Six Words to Sixteen Hundred: Published Again

During the first year of the pandemic, I took three weeks off from my novel to craft a 1600-word story for an up-and-coming anthology: Voices of Magic. Two years later and eight days ago—March 23, 2022—the book was officially launched on Amazon.

It was one thing to read my story over and over again in a word document on a laptop screen—during COVID—making edits until I ran out. And quite another to see the words in print, and then watch the anthology take a leap in the categories of New Age Channeling and Personal Transformation Self-Help. I am proud to be a contributing author for this enchanted collection of personal stories of magic.

My story “Time Passages” weaves in and out of timelines like my novel has for 500+ pages, but only for about as long as half a chapter. A friend and fellow writer told me that my story read like a condensed novel. That’s about how it felt, writing it, the hop-skipping timeline that covered a lot of territory. Thus, why I gave it the title I did—no other way to put it.

I am including the first paragraph of “Time Passages” below, to demonstrate my point:

An atmospheric hush rolled in around the jewelry counter, disguised in feminine chatter freewheeling over clearance tables. On the far side where he stood, the air came alive, like how it does before a thunderstorm, deceptively still. I hadn’t noticed his presence, at least not by my usual measuring sticks—my five senses—the real stuff of my existence, like being inside my body with its all-too-familiar cushiness since the pregnancy. Here on the first floor of Columbus, Ohio’s preeminent downtown department store, a glimmer of light was about to arrive at the end of a very long dark tunnel, wherein dwelt the interminable quagmire (i.q.) that followed high school graduation and delayed my first day of college by two—and one-quarter—years.

This is not my first foray into authorship. It began with a mere six words back in 2008. A contest was issued, and thousands of concise life stories poured into Smith Magazine for its debut six-word anthology, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs from Writers Famous & Obscure. I was over the moon when I found out my tiny memoir had been selected for the publication. In no time at all, the book became a New York Times Bestseller.

Perhaps one day I’ll go from obscure to famous, and up the ante on those six words. 🙂

Two years following that publication, I won a flash fiction contest that had very specific criteria. My 101-word story “Tarragon” was published in an issuu chapbook online, entitled Dog Days of Summer: Not From Here Are You? The funny thing about this little fictional story is—and I only connected the dots about this recently—it relates storywise tp my just-published memoir/nonfiction in Voices of Magic.

The criteria for the flash fiction submissions were: 1) The story had to be exactly one hundred and one words (not including the title); 2) it had to contain both words heat and summer. And that’s all I have to say about that.

A Gathering of Human and Faerie Magicians in Maui