Playing With Ficlets

Ficlets has been around for a few months now, and while it was a blast to build and launch, I honestly haven’t had a ton of time since it launched to actually enjoy my own product. I’ve been busy fixing bugs, responding to feedback or working on other projects (the nerve, people making me work). Building things is fun, but I forgot to actually use it.\
For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking time out to play with ficlets: write stories, play with inspiration, and explore other peoples’ ficlets. It’s been a nice surprise to find out that the experience I envisioned when we started building it is actually fun. I’m having a great time working on stories, getting feedback, and finding stories to continue. Here are some of my favorites:

• I’ve been working on writing dialogue recently, something I’ve always sucked at, and today’s ficlet is all dialogue about freakshow performers tired of performing.
• I wrote When It Ends For One, It Ends For Both to work through some emotional stuff late one night after hearing about some friends’ marital problems.
• The Butler’s Secret is my most popular ficlet yet – a mystery about a butler with some evil plan – written just because I saw a photo of an evil-lookin’ butler on the inspiration page.
• A Hero’s Burial is a sequel to Twelve Inch High Underdog – which is my all-time favorite ficlet.
• The Falling Men in Their Fancy Suits is a story I wrote as part of our poverty challenge as part of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day.
• “Death and Sausages”… only because I wanted to use “death and sausages” in a story.
• I wrote Security Blanket because Mr. Scalzi wrote a blog post about steampunk zap guns.\
  I’ve written more, but they’re either crappy or not worth pointing out (although I still think my story about Moses is funny as hell).\
  There’s a lesson in here somewhere about eating dog food… but I’m just glad it’s still fun to play with ficlets.