75 is 3/4 the way to 100 stories in 100 days

Oh, my! What will I do next? I suppose I can just continue the daily stories on my blog now that I've gotten into the habit. It does keep me writing even when I don't feel like it, even when I have nothing to say, as you well know. But there is a second project, my main project I've been meaning to write for decades, that started as a few long short stories, one of which was published. I was going to write them as six related stories, but now I'm wondering if they are really, oh, God help me, a novel. I don't think I can write a novel, but this subject is big. It's more memoir, but needs to be fiction to protect confidentiality and give me creative freedom. I feel like I would need help to write a novel. I wouldn't know where to start. I have these scraps of stories. I have tons of how-to books. I suppose I could actually read them. I suppose I could still write a story a day on my blog and start writing this other thing a little every day. I suppose.

After

She had people in her head. Millions of them. Crammed into cattle cars and gas chambers. And everything she did, she did for them. Seven years old. The daughter of two concentration camp survivors. She understood what they had lost, all those in their families who had perished. And all those families with no survivors. She was a remnant. A ragged piece of cloth. And everything she did, she did for them. The things they would never get to do, to see, to touch. The breaths they would never breath. But one thing she wouldn't do. She wouldn't pray for them. She wouldn't betray them by giving thanks to the God who turned his back on them. She went through the motions because her parents still believed. She went through the motions for her parents. But God knew. God knew that she knew. And she waited, every day and night, for his vengeful fist to fall.
(75 stories/70 days)

Multiple Choice

I had a choice today between going to a holiday party at work or staying home drinking coffee and responding to comments on my blog. Guess which one I chose.
(74 stories/70 days)

Jesus' Son Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Some people think it's really cool to read and write books about drug addicts and alcoholics, like Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, and they get all this praise for the beauty of their prose and the sensitivity of their portrayal etc. etc. Fuck it. Let them live with a fucking addict like I've had to the whole time I've been growing up, my goddamn older brother who constantly shoots up heroin in the house of my hardworking parents, stealing from them and they keep throwing him out and he swears he'll go to detox and he does and stays clean for about two minutes and then he's back home doing his old shit again and I think that's the reality of drug addicts and the price their families pay and the heartbreak and not the cute little humorous adventures that Denis Johnson likes to tell so that everyone thinks he's that oh, so, great, oh, so ,cool, writer who knows what the druggies of contemporary American life are all about. Fuck him.
(73 stories/69 days)

Hopeless

I've reached a point where I don't know if I can keep doing what I am doing, said Saul. I'm striving and striving and there's no light at the end of the tunnel and it just makes you feel at some point, enough already, why am I doing this, you know? Like farting in the wind. It's living a meaningless life. Just this putting down words on paper or entering them into a computer for a few people to see, it's just such intense busy work for nothing really, impersonating those who are really writers, I'm just going through the motions. I can't go through this fakery much longer. What would you think of moving to a foreign country where I can just forget the English language entirely, so it will stop tormenting me with this desire to record my thoughts, where it will take all the stamina I have just to ask for a glass of water? We could go to some poor island country and live off of our savings? What do you think? It would make a great adventure tale.
(72 stories/69 days)

The Novel

She had it all planned out, all the chapters, the scenes, the characters, the plot. It would take place in New York City, Paris, the Cayman Islands and Panama City. The heroine was a female CIA agent named Kara and her nemesis was an international arms dealer Cyro, though of course there was a strong sexual tension between them as well. It was all very sophisticated. She couldn't say more lest someone steal her ideas. Let's just say it was hot. A hot manuscript, a hot property, she was going to make it big. But then she started to show it around. The idiots! "Cliche." "It's been done to death." "Let's see something new." "Not this again." This was her brand new idea. Where had they seen it before, she'd like to know. She asked them. She left messages. But they wouldn't return her calls. What a crazy business this publishing business was. If she couldn't break into it, how could anyone else?
(71 stories/68 days)

Writer's Envy

It got to the point where Larry was so crippled by Writer's Envy that he couldn't write at all. He felt all knarled up inside like an arthritic limb. He would see another book or story published by someone he knew, someone he'd gone to school with or knew from his writerly circles and it was like getting punched in the stomach. He would have to take to bed for days with a bottle of Atavan to just knock himself out for awhile. It was giving him an ulcer.

Once he was a writer with as great a potential as any of them, greater even. What happened, he couldn't say. He'd start and stop. He'd never finish things. He was always starting over. Getting bored and starting new projects. Becoming so self-critical he could never submit anything. And so the years wore on and he earned his living editing other people's work while his own lay fallow, dead in the water, withered on the vine, you name it, rotten to the core.

He'd hoped he would outgrow this, his writer's envy, that he would just come to a place of acceptance and let go of his need to be a writer and just appreciate the writing of others. So many other people could do that. Why couldn't he? Why did he have to torture himself like this, spending his life tormenting himself over something he just clearly couldn't do? Just because he was told at a young age by others that he could do it, that it was in fact his calling? They set him up for failure. How dare they? How dare anyone do that to a child, to a young man, the failure rate being so high, set them up for a life like his, a life in which whatever one has is never enough, whatever one achieves is never the right thing, whatever one hopes for will never be?
(70 stories/68 days)

A Madwoman Reads Gogol's Diary of a Madman

For my Psychopathology and Literature course I chose Nikolai Gogol's Diary of a Madman, an early portrayal of the mental illness schizophrenia. He didn't seem so mad to me at first. He was a little excitable. And he talked to dogs. He decided two dogs were carrying on a correspondence and stole some letters from one of the dog's beds that was really the diary entries of the girl who owned him. He was eventually institutionalized. It was nothing liked my situation. Except that I fear institutionalization. I will do anything to stay out of the hospital. I will take whatever medications they prescribe no matter how badly, how dazed they make me feel, as long as I can still function well enough to go classes.

