nerdflood

Via Kevin Lawver’s wonderful Tumblr, I came across this yesterday.

What is it? Nothing more than a collection of somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 stories written on Ficly.com. I’ve talked about Ficly a lot in the past. It’s a fantastic site, not just because you can create and share short pieces of fiction there, but also because of the excellent community of writers that has sprung up around the site. They are creative, gracious, clever, and kind, and I really wish I had more time to spend there these days.

The book itself appears to be a $3 PDF ebook, with all of the proceeds benefiting the site proper, presumably through things like server and hosting costs, bandwidth, Ferrari’s, and office supplies. You know, the usual. I know Kevin and his expensive tastes for the finer things in life. And I don’t know Jason Garber at all, but he strikes me as the sort of person who could use a new Rolex every couple of months.

Now, I’m going to completely look past the fact that this compilation doesn’t include any of the 59 amazing stories I’ve written for Ficly. No, I’m bigger than that. Instead, I’m going to focus on what I think is a truly tremendous —

Okay, seriously? Not even one of my stories made it in? I thought Rivalry was pretty good. That Which God Did Not Create? Cannelliare perhaps? No?

It’s because I gave on the Ficly 365 project, isn’t it? I’m sure that’s it. That has to be it. Look, I’m disappointed in myself, too. Truly I am. But I suppose it’s understandable why I was left out.

No, no, it’s fine. Really. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. I mean, there’s literally thousands of stories on Ficly, and some pretty talented people writing them. And the selection of stories and authors contained within this book appear to be of absolutely exceptional quality. There’s no reason to complain.

Or, you know, harbor hurt feelings.

Or hold any sort of grudge.

For being left out.

Overlooked.

Denied.

….

Okay, enough. That joke can only go on so long. Seriously, buy a copy of the book and support the phenomenal Ficly site and it’s wonderful community of creators, please! I implore you.

Do it before I decide to start writing Ficly stories again, and all of them feature YOU in not very pleasant situations. I can do it people. We have the technology.

Now that I’ve published fifty Ficly stories, I’m a self-described, federally-licensed Ficly Veteran™ and as such, demand more, newer, and better features out of the online micro-publishing platform. After all, what else am I paying my $29.95 monthly subscription rate for, if not exceptional service?

So I’ve assembled an official List of Things™ (rendered on equally-official Ficly Mayoral Candidate™ letterhead) that could really use some improvement on Ficly.

Before I get started, I must profess that I absolutely realize that Ficly is created, managed, and maintained by only a ragtag outfit of rebel monkeys who do it purely as a fun and interesting side-project/diversion/portfolio-fodder. I don’t expect them to cater to my will–or, indeed,  even acknowledge that I wrote anything of the sort at all. However, as the newly-christened Ficly Gubernatorial Clabberwonky™ I fully expect all of my requested changes and updates to be implemented within a week. That should definitely suffice.

Things that are broken
These being things that were implemented (or at least partially implemented) but in one way or another do not completely function the way they were intended or designed.

Inspirations – In the old Ficlets site, we had built-in inspirations. Some were images pulled from Flickr which we could use as “starting blocks” for stories. Others were “starting lines” and “ending lines” that we could use to launch ideas. There’s a button for inspirations on Ficly, but it gives you an error message saying that they monkeys are working on it, and there’s a fairly flimsy promise attached to that statement. We’d love to have this implemented.

It should be somewhat telling that this is the only item on the “broken” list.

Things that could be greatly improved
These being things that essentially work as designed, but could really use a tweak (or seven) to get the most functionality out of the features.

Profiles – Profiles currently house links to an author’s stories, a bio, a website link, and a friends listing.. There’s some numbers for how many challenges, comments, and stories the author has created. But what would be extraordinarily helpful would be some links to the comments and challenges authors have participated within.

Browsing tags – There’s the ability to see some tags on the browse page, but we don’t know if those are recent tags, popular tags, active tags, etc. It would be nice to have an alphabetical listing of all tags for easier browsing.

