I’d love to read your mini memoirs, and I’m sure my readers would too! If you would like to be a part of the Mini Memoir Monday series, please submit a memoir that’s 500-1500 words. This memoir can be goofy, sad, or just odd. The key to a mini memoir is that you pick a specific moment in time – in other words I don’t want a brief recap of your entire life. I prefer short glimpses into people’s lives; stories that raise more questions than answers.
Forward this to any of your friends who might have good tales :)
If you’d like to submit, fill out this contact form, and in the comment section you can include the attachment.
I’m writing to let all authors, poets, musicians, painters, and any artist types that I forgot!
The Community Storyboard is a new and exciting blog where you can submit your work and have it showcased. You can get important feedback and make friends with other artists. Aside from submissions, we are going to be doing a few prompts and weekly themes that you can use for some spontaneous creations.
We’re all friendly people there and want this to become a blog where all artists can come for support and fun. Being an artist is a tough road, so let’s try to unite and travel down it as a community
Here is the seventh installment of Ten Top Lists of What Not To Do by John W. Howell of Fiction Favorites at http://johnwhowell.com and Marie Ann Bailey of 1WriteWay at http://1writeway.com. These lists are simu-published on our blogs each Monday. We hope you enjoy.
10. If you bring a host or hostess gift, do not take it home with you even though the evening stunk.
9. If you are seated next to someone you don’t know, do not start the conversation with “so how’s your sex life going?” even if you really want to know.
8. If the host or hostess seats you next to someone clearly older or younger than you, do not ask any questions that have the word “age” in them.
7. If you are asked a question while eating and you don’t have a ready answer, do not continue to stuff mashed potatoes into your mouth even if it is the only way you can think to stall.
6. If you are asked what you would like to drink, do not say “whatever you got,” since you might end up with tap water or worse.
5. If your host or hostess tells you to make yourself at home, do not sit down on the couch and put your feet up on the coffee table.
4. If you need to use the bathroom, do not take the occasion to open any drawers, cabinets or closets even if you are dying to check out the medication and birth control being used.
3. If you are asked to choose either red or white wine, do not say both even if you normally mix the two.
2. If you see that there aren’t enough chairs for everyone at the table do not bump the oldest person to secure one for you.
1. If you find that you have somehow been over served, do not offer to fistfight the host or hostess if they ask for your keys.
2. Thank and link back to the person who nominated you.
If you don’t already know Patty at http://petitemagique.wordpress.com/, then visit her blog right now. She is a truly gifted artist, blending song lyrics, her own poetry, and photography/artwork into her blog posts. Patty is a woman of tremendous feeling and she has experienced too many tragedies in her young life. Her poetry reflects her struggles … perhaps I should say, “our” struggles, for I believe Patty speaks for many of us who have suffered great loss. I find her poetry to be always beautiful and often cathartic. I am always in awe of her creativity. In spite of all she has gone through, her generosity and love know no bounds.
3. Nominate as many bloggers as you like.
If you are a follower of my blog, then you will know that I tend to “cheat” at this part. I hate to say “this blogger will get this award and this blogger will get the other award.” So at this end of this email, I will list as many bloggers as I can. I have at least several dozen favorites so I will try to pick those who may not have already received any or some of these awards.
4. Let your nominees know via a comment on their post.
Will do ;)
Second, I’ve been nominated by three amazing bloggers for the WordPress Family Award! The rules are the same as above, except that the list of nominees is limited to 10.
Running to Her Dreams is about much more than training for a marathon. She’s also a mother, a dreamer, and a doer. She finds hearts in nature, takes photos of them and posts them to her blog. In her own words, she is a “smartassic woman running to her dreams, who follows her heart and occasionally drops the f-bomb.” Her motto: “always be true to yourself and think like a boss!”
Gwen is a wonderful blogger, sharing her insights, her writing, and lots of great marketing tips on her blog. Hers is the kind of blog that you could spend days on, clicking from one informative tab to another, drinking up her knowledge, suggestions, and encouragement. She is a writer’s writer: someone who lives and breathes writing and who shares everything she learns.
