Posting Stories for a New Collection

 
Today's story, The Puppets Take a Bath, is the first in a small collection of stories that I will release in a few weeks: Serene Morning & Other Tales of a Little Girl.
 
These are very personal stories for me. They are remembrances and homages from one special year.
 
In 2006 I started a project I called "A Short Story a Day". This project was my first real attempt to improve my writing through intense practice. What could be better practice, I thought, than writing a short story every day? Ultimately, I wrote 202 stories that year. Not quite one a day, but a good effort, I think. I learned more about writing in those 10 months than at any other time in my life.
 
In 2006 my daughter, Serene, was 5 years old.
 
A writer needs a muse, especially when he's writing a story every day. These are the stories from the days when Serene was my muse.
 
Some of the stories are biographical-ish (like "The Puppets…"), my attempts to remember-with-prose her earliest years. Others are pure whimsy, though inspired by the antics of my baby girl. And one, oddly enough, is science fiction.
 

Serene, April 2006, 5 years old
 
-David