Better browsing in general – What we need is a better organization system for stories to be able to find content more efficiently. Maybe the ability to add categories or genres? Like a standard science fiction tag or romance or mystery. That could be helpful.

Notes – From working with them, notes appear to have been a last-second afterthought. There is very little functionality to them. I have notes in my Sent folder, but I have no idea who I sent them to. Every incoming note is new, even if it is part of an ongoing conversation. There’s no attachment to an earlier note, or connection to its history. Notes are substantial for authors coordinating series cohesion and organizing group efforts. This could use a bit of a redesign.

Things that would be awesome
These being things that do not currently exist on the site, but, as stated, would be awesome.

Challenge entry – Right now in order to enter a challenge, you have to create a new story. What if you already wrote something that would be a perfect addition to a challenge? The ability to add an existing story to a new challenge would be something nice to implement.

The “mid-ficly” – This is something that I wanted to see implemented on Ficlets, and I’m still championing the concept on Ficly. A “mid-ficly” story is one that can be both a sequel to one story, as well as a prequel to another. You could create it as a sequel, and then pull up a list of existing stories to attach it as a prequel to something else. Or vice versa. It would probably be a difficult piece of functionality to design, but I don’t care. That’s not my job, just do it.

Auto-post to social networks – Sure, you can connect your author RSS feed through TwitterFeed and have it post to your Twitter and/or Facebook, but I would rather have it done intrinsically through Ficly with some kind of inherent shortened URL (fic.ly/13452, perhaps – I don’t even know if .ly is a real domain namespace. Once again, not my job.).

Okay, that’s all for now. I’ll probably be back with more outrageous gripes and complaints after I’ve written 100 stories.

All right, all right. Maybe I’ll give the monkeys two weeks.

So saith His Royal Highness, the Fifty-first Ficly Over-father of Fortitude™. Amen.

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I honestly don’t mean for this to become the Ficly blog. I swear. There’s already one of those, and I don’t need that kind of pressure.

I just felt the need to point out that I am now approximately 1/12th of the way through the Ficly 365 challenge. Upon completion and posting of today’s story, “Ginger Goes to Hollywood“, I have now crafted 31 extremely short tales, one for every day of January 2010.

I’m not only proud of my accomplishment, and my ability to force myself to write every day, but I’m also very encouraged by the excellent company I’ve been keeping over at Ficly. The community there is fantastic, and I’m discovering more wonderful new people every day. I’ve been attempting to try and read and comment on other people’s stories, as well, since so many people have been so kind as to comment on my own. But that’s dreadfully difficult to do. I’m hoping that’s something I can get better at over time.

In any case, the full breadth of my literary prowess is on display over on my Ficly author page (or, alternatively, here on Nerdflood, once I get it up to date). I’ve had some stories I’ve been especially proud of, such as That Which God Did Not Create, Cannelliare, and Rivalry. A couple of awfully goofy entries, including The Garden versus the Undead and the entire Merry Deathmas story arc. At least a couple of absolute stinkers (I won’t point those out). I even entered one story into a challenge and somehow ended up winning. I’ve also been asked to participate in a bit of a back-and-forth series with another established writer on the site (which starts here, with his first entry). This has proven quite difficult to do given my inherent fear in creating sequels to other authors’ works.

But I truly feel that the challenge is working. In forcing myself to grind these gears every day, I feel as though I’m stretching muscles and really getting something out of my workout (I’m aware of the mixed metaphor. My apologies). After I’ve completed my year of Ficly stories and have truly and fully established a daily writing regimen, I think the task for 2011 will be to apply that routine towards the creation of a novel. At least, that’s the idea. I think.

So, it’s one month down, eleven to go. 31 days behind me, and 334 days before me.

Man, that’s a heck of a lot of stories.

