Will Hindmarch is a writer, game developer, and graphic designer whose work has appeared in the likes of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities.

Some of my favorite Wi(l)ls are the Wils Wheaton. Those Wils are great. Wil the Actor, Wil the Podcaster, Wil the Host, there’s a whole slew of them out there, working hard. You know them. You dig them, same as me. One of my favorite Wils Wheaton, though, is Wil the Writer.

I’ve dabbled in acting and radio just enough to know they’re tough—enough to know I enjoy them more than I am good at them. So I can look at those Wils as an audience member with just a fine fiber of appreciation for why the work is difficult, even though I mostly don’t know what I’m talking about. I admire those Wils the way I admire a lot of my friends with jobs I cannot do well, by being grateful that other people are better at stuff than I am so that stuff can get done.

But Wil the Writer? I make my living as a writer, so I know the racket territory. I come to Wil’s writing with the appreciation of the cobbler from across the way. I picked up Wil’s books and blog posts and admired their craftsmanship, from the stitching to the gloss, and I instinctively wanted to take them apart to see how they worked.

Here’s what I wanted to recreate: Wil’s capacity for sentimentality without syrupy additives. What the hell does that mean? It means Wil writes frankly about the feels without being being all cloying about it.

Sometimes he dances (barefoot) right at the edge of Sugarsville, but he knows what’s sweet and what’s too sweet and he’s got a honed knack for staying on this side of the saccharine line. He writes honestly. He finds the moments. That ain’t easy.

In 2008, Wil and I were both writing flash fiction at a website called Ficlets. The gist of the site was that you composed little bits of fiction within a limited character count and posted them where others could write prequels or sequels to them, turning any piece of flash prose into this potentially branching, sprawling narrative. (That site eventually burned down, but they built Ficly on the old lot. I wrote a few things at the new site, too.) I don’t know if Wil wants me posting stuff he wrote back when, but let’s see what happens. At the end of January of 2008, Wil wrote this passage of fiction called “A Godawful Small Affair:”