scene on the other. It actively encouraged the kids to fill in the gaps themselves.
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Date: 2010-12-15 02:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-15 03:18 am (UTC)I would devour all of these. Pies. Torso. Maman. Lipstick. Herpes. Wanted.
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Date: 2010-12-15 03:19 am (UTC)I should make it into a book of short stories and use that for the back blurb.
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Date: 2010-12-15 03:40 am (UTC)