They tell me that I have delusions, too, that are as bad as thinking that dogs can talk. That my beliefs that people are trying to poison me are false. My brother is the number one suspect and my parents are two and three, though they all act nice on the surface. My dorm roommate is also a suspect. Which means around these people I can't have any open containers and can only eat things from containers I open myself, like small yogurts and frozen meals. I don't sit next to my roommate in the cafeteria and don't bring any food to my room. I use those blister packs of Tylenol and Benadryl. So far I've been lucky. I don't consider this a delusion because this is real and my life is at stake but no one believes me so I just have to keep myself safe.

And while I don't communicate with animals, I do communicate with people in a secret code that is often difficult to decipher and very exhausting to understand, making it tiring to be around people altogether so that I prefer to be alone. When people are talking, they can be saying one thing and meaning something entirely different in code. It's like interpreting a dog's bark. So I spend most of my time in the library reading. It doesn't happen with books or DVD's or the Internet. It's something about people's physical presence. I try not to talk to my doctor about this because I am afraid it's too much like talking to dogs and will automatically lead to a hospitalization which to me is a horror of horrors, as Gogol wrote:

"No, I haven't the strength to endure more. My God! the things they are doing to me! They pour cold water on my head! They won't listen to me, they won't see me, they won't hear me. What have I done to them? Why do they torture me? What do they want of a poor creature like me? What can I give them? I have nothing. It's too much for me, I can't endure these agonies, my head is burning and everything is going around. Save me, take me away!"

I'm exhausted. I will have to figure out how to write my paper about this short story tomorrow.
(69 stories/68 days)

Rabindranath Tagore Goes to Parents' Weekend

I'm sitting in the hotel lobby waiting for Kim, an old friend I haven't seen for thirty years. I reconnected with her on a whim when I noticed our children were freshmen at the same college. It turned out we were both divorced, unattached single mothers and decided to spend some time together on Parents' Weekend catching up.

Working through the Nobel Prize Winners in order, I brought a short story collection by Rabindranath Tagore. Kim was late, so I settled into the story "The Living and the Dead" in which Kadambini is assumed dead but escapes cremation and wanders the land unable to return home where they would banish her as a ghost. She hides out in the home of a childhood friend. There, she is deader than dead. The people she and her friend once were are no more and it is a strain to pretend they still know each other.

"Sarah?"

I look up and barely recognize her.

"Kim. It's so good to see you."

We shake hands. Perfunctory hugs.

It is a shock sitting across from Kim, someone I knew at exactly my same age as a child, who now has greying, thinning hair, sagging eyes, lined skin, jowls, many clipped chin hairs, despite her flamboyant blue and purple dress and her familiar piercing dark eyes. How can that be? The person I look at in the mirror every day doesn't look that old. Am I deluding myself? She's also about three times as heavy as she was and her eyes keep darting around the room to see who's checking her out---well that hasn't changed. Answer: nobody.

So we catch up. And I realize all the things I used to like about her, her feisty sense of humor, her irreverence, are gone. She's serious, can't take or tell a joke, and is preachy. All the little annoyances, her materialism, her competitiveness, her vanity, have ballooned out of proportion and taken her over. She has become a religious fanatic of sorts. A fundamentalist. The person sitting here is an imposter of the friend I once knew. And I must be the same. Back then I was very religious and insecure. Now I am a very secure, assertive atheist. My own new qualities, a forest of them, have taken the place of the old. I can imagine her thinking of me as highly obnoxious and detached compared to my former warm, cuddly self. So be it.

Sitting there, together then, we were both looking at corpses, mummified versions of old friends, unable to appreciate who we'd become, or, worse, knowing that were it not for the past, neither of us would have ever chosen to have lunch with the person sitting across from us. There was no motivation to get to know the new people we'd become. At another time in my life I might have tried and pushed it for old time's sake. I might have jumped into the fire with both feet, just to prove we were both still indeed the same people we were. In fact, I did once, which is how I know this can't work, and I blamed myself for that relationship's failure. But I know now it's often better to drop the old expectations early on and start from scratch with someone new.

Our sons, it turns out, didn't care to be friends either.

(Comment: I think this story doesn't work as flash fiction and seems more like a sketch for a longer story in which the incompatibility between the friends needs to be revealed gradually through dialogue rather than merely described. It may not be possible to insert others' stories into the short format of flash fiction. It may make the stories too complex. But that might just lead me on another journey.)
(68 stories/67 days)

67 is 2/3 of the Trudge to 100 Stories in 100 Days

It is feeling a bit like a trudge these last few days, energy flagging, brain empty, marking time by writing humorous stories about an empty brain but there is only so long one can go on that. I feel a bit like I'm in a dark igloo here, pacing around to keep warm, the fire's out and I've got to light it again the get restarted. I've been toying with the idea of playing off of a master's short story in each of the next group of short stories, both in order for me to better understand what the master is doing as well as to give my stories some of the depth I feel I have lost. It also adds the challenge of reading in depth a master short story each day, not just writing a story each day. I feel my writing has lost its connection to reading. I need to become a more self-disciplined writer if I am to accomplish anything in this arena in this shortening lifetime. Starting later today, or tomorrow, I have my first story in mind. The last third of this challenge, then, will be a new start, in order to always keep the writing and the process fresh and alive: one read story inspiring one written story each day for 33 days, presenting not only my own story to the readers, but also a story by a master.