KD^#C^3 - 20250330 - I hear the wind blow
I like short stories. IN high school I started reading collections of very short stories. Usually the designation for "Very Short Story" changed a lot between editors. Usually it was build around a word limit. 500 words, 100 words or even 44 words. When twitter came around I followed a few accounts that did tweet-length stories. And this was back when a tweet was 140 characters max. I like short stories. I like the constraints they place on writing, and how the limited form makes you want to use every word to its maximum potential.
I think the very short story community, such as it is, has migrated to reddit. Or at least that's where I see it the most. There are various 2-sentence stories groups, often with different genre constraints as well, i.e. 2-sentence horror, or 2-sentence sad stories. Regardless of the supposed genre, all of these 2-sentence stories have the same format (or at least the successful ones do): The first sentence sets up a scenario and the second one subverts that scenario to greater or lesser effect. Personally I find this format a little dull. It's constrained, but not in a way that encourages creativity to my mind. Rather, I find it makes most of them feel the same.
There is one other format, which I actually took to writing for a little while back in *checks notes...* 2009. This Very Short story format was the ficlet. This was the term d'art for sort stories that ranged between 64 and 1024 characters. These constraints were to keep the file-size relatively low (hence the binary-based upper and lower bounds.) I wasn't active in th community for long, and by the time I discovered it, they had already migrated once. Originally it was hosted in AOL (Kids, ask your parents) and AOL shut it down, so they moved to their own website, which was Ficly.com. That's where I discovered them. I wrote 10 stories in 2009, I think all of them were exactly 1024 characters, because that was the limit and I thought it as a neat accomplishment. But I got distracted (mostly by grad school) and moved onto other things. Sadly the Ficly.com website shut down in 2014, although they kept an archive of all the posted works. Another website, Ficlatte.com, showed up as a replacement, but it shot down too, although less formally than its predecessors. It just stopped working one day, a few years ago.
Until this week. They got the site up and running again. You can go there and read short stories made by people. You can't read any I wrote there, because I didn't write any. Bu I did write some ficlets on ficly, and I will share one with you now. I didn't remember writing it until I looked it up just now, but I'm pretty happy with it. Also I checked and it's not exactly 1024 characters long. You'll just have to live with my imperfections.
I think the very short story community, such as it is, has migrated to reddit. Or at least that's where I see it the most. There are various 2-sentence stories groups, often with different genre constraints as well, i.e. 2-sentence horror, or 2-sentence sad stories. Regardless of the supposed genre, all of these 2-sentence stories have the same format (or at least the successful ones do): The first sentence sets up a scenario and the second one subverts that scenario to greater or lesser effect. Personally I find this format a little dull. It's constrained, but not in a way that encourages creativity to my mind. Rather, I find it makes most of them feel the same.
There is one other format, which I actually took to writing for a little while back in *checks notes...* 2009. This Very Short story format was the ficlet. This was the term d'art for sort stories that ranged between 64 and 1024 characters. These constraints were to keep the file-size relatively low (hence the binary-based upper and lower bounds.) I wasn't active in th community for long, and by the time I discovered it, they had already migrated once. Originally it was hosted in AOL (Kids, ask your parents) and AOL shut it down, so they moved to their own website, which was Ficly.com. That's where I discovered them. I wrote 10 stories in 2009, I think all of them were exactly 1024 characters, because that was the limit and I thought it as a neat accomplishment. But I got distracted (mostly by grad school) and moved onto other things. Sadly the Ficly.com website shut down in 2014, although they kept an archive of all the posted works. Another website, Ficlatte.com, showed up as a replacement, but it shot down too, although less formally than its predecessors. It just stopped working one day, a few years ago.
Until this week. They got the site up and running again. You can go there and read short stories made by people. You can't read any I wrote there, because I didn't write any. Bu I did write some ficlets on ficly, and I will share one with you now. I didn't remember writing it until I looked it up just now, but I'm pretty happy with it. Also I checked and it's not exactly 1024 characters long. You'll just have to live with my imperfections.
Eli's Coming
There’s a storm brewing just over the horizon. There’s the sound of thunder about to break. There’s electricity in the air. There’s nothing that can be done to stop it.
She’s about to finish dinner. She’ll clean up after herself, because she wants to be ready. She will scrape her plate and rinse it off in the sink. She will glance at the front door as she heads to the living room to see that it’s locked. She will curl up on the couch with a glass of wine, and see if the monologue makes her want to watch the rest of Conan.
He will finish this one and maybe one more. He will convince the bartender that he’s fine to drive by reciting the alphabet backwards while standing on one foot. He will jingle the keys in his pocket, laughing at the sound that they make.
The Officer will not be surprised by the call, just disappointed. The Officer will arrive on the scene and fill out all the appropriate paperwork. The Officer will mourn in the future, because there will always be a job to do.
Then the rain will start.