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Well, it’s only been a week, but it’s been a successful one! In conjunction with my new goals for 2010, I’ve created a new Ficly story so far for each of the 7 days of January. It’s been a great experience so far. I feel like I’ve been stretching some muscles I haven’t had a chance to stretch in a long time. I’ve also made a few new friends on Ficly, which is great. The site has a fantastic, involved community that I haven’t really had a chance to tap into yet. Hopefully this challenge will allow me to get to know some great fellow writers and have some fun sharing a great hobby.

I’ve also got some fellow writers that have joined in the challenge! Fellow Colonist Jeffool has been writing stories right alongside me, though he has been momentarily sidelined by a wisdom tooth extraction. To him I say: LOSER! I wrote my very first Ficly365 story the day after I got all four of my wisdom teeth removed! But I digress. Just today I learned that someone else has also joined the fun. He’s a little late to the party, but he’s working to get caught up. It will be entertaining to do this with others and compare notes on the whole process.

I’ve got an 8th story waiting in the wings for today, but unfortunately I’m going to be largely offline for the next couple of days, visiting family. Ficly stories will still be written! I promise. But they won’t get posted online until sometime late on Sunday.

Remember: if you want to check in on how I’m fairing, you can visit my Ficly profile, my Ficly page right here on the blog, or follow everyone’s combined progress using the Twitter tag #Ficly365. Enjoy!

7 down, 358 more to go! Here’s hoping your 365 project is also doing well.

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So, myself and an eclectic collection of wanna-be authors are presently working on writing short stories for our very own anthology. The catch is that the stories are all pulp fiction (this pulp fiction, not that one). We have quite the extraordinary mix at the moment: a handful of hard-boiled detective stories, at least one superhero missive (that would be mine), a sword and sorcery tale featuring an unchained barbarian, and I think there’s even a zombie story in there, as well. Beautiful genre fiction with clear-cut heroes and villains and lots of action and intrigue.

The only problem is, our anthology doesn’t yet have a name.

We have quite a few potential candidates wistfully wandering about in our heads, but nothing that a majority of us are really falling in love with. So we leave it up to you, Unknown Collective Internet Beings™®, to help us nail down a title and move past this so we can focus on the stories themselves. Yes, this really is the sincerest form of cat vacuuming for us.

I’m throwing a random (alphabetically ordered) assortment of titles we have come up with into a TwtPoll and leaving it up until Friday. GIVE US YOUR VOTES! Or feel free to suggest other options not previously considered. And re-tweet amongst your fellow banditos to your heart’s content. We don’t mind the free publicity.

And thanks! If a clear winner emerges I’ll be sure to post it here for everyone to ignore.

Because that’s what you’ll do.

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I actually wrote most of this a couple of days ago. And technically, Harlyn won’t hit thirty days until tomorrow. But it’s my blog and I can post it if I want to. Keep in mind, poetry is not necessarily my strong suit. Enjoy!

Right now, as I write this, you lay next to me.
Just wiggling by the light of my warm laptop screen.
In the past thirty days, you’ve cooed, stared, and explored.
You’ve cried, burped, and pooped: you’d think we were bored.

Alas, quite the opposite, if I say so myself!
We have quite a few things on our “need to do” shelf.
Caleb starts back to school, Alex is active as ever.
We’re selling our house (which might happen, oh, never).

But on the day you arrived, I shed tears of joy.
I was prepared for a third – and, yes, final – baby boy.
I so wanted a girl, you fulfilled my heart’s craving.
Something so small, so sweet, so amazing.

In your first week you hardly even opened your eyes.
In your second, I noticed how quickly time flies.
The third week, I told myself it wasn’t a dream.
Now the fourth week, I’m convinced. We’re an inseparable team.

I’ll protect you from boys (we’re really quite vile).
I’ll give you lots of toys (we’ll add them to the pile).
And I’ll watch and I’ll worry every day of your life.
All the way to the day you make someone their wife.

For now, life is filled, once again, with a baby.
Diapers are filled, too, but maybe – just maybe,
We can look forward to days where we laugh hard and deep.
For now, please allow us a few hours of sleep.

