Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette

Are you a playwright?  Are you a novelist?  Are you a short story writer?  Are you a flash fiction writer?  Are you a blog writer?

Of course, you could be a mixture of two or more kinds of writer; but it was not until the Old Soldier realized he was mainly a flash fiction writer that he found the genre he was good at and could even become an authority on.

As a young writer, the Old Soldier struggled with the novel and the short story.  I even tried to write one and two act plays.  I played around with poetry.  I was miserable.  I was writing and sending out my work to anyone I thought might publish it and all the while working dead-end jobs that I cared little about just to keep a roof over my head and food on the table.

I was so miserable that I spent some time in a psychiatric hospital.  Of course, growing up in a home where my father was a wife beater and joining the army at eighteen to get away from home and ending up in Vietnam didn’t help my mental stability either; but it was my failure to get published that I think was the thing that finally pushed me over the edge.

My inability to get published went on year after year after year until I was a middle-age man.  I grimly pushed on.  Then I discovered flash fiction and the world seemed to open up in front of me.

I decided to go back to college.  I got a BA in writing (University of Pittsburgh, 2003).  Then on the strength of 50 pages of flash fiction stories I was accepted to a graduate writing program (University of Pittsburgh, 2003).  Then I was awarded a K. LeRoy Irvis Fellowship that paid for my graduate education and gave me a generous monthly stipend for three years.  Finally, a local weekly print newspaper began to feature not only my flash fiction stories but my articles on writing flash fiction.  And I got paid.

Now the Old Soldier is the editor/publisher of the most dynamic flash fiction publication on the internet.

So, what kind of writer are you?  Writer, know thyself.

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