a powerful magic-user will destroy all cave invaders

I’m not the only person who was wondering how Gabe’s D&D session went. So many people asked him for details, he posted a picture of his setup and talked a little bit about his first time sitting behind the DM screen. His enthusiasm for DMing is just infectious, and he couldn’t have picked a better time to pick up the hobby; the 4E DMG really is that good, and best of all, it’s useful for whatever system you play. If you want to run a game, but have been intimidated by the idea, this book will Dispel Fear and Inspire Confidence like no other. Quoth Mike:

The Dungeon Master Guide is really a great resource. It will give you all kinds of ideas about what you might want to pick up for your game. It even goes into detail about the environment you play in and gives great tips on getting your friends into the spirit. Where the Player’s Handbook is really about rules, the DMG is more about the philosophy of be a Dungeon Master and the mechanics of creating a world for your friends to play in. I was really impressed with it.

I don’t know how much the general public knows about the guys behind the characters in Penny Arcade, but I know them fairly well. I don’t think it would be cool to rip back the curtain too much and spoil their mystique, but they are just good people. I’m really lucky to call them friends.

Speaking of RPGs, Green Ronin has just released a new Mutants and Masterminds book in stores, called Freedom’s Most Wanted. It’s full of supervillains! SUPERVILLAINS! Have you ever played M&M? It’s insanely fun. But don’t take my word for it, you can try it out for free. Get started here.

ficlets is going to the land of wind and ghosts. here’s how to save your stories.

AOL is shutting down Ficlets on January 15, and in their infinite corporate wisdom and understanding of how communities on the Internet work, they’re not providing any easy way to archive the stories you’ve written there beyond advising that you try “copying the text and pasting it into a plain text or Word document.” Right. That’s going to be really fun and easy for people who have written dozens of Ficlets. [::facepalm::]

Ficlets’ creator, Kevin Lawver, even tried to get AOL to do something with it other than just stick Christopher Lee inside it and set it on fire, but they refused:

I knew this was coming, I just didn’t know the day. I tried, with the help of some great people, to get AOL to donate ficlets to a non-profit, with no luck. I asked them just to give it to me outright since I invented it and built it with the help of some spectacular developers and designers. All of this has gone nowhere.

I don’t get this. I don’t understand what AOL has to lose by letting someone who wants to care for it take it over, and I don’t understand what AOL has to gain by simply destroying it, but that’s probably why I’m not in middle management at AOL: I like to actually nurture and support cool and unique things that don’t suck.

Ficlets was important to a lot of people. There are over ten thousand writers, thirty-five thousand stories, and eighty thousand comments. It was also important to me. On my author page, I wrote:

I am a professional narrative non-fiction writer. I’ve published three books, and write several geeky columns on topics like technology and gaming.

What I really want to do, though, is write fiction, and I figured Ficlets was the perfect place to find my fiction voice.

The 1024 character limitation, the ability to draw inspiration from quotes and pictures, and the collaborative nature of the prequels and sequels all worked together to help me create some super short stories that I’m still really proud of, like They Don’t Come Out at Night, Snowfall, and The Fifteenth. My story A Godawful Small Affair , inspired by listening to way too much Ziggy Stardust (as if there’s such a thing!), turned into a truly wonderful collaborative fiction project that branched out into dozens of multiple universes.

A fellow Ficleteer, Chris Meadows, wrote a Requiem for Ficlets that touched me in a way that, if Loretta touched me, I’d say, “Oh yeah, that’s nice.”

As a site, Ficlets did have its problems. (Some of which could have been alleviated by more development.) As a busy site that received hundreds of posts per day in its heyday, it never really developed a workable method for making sure that new ficlets weren’t quickly buried in the rush of more ficlets. There were lists of “popular” and “active” ficlets, but getting on the lists was a crapshoot that largely relied on whether your ficlet stayed in the “Most recently posted” list long enough for enough people to see and read it.