It’s an enormous effort to have a baby to raise.
(But mostly for mommy; she deserves all the praise).
The days, they drift by in a soft, gentle flow.
Already your birthday seems a lifetime ago.

So here we both are, just thirty days later.
You’ve already made my life that much greater.
And though I’m exhausted and my mind is in tatters,
You’re my beautiful girl, and that’s all that matters.

I mentioned a while back (holy crap, and it’s still on the front page) that Kevin Lawver was going to re-incarnate the long-lost property that AOL killed, Ficlets, into a new creation. And now that day has come.

Introducing Ficly! I haven’t had a chance to really play with it yet, but here’s some things I’ve noticed right away.

1) You can sign in by linking your account to either Google, Facebook, or even OpenID (which, in the end, stopped working on Ficlets). I linked to my Facebook account since I’ve been using that particular social network more and more these days. Will this mean that any story I create can be automatically published to my Facebook profile? That remains to be seen but would be an awesome feature.

2) There’s a special section devoted to challenges. I love that they decided to do this. Challenges were something that appeared on Ficlets where authors would post a challenge of some sort–such as “write a story that takes place following a future apolocalypse”, for example–and fellow authors could create sequels to that challenge with their themed creations. The fact that Kevin and the Ficly team included this as a standard feature shows that they really understood the Ficlets community. Challenges appeared organically as a result of the authors attempting to install their own form of ownership and comaraderie within the community. An inclusion of this feature in Ficly is a direct nod to that established community, and it’s well-deserved.

All in all, I’m really looking forward to digging into Ficly and writing some more short, short stories. I’ll probably post again with a follow-up once I’ve had a chance to see more of Ficly first-hand and check out all that it has to offer. For the moment, I’m just really excited to witness the return of Ficlets; even if it doesn’t have the same name, I already know it has the same heart.

Here’s a post from Kevin on the launch of the new Ficly.

There’s been a big to-do on those darn argumentative internets regarding George R. R. Martin’s treatise on how he should be allowed to have his own life and not be forced to simply churn out book after book like some sort of novel-writing automat. Several notable authors have hopped onto the bandwagon to defend Martin’s quest for peace, including John Scalzi, who delivers (what I think is) the most damning essay of them all.

Now, it should be noted that I agree with them. Authors are human beings, with their own sets of wants, needs, and desires, and they should be allowed — or, more appropriately, expected — to chase after them.

But I’m not here to defend them, because then I would be just one more small, meek voice on top of an enormous pile of much louder and more prominent voices, and that would just be silly. No, I’m here to try and explain how we all got here in the first place.

It’s actually pretty simple: it’s the consumer mentality. We have built up here in our wonderful little capitalist society a consumer mentality that people who buy things (i.e., consumers) are always right, should have their every whim catered to explicitly, and must at all times be happy about every aspect of their consumerism, or else. Just read the Consumerist for a few minutes, and you’ll see just what I mean. If our happy meal doesn’t come with a toy, if our download speeds are not acceptable, if our paint is eggshell instead of off-white, we complain. Loudly. And make serious demands of the corporations that in turn (sometimes) treat those demands seriously. It’s what we do. We’re consumers, and we feel we have a right to make sure companies know when we aren’t happy with something they’re doing — or NOT doing.

I’m not even trying to say that that’s wrong. We should demand the world from companies that promise the world, especially if we’re paying for the privilege. It’s not necessarily wrong, it’s just where we are right now as a society.

Unfortunately, this consumer mentality has leaked into our artistic leisurely entertainment devices, as well. Let’s face it, authors (in most cases) can be just as faceless as the faceless corporations we scream at in disgust on a daily basis about our tall cafe grande double mocha whip that was made with — gasp! — 2% milk instead of skim?! Oh, the humanity! Call the authorities. They must be stopped.

And so authors become victim to the dreaded consumer mentality just like the McDonald’s, the Starbuck’s, and the Comcast’s of the world. People begin to make demands and have expectations about books being of a certain quality or delivered within a certain timeframe. They complain when the roles of favorite characters become diminished in a sequel, or when a highly-anticipated novel is late. Again. They are consumers. They know no different.

