Two years ago I tried to look a blank blog post page in the eye. It was daunting, the notion of writing some flash fiction–nothing finished, even, just a rough draft of a scene or two, just an idea, anything to keep me from becoming just some milquetoast, a writer with no spine or guts or, dare I say it?, balls. The challenge of writing every day (or every other day, or every three or four days) in response to some canned Word of the Day email gave me the courage to think outside whatever small closet of imagination I had packed tight somewhere in my brain. It was a challenge to write, even if what I wrote wasn’t that exciting. It was still a collection of words that had never before existed, 100 or 200 words to keep me moving toward 1,000 or 2,000 or more.

Tracy could admit that arguing with the cop had not been her best idea yet. Still, it had to beat certain hard luck with her social worker, who would have given her an evil eye so sharp and painful it would have unlocked wounds older than she cared to remember. And she so endured a faulty breathalyzer test, a slew of drunk-driver competency checks, and finally the bumbledom of traffic court just to prove that the the one-way sign had, in fact, just as Tracy had tried to argue, turned in the wind and pointed in the opposite direction.