Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Memoirist of the Month - SMITH Magazine

February is looking bright thus far. Lots going on this month, but one item is at the top of the list.

I was given the honor of being the Memoirist of the Month (MOTM) on Smith Magazine's Six Word Memoirs (SWM). Any serious writer knows how important it is to build credibility in the writing world. Every success scored means a query letter with more clout. Talk about exciting.

If you're not familiar with SWM, it's definitely worth a look. My first look turned into a year's worth of memoirs (more than 1,500 written and posted, a couple contest wins, a Six included in a book [see previous posts for more on that] and now the MOTM). The site's title is self explanatory. The posts are six words long and describe something personal. I've posted Sixes about work, writing, reading, family, the autism life, marriage, and random everyday things. With each post, there's an opportunity to write a back story that can be very short to lengthy with the option to include an image with each post.

Hope it's not bad luck to tear a fortune cookie fortune.
To maximize this great opportunity, I've made a decision. For each day I am the MOTM, I will write a flash fiction story. Three written so far, so I'm going to try hard to end with a full deck of 29. Ending with 29 finished pieces will make the special month an even more wonderful and memorable experience.

I admire published flash fiction writers for their ability to come up with something so short yet captivating enough to get published. Similarly, I admire novel writers who have the patience to dish out 80,000+ winning words. I fall somewhere in between, I think. I'm an essayist and short story writer for the most part, but I'll finish that personal  memoir one of these days. I have 30,000 words of it written.

I have a job interview tomorrow. Spent the day getting organized for that. Tonight, I have no idea what I'm going to write my flash fiction story about, but hopefully I'll come up with something awesome within the next 4 hours.

Here goes.