[…]

On the other hand, the site had a number of excellent innovations. The ficlet format itself was made for creativity … unlike cluttered competitor Writing.com, the Ficlets interface was completely uncluttered, and it allowed infinite story branching instead of writing.com’s two-predefined- choices-only.

Another especially clever touch was the ability to search through Creative Commons-licensed Flickr photos and use them for “inspiration”. This was the sort of creativity that Creative Commons was meant to engender, and seeing it in action was a thing of beauty.

Chris came up with a way to save your Ficlets, using a tool called HTTrack. He’s included fairly simple instructions that shouldn’t be too difficult to follow, so you can create an archive of your work, as well as any prequels or sequels that it inspired.

Through extensive trial and error, I’ve managed to come up with a set of rules that will fetch all the stories I want and not too many that I don’t want. And as the doom of Ficlets draws nigh, I figure it would be best to get this slightly imperfect set out there now, so people can save their stuff right away, and perhaps worry about refining it later. If anyone who knows HTTrack better than I do can send me tips or corrections, I’d be thrilled to update this post with them.

I really loved Ficlets, and I get the feeling that a lot of Ficleteers discovered it because of me or Scalzi. I’m really sad to see it go, and I’m hopeful that something new is created to take its place. Until that happens, though, thanks for reading my stories, and even collaborating with me on some of them. Keep writing!

i really love trader joe’s

This week’s LA Daily is all about an awesome cookbook Anne and I discovered entirely by accident, and how it’s made cooking fun again:

When I was in my early twenties and had the dual luxuries of copious time and disposable income, I loved to cook. I cooked different things all the time, experimented with various styles of cooking and ingredients, and wasn’t afraid to take a chance on something exotic. “What’s the worst that could happen?” I thought. “I’ll just make something different if this doesn’t work out.”

Then I got married and had kids. My days got longer, my responsibilities grew exponentially, and the whole concept of free time became a memory so distant, I wondered if it had ever really existed at all.

I still cooked, but I had a new set of priorities. Instead of grabbing a cookbook and picking out a recipe that looked interesting, I had to ask myself: How long would this take to prepare? How much is it going to cost to feed two growing boys in addition to two adults? How likely is it that the kids I’m working so hard to feed are going to complain about the uniqueness of the meal I’ve prepared? Wouldn’t it just be easier to order take out or throw something in the microwave?

I had resigned myself to a lifetime of culinary boredom until last month, when my wife and I came across a cookbook that singlehandedly made cooking fun, easy, and affordable again. It’s called Cooking with All Things Trader Joe’s, and it is exactly what it sounds like: choose a recipe, head into your local Trader Joe’s to pick up the ingredients, and make your friends and family think you’re a hell of a chef.

We’ve been making something different every night since we got this book, and it’s just awesome. I wish I’d discovered it years ago.

in which wil connects the dots

I was talking with Andrew last night about the Monolith Press editorial calendar for 2009. As we planned out our release and drop dead dates, the subject turned to the fiction project I wanted to do in 2008, but never finished.

“The plan is to [REDACTED],” I said, “but I don’t know which one I’ll start on first.” I thought for a second. “Probably [THING I’M REALLY EXCITED TO WRITE.]”

“Good idea,” Andrew said. He asked me what was going on with a story that I once had a great deal of enthusiasm for, but haven’t made any progress on in months.

“I made two huge mistakes with that,” I said. “First, I didn’t realize until I was almost ten thousand words into it that it can’t be a first person narrative, because it’s way too limiting for what the story needs. Second, I didn’t outline it before hand, I just had a basic idea for where I wanted it to go, and tried to write it by the seat of my pants. It was really stupid to do it that way, but I learned a valuable lesson from the experience: I need to work from an outline, because when I do, I’m connecting the dots instead of assembling a jigsaw puzzle.”

“That makes a lot of s—” he began.

“Wait. I like that. I need to write it down.” I opened TextEdit and typed connect the dots instead of assembling a jigsaw puzzle.

“I see what you did there,” Andrew said. “You should be a writer.”

“Thanks! I’m working on that.”