Created by my awesome wife.
for halloween: they don’t come out at night
Back in March, I wrote about this cool website called Ficlets:
From Scalzi (who else?) comes a collaborative short fiction site for writers, called Ficlets:
What
does "collaborative short fiction" mean in this case? Simple: You, as a
writer, post a very short (not more than 1,024 characters) piece of
fiction or a fiction fragment on the Ficlets site. People come to
Ficlets to read what you’ve written, and to comment on your piece. If
they want to, they can also write a "sequel" to your story or story
fragment, carrying the story forward from where you left it. Or,
alternately, they can write a "prequel," explaining how you got to
where you are in the story. All sorts of people can write all sorts of
sequels and prequels — and of course, other people can write sequels
and prequels to those. What you end up with is a story with multiple authors and multiple branchings — lots of possibilities and surprises.Sounds
like a lot of fun, doesn’t it? If nothing else, it’ll be a swell place
for some of my half-baked fiction ideas to get closer to fully-baked. (yeah-ha-ha-ha, turn it up, man!)
It only took me seven months, but I’ve recently taken my first uncertain steps into original fiction writing at Ficlets. It has a structure that works for me: I only get 1024 characters, so I stay focused on turning my idea into something readable in a limited amount of time and space. I don’t know why that works so well for me, but I feel no pressure (internal or external) when I do it, so I’ll just accept that and enjoy it.
Since today is Halloween, I thought I’d share one of my ficlets. It is a scary little piece called They Don’t Come Out at Night. Here’s a bit:
You have to keep moving. You have to get to the well and fill your skins, because the house is dry and the night is long.
You have to keep moving, because if you stop . . . no. “No!” You tell yourself. “They don’t come out at night! No one has ever seen them come out at night!”
No one who is still alive, that is.
It was the featured Ficlet last week, and a ton of other writers wrote prequels and sequels inspired by my story. It’s fun to discover what other people saw when they read my story, and what their own imaginations created as a result. Some of them are really good, and make for some fun, creepy reading this All Hallow’s Eve.
fastfiction from internet jesus
Warren Ellis wrote a pretty fantastic short short story called Jack Baby that I saw yesterday:
I dipped the old jar down into the creeping slurry and scooped a pint
of shit-water out of the Thames, down where the sewers meet the river.
It’s come to this, I said to no-one: making jenkem rather than seeing
the Jack Baby.Seal up the jar, watch it ferment for long
sleepless days, and then inhale the gas off the top. Jenkem: ghetto
drugs. An hour of laying like a corpse and seeing dead things instead
of the orgasm-jerking and spacewalk day of a Jack high. But I couldn’t
afford Jack, and I didn’t want to think about the Jack Baby.
There’s a lot of atmosphere, character, and story wrapped up in the 200 words or so that make up the entire thing, and I had to read it twice to fully absorb it. It was totally worth it.
When I manage to wring fiction out of my brain, it will be because I am inspired by stories like this. I mean, how in the hell can Warren come up with stuff like — well, just go read it, and see if you don’t have the same reaction.
Geekdad reviews The Happiest Days
Ken Denmead, who edits the Geekdad blog at Wired, wrote a review of The Happiest Days of Our Lives this weekend:
This is a wonderful little book. I hate to use a diminutive like
"little," for fear of implying that THDOOL is less-than significant in
some literary way; it isn’t. It is a charming, heart-warming,
laugh-inducing, tear-jerking, and even envy-inducing read. It is not,
however, long. I’d like to argue that this is a plus. Indeed, I think
THDOOL is enjoyable in part because of its length (or lack thereof).
It is, after all, a collection of short-form writing (blog-posts),
collected, expanded, massaged, and served with a steaming side of
post-modern nostalgic recollection. This is the face of contemporary
introspective non-fiction, and it is exactly what we all like to read
and write nowadays. Reading THDOOL is all about getting the quick-fix
of checking your RSS feeds in the morning and skimming the new posts,
but then getting to take a little longer to sit down and savor
something just a bit more significant.
Have I pointed out that everything in this book, though it started online in one form or another, was completely rewritten, updated, expanded upon, and "de-bloggified’? The Happiest Days isn’t just a cut and paste, and maybe I should have made that more clear before? Anyway, I’m very happy that Ken noticed that, and mentioned it.
There will be good reviews and bad reviews, and not everyone will like what I write, or how I write it. I’ve learned over the years to make a conscious effort not to give too much importance to any of them, but I have to admit that getting such a positive review from someone who I respect and enjoy reading every day made me squee just a little bit.
Okay, a lot.
pimp of the dead
Last year, Anne and I went to a Halloween party as a pimp and his ‘ho.
We had an awful lot of fun putting the costumes together, because while it is hard out there for a pimp, as long as your pimp hand is strong, and you can recite Antonio Fargas’ poem from I’m Gonna Git You, Suka, it’s pretty hard to lose.
Here’s me, reminding everyone that my bitch better have my money. Not half, not some, but all my cash:
This year, we went to the same party, as the same characters . . . who had become zombies. Here’s me, reminding everyone that my bitch better have my brains. Not a cerebellum, not a stem, but all my brains:
All night long, Anne and I kept singing RE: Your Brains, which was tremendously amusing to both of us. We only paused for a moment, when we won the costume contest award for Best Couple’s Costume. Our prize? Wristwatch walkie talkies. Yes, it is the best prize, ever.
