I’ve moved

Hi, everyone. For the moment, I’ve moved my blogging over to Tumblr. Why don’t ya go check it out? I explain the move there, in my first post, so if you’re wondering why, just look it up in my archives.

I hope to see you all there.

 

Flash Fiction Friday: “The Terror Within (Introduction)”

My latest 250-word entry for Flash Fiction Friday is “The Terror Within”—or, rather, the beginning of a story by that name. I was inspired by this week’s challenge to write a full-on short story, but to keep the entry within the word limit, I only wrote the introduction. Will I finish it? I don’t know. I’d love some feedback, and if it’s positive, I might just go ahead and write the rest.

For the record, the three wildcard words provided this week at the Supplicium Post Mortem blog were “restraint”, “tidal”, and “koozie”, and I managed to use them all—though I took great liberty with the word “koozie”, which, according to Wikipedia, is actually “a fabric or foam device that is designed to keep a beverage can or bottle cold.”

As always, I hope you enjoy.

 

Flash Fiction Friday: “Et Ego in Arcadia Vixi”

After a bit of a hiatus, I’m trying to get back in the swing of things, so here’s a new Flash Fiction Friday entry. I managed to use all three wildcards (carpeting, umbrella, et ego in arcadia vixi) but I went over the 250-word limit by about 50 words. Oh well. Sometimes the story can’t be contained in such a small space. Even 300 words seem too few for this story, but I’ll let you all be the judge of that. Let me know what you think. I hope you enjoy.

 

Flash Fiction Friday: “Strange Bedfellows”

I had a hard time with this one. I threw out idea after idea—one I had already written but just couldn’t get down to 250 words. I managed exactly 250 with this one (according to Microsoft Word), but I only found a way to include two of the wildcards: “turquoise” and “swan”; my own wildcard suggestion, “hagiography”, just wouldn’t fit in. Oh well. It’s a story. I hope you enjoy it.

 

Revolution 2.0: A Brief Manifesto

When you spend as much time as I do on Twitter—the very embodiment of the social Internet experience, or Web 2.0—you start to see complaints about people who share too much personal information. Some people know they’re sharing too much and even hashtag #TMI. But what is too much? And why do people complain? Well, some people are attention whores, and they share what most people would keep private in the hopes of evoking a response and getting people to talk to them; they’re needy, quite likely even co-dependent. In this post, I’m going to do what I always do: ignore them. I want to talk about something deeper.

It seems to me that people wear their avatars as masks. They feel that they don’t really know the people they’re talking with, that those people are simply personae, also wearing masks, and so they feel comfortable sharing information online that they wouldn’t in “real life”. Well, welcome to the 21st Century, people. This complex network of machinery we call the Internet is, like it or not, the way we communicate these days. It’s a barrier that breaks down barriers, and it’s changing the way we interact. It’s been around for over a decade and a half, and we still haven’t adapted to it. We’re still playing by the old rules. It’s time to toss the rules out the window.