Ok, so I’m a little late to the party, but Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is one of the coolest things I’ve ever witnessed. It’s a superhero musical starring America’s Emmy Nominated Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion, and was directed by Joss Whedon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly fame.

I’m not a big fan of musicals. Ok, I hate musicals, but this is a truly awesome experience. It took a couple minutes to get going, but once it did, it was amazing. It’s being offered up for free right now, with Act III being posted tomorrow morning. However, it will all be gone on Sunday afternoon. So hurry up and watch. Be amazed.

And for those of you wondering where I’ve been on Ficlets recently, please remember that E3 was this past week and I’m a huge nerd. I had over 10 hours of E3 coverage by G4TV recorded, with another hour and a half today, plus the hours I spent online reading through game previews and hands-on demos. My wife gives me the same look you’re giving me right now, so I’m entirely used to it. After tonight though, it’s over and I’ll be back to my current addiction of micro pieces of fiction.

Apparently the comments aren’t working properly.

I hastily threw this thing together thinking that if it were up, I might actually post something worthwhile. As anyone can plainly see, that did not happen. Yet, in my haste, I didn’t actually test the comments. So now, even if someone does comment (why would they?), it won’t show up.

Looks like I’ve got some work to do tonight. Maybe I’ll even work on putting up that one post about why I hate John McCain so much.

I promise to talk about something new soon, but who cares since nobody is reading this anyway.

As of last night, my ficlet Pink Cigarette is the second most popular ficlet on ficlets.com with over 460 views. Yesterday afternoon it only had around 70 views, so something drastic happened but I haven’t the faintest clue as to what. I wish I knew because knowing that hundreds of people are reading my story is exciting. Especially considering all of the comments and ratings have been positive. I would love for the same thing to happen with a few of my other stories that I’m particularly proud of.

If anyone makes it here from my profile link there, please accept my most humble thanks for taking time out of your day to read one of my stories. I’m sorry that there isn’t more here at the moment, but there definitely will be within a few more months. Feel free to come back at some point. If you liked any of my ficlets, there’s a definite chance that you’ll enjoy something else that I create and post somewhere on this series of tubes.

Well it seems as though I have now become obsessed with Ficlets. I have not played any Grand Theft Auto IV in the past week, mainly due to my obsession with Ficlets. I’ve been spending a ton of time reading through some of the fantastic series that are being posted on there. It’s amazing how much fun reading an exceptionally short story can be.

The real magic is when you come across a random story that speaks to you in such a way that you are compelled to write a sequel or prequel. I’ve yet to prequel any stories, but I’ve done a couple of unsolicited sequels that were enjoyable little writing exercises. I say little, even though the average ficlet I write takes me between 40 and 90 minutes. It’s important to choose each and every word carefully to really get the most out of this format, and I’m really trying to improve with each and every one.

Occasionally I’ll throw out a complete loser like I did last night, but I’m hoping that those are few and far between. I am nowhere near on par with some of the better ficleters out there, but I’m having a great time reading their stuff, learning from it, and hopefully applying it to all of my writing.

I highly encourage anyone who stumbles across my lowly blog to check it out. And if you do, please send me some constructive criticism through the comments, sequel or prequel my stories, and send me a note letting me know who you are so I can read through your stuff.

Well, I finally got the website somewhat presentable, so I’m going to try and actually start using this thing now. It will be pretty bare bones until I find some time to write something interesting.

One thing I can post about now is something I read about on Wil Wheaton’s Blog. As he is prone to do, he blogged about writing. This particular post extolled the writing of Ficlets, more specifically writing a prequel to a ficlet. Ficlets are short stories told in no more than 1024 characters. The exciting part, as Wil mentions, is the fact that users are encouraged to not only create their own tiny stories, but to write prequels and sequels to other users existing stories.

I thought the idea sounded like tremendous fun and a great way to try and get back into the swing of actually putting words together in a coherent manner. Thus far I have had mixed results, but have had tons of fun in the process. My current Ficlets are:

• No More Tequila For Me (first attempt)
• Bob Should Move (hopefully a full series)
• Sorry (someone even wrote a prequel)

My other two Ficlets are sequels to a story that was originally created by Ridcully Calvert called A New Job. Steve Fairweather (the nice man who wrote a prequel to Sorry), took the story in a whole new interesting direction with The Same Old Life. I had a tremendous amount of fun running with that and creating Paying The Price, which Ridcully followed up with the amazing A Mysterious Package that totally changed the dynamic I was going for. This is exactly what makes this whole process exciting and a useful learning experience. I created a scene that I had anticipated going in one direction, but someone else took it someplace completely different. So far the latest installment is Sending A Message, a Ficlet I created today.

I haven’t had this much fun writing in a very long time. I find myself checking Ficlets.com every so often just to see where this little story we created goes, while keeping ideas for new stories in the back of my head. Hopefully this will help me become a better writer; even if it doesn’t, I couldn’t think of a more fun way to try. Do yourself a favor, and sign up with an account and tell your own little micro story in 1024 characters or less.

If you want to keep up with the stories I currently have running, here’s my profile. I’m going to try and figure out a way to keep a feed of my stories on my Portfolio page here. When I find time to pull myself away from writing that is.

Update: My ficlet feed is now automatically updated on my Portfolio page. Awesome!

This post is simply here as a placeholder. I just moved servers (finally), and am now going to try and actually finish this darn site that I’ve been effectively working on since 1995 with limited success. 13 years to launch a site is beyond procrastination. Although technically it has existed in many different forms and states of completion since I started putting my wanna-be The Spot clone with mental patients up on GeoCities, it’s never been fully realized into something I could actually just start typing things into.

I also need to move my mom’s site over to this new server at some point. Hopefully I’ll get that done soon as well.