Serendipity – an aptitude for making desirable discoveries
by accident
That is the name of the game for today’s blog post. It
started out with me wondering, in the back of my mind, if I couldn’t find
something to write that would only encompass the 15 minutes spare minutes I
have of my lunch hour (OK, technically it’s a lunch half-hour but that sounds
so awkward). I tried haiku but honestly, stuck in a room with no windows I just
can’t connect enough with nature to get out a decent haiku. That’s when an
email showed up in my inbox. I am ruthless with trashing unwanted emails so the
fact that I read it at all was miraculous.
Turns out Jane Herenstein is having a special 99 cent sale of
her ebook Freeze Frame: How to Write Flash Memoir starting tomorrow. I read a
lot of memoir but don’t necessarily write it. But 99 cents? I decided to give
it a try. (And ordered it early so I could tell you my thoughts).
Freeze Frame was an interesting book and taught me so much about memoir I didn't know. It included a
discussion of what memoir is, addressing the truth vs. fiction question, dialogue
and composite characters as well as the definition of “flash”. Seems flash can
be as little as 100 words. There were plenty of writing prompts that I was just
itching to try. I was mentally composing flash memoirs as I read Freeze Frame.
Read this book ready to write because flash is addictive! There were lists of memoirs to read as well as
several excerpts. Finally there were lists of publications that are friendly to
flash memoir (as well as other genres of flash). It was the writing prompts and
the explanations that preceded them that really drew me in. Definitely worth
more than 99 cents – and enough “assignments” for quite a few lunch hours.
Then I had an email from a friend of WOW, Barbara Barth who
is on a WOW Blog Tour for her romance/suspense Danger in her Words right now.
But Barbara is a memoirist at heart and is going back to her roots with a
creative non-fiction about her many dogs. And she’s inviting writers to submit
blog post (flash memoirs if you want another name) about the dogs in their life
to her blog Writer with Dogs. My furry friend Daisy and I are already signed up
and would love to meet you there.
So how’s that for serendipity:
Extra time at lunch + unwanted email + dog memoir =
today’s post
When was the last time serendipity showed its surprising
face in your life?
