When I woke up this morning, my head was throbbing, I felt sick to my stomach, and my whole body felt toxic.

"Oh my god." I thought. "I have a hangover."

I kicked off the covers, and sat on the edge of my bed, my head in my hands.

"This doesn’t make sense," I thought. "I drank two beers in four hours last night. What the hell?"

Anne walked into our room, holding her head in one hand, the other across her stomach.

"Oh my god," she said. "I am never eating candy again. I have such a sugar hangover."

"I am so relieved," I said. "I thought I was even more old and lame than I am, and I had a hangover from two beers."

She looked at me.

"I know, it’s a silly thing to be happy about."

We walked out into the living room together, and saw the shameful evidence of the previous night’s debauchery: fun size candy wrappers littered our dining room table. A half-eaten Baby Ruth sat on a pile of Butterfinger crumbs, and a salad bowl, that was filled to overflowing with treats for our neighborhood ghouls last night, was nearly empty.

It was a monument to excess, standing defiantly against our efforts to live a healthy and balanced life.

As I scooped up handfuls of wrappers, a half-melted Kit-Kat stuck to the side of my hand. I was revolted by the smell of it, the way it felt, the soft chocolate pressing crispy bits of delicious crunchity wafer into my skin.

"I can’t believe I thought it was a good idea to mix Nestle with Hershey’s last night," I said, the memory of a furious game of Sorry! flashing through through a chocolate-stained lens of shame.

A few minutes later, it was all cleaned up. "I’m going to go back to bed," I said, "and hope that I don’t see a chocolate-covered baby crawling on the ceiling."

Created by my awesome wife.

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.