S.K. Nicholls is a woman of many talents: she is an author, poet, lover of history, a Registered Nurse with a 30-year career spanning “everything from ER and CCU, pediatrics, geriatrics, hospice to psychiatry.” She grew up on a farm but now lives in a big city. She is a wife, mother, and grandmother. She most recently published Red Clay and Roses, a fictional account of a true story about life in the deep South during Jim Crow and before Roe vs. Wade. I reviewed her book here, and highly recommend it. It is an important work, a story that needed to be told and that needs to be read.
3. & 4. OK, when it’s awards time, it’s cheatin’ time for me. I’m combining my nominees and invite them to choose any (or none) of the awards here.
Without further ado, let me just share the love among:
Check out the new header for The Community Storyboard where our rowdy band of editors have been immortalized as superheroes by the very talented Dean at Dean’z Doodlez!
The paperback print on demand is just around the corner, stay tuned!!!
Excited to share with you that “Red Clay and Roses” is live now, and ready to read/purchase on Amazon and smashwords. Smashwords has epub, mobi and sony, so just about any reader is supported if you don’t have a kindle for Amazon. They also have a pdf version for your computer if you don’t have a reader.
I was getting great reviews but I knew something was not quite right, especially with regards to the first chapter of the book. So I had a copy editor take a look and we worked together for a couple of weeks and got the flow more smooth and the transitions between book sections better adjusted. Line editing was also rechecked and minor corrections made. There is nothing that changes dramatically, but I feel it is a better product now.
We were on our way back home after a two-day business meeting in another state. We still had about 200 miles to go when we decided to stop at a Wendy’s off I-75 and break for dinner. I was tired and hungry and sat facing away from the windows when one of my coworkers pointed past my shoulder and said “Look!” I turned and my heart sank. A thin cat was slinking along the ledge of a window, rubbing against the concrete dividers, and begging for food. I sighed and looked away, telling myself that she was likely a stray, probably feral, and I should ignore her because I was 200 miles from home and I already have three cats.
And I keep telling my husband that we cannot have any more cats. Even in the best possible environment, they grow old, they get sick, they die. We’ve had to put down four cats in the 20+ years we’ve lived here. Luisa is almost twenty years old, and I dread the day when she’ll start to fail and we’ll have to make “the decision” yet again. Junior and Maxine are not so old, but I can’t imagine life without them.
So I turned away, but this cat continued to walk along all three windowed sides of the fast food place, catching my attention. Finally, I bought a hamburger and my coworker gave me a tray to put it on. I went outside and couldn’t find her. I circled the place twice and was ready to give up. The three of us consulted and I put the tray of cooked meat down around some bushes. We moved toward our van when a car started and the thin, now obviously young, cat came shooting out from under it. She followed me to the tray, rubbing against my legs as we went.
I was able to pick her up. She let me pet her. She wasn’t feral, not at all. She was a young cat, perhaps younger than one year old, and all I could think was that she was lost. I don’t remember what I said next, but whatever it was, it prompted my coworkers to suddenly start brainstorming about how we could get her to my home.
One coworker brought the van around to where the cat was eating; the other went into Wendy’s and got a bunch of paper napkins to line the recycle bin that we had used to transport documents. There was a department store in the next lot, so we drove there and they insisted on looking for a pet taxi. Aside from our luggage, we didn’t have a closed container to put her in, and it was too dangerous to let her roam loose in the van.
While my coworkers were in the store, I called my husband, just to warn him. I’m bringing home a cat. My coworkers are enablers. They want me to call her Wendy.
They came back with a pan of cat litter, a large fleece blanket, a bag of kitty treats, a bottle of water, and a double-bowl dish. As soon as the van started again, she made for the floor. I tried to get her to settle in the recycle bin but she would have none of it. Finally, I loosely wrapped the blanket around her and pulled her to my lap. She laid there, purring, sleeping and stretching for three-and-a-half hours.
So we have a new cat. Her name is Wendy (although my husband likes to call her Wendyz). She had been spayed (yea!) but she had not been chipped. Well, she wasn’t then, but she is now. To her original caretakers: I am sorry you lost your cat. I don’t know of any way to find you since she was found at a fast-food restaurant off a major interstate and she didn’t have a chip. Your loss is our gain. She is beautiful and she is sweet and she is safe and we will do everything to give her a long, happy life.
I know The Association’s song is “Windy” but it still kept popping into my head on that long drive home.
Marie at 1 Write Way 