Now, once again I reiterate: I am not attempting to excuse the behavior of those angry and nonsensical fools that think folks like Martin should be writing them their books and doing nothing else. I hope to someday be one of those marvelous authors that is so wildly popular, people will actually beg me to write my next novel. I could only be so lucky.

But we have to face the fact. This behavior is not going to go away. Never. Let us not forget that books — despite how influential and altruistic we readers deem our hobby to be — are a consumable media. We are consumers who purchase a product that a creator has produced. We exchange money for a good, and therefore have expectations attached to that particular transaction. As such, authors will continue to be lumped together with the rest of the faceless corporations and be reviled when their products do not match expected quality standards.

However, unlike Starbucks with its thousands of baristas, or Subway with its thousands of sandwich assemblers, an author is one person. One single solitary human being that is producing one single solitary work of art at a time. We shouldn’t be berating them for not meeting our wild expectations. We should be thanking them for creating something beautiful and amazing and allowing us to share in the finished piece.

Even in our capitalist society with our consumer mentality, we have to remember that. For as tiny and seemingly insignificant a detail as it might be, it makes all the difference in the world.

So, I’ve had this short story bubbling around in my head for a while, and I finally got around to scratching down a few of the details before they become lost to the vanishing ether of this echoing chamber of a brain I’m cursed with. As I was putting together some of the character details, a thought occurred to me. What makes a character the “protagonist” of a story?

This question came to me just as I was attempting to mark one of my characters as the protagonist of my story. I have two characters in this story that are “central” actors. One is the narrator and, essentially, the “main character” in just about every respect. She is a strong female character who grows very noticeably through the story. From her perspective, you understand her thoughts, motives, and reasoning.

However, the other central character is a male who is, for all intents and purposes, the “hero”. In the climax and resolution, he is the character that rights and wrongs and saves the day. But for much of the story, he is an important, yet a purposefully “background” character. His actions are not at the forefront of the story, but they are obvious in the telling of it from the female lead’s narrative. His existence is really only suggested through much of the story. Even though he truly shines at the end, he is never really the focus.

So, which one is the “protagonist”? According to Wiktionary, a protagonist is described as “[t]he main character in a literary work or drama”, as well as “[a]n advocate or champion of a cause, or course of action”. Well, that’s all well and good, but my female lead may be the “main character”, but is in no way a champion of any cause or course of action. My male lead IS the champion, but isn’t really a main character in the strictest sense of the term.

So, maybe I have a unique situation where the two characters together form an amalgam protagonist? Neither one would carry the story independently. It definitely requires both of them. In a sense, I suppose, they are both the “hero”.

Am I picking nits by attempting to label one or the other — or both — as the protagonist? Should I forgo this discussion and simply move on to actually writing the story? Is this even important to focus on? Could my own perception of the definition of a protagonist be essential to my ability to tell a logical and compelling story? Curiouser and curiouser. I’d love to hear other thoughts on this.

You’ve probably heard about this new Coraline movie coming out, perhaps? It’s the one that looks provocative, yet somewhat nauseatingly creepy. Yeah, that’s the one. It’s the movie that’s based on a novella written by one of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman. You probably didn’t know that, because the commercials for the movie never even mention Neil Gaiman. I think that’s a shame, honestly, despite whatever reasons there may be for not mentioning the person who wrote the story in the commercial for the movie. Maybe he opted out of that sort of thing. I’m sure his name will be in the credits, somewhere. I mean, he only won a Nebula AND a Hugo award in 2003 for the story, so it’s not like he’s already accomplished anything with it.

In any case, here’s more reason his name needs to be attached more often to the project. It appears as though Neil has just received the Newbery Medal for his recent children’s book, The Graveyard Book, and from what I hear, it is a well-deserved award, indeed.

So, there you have it. There’s a reason (among several more, actually) that Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite authors. One of the other reasons is Neverwhere, but that’s for another post at another time.