By and large, a whole lot of empty friggin’ space.

So let’s talk about it a tad, shall we? Why are you here, and more importantly, why am I here? Well the crux of it is simply this: for as long as I can recall, I’ve had an infatuation, a passion, a love of stories that rivals all other loves. There was a problem, though, and the problem was simply this: I needed money. So I trekked off into the lonely wilderness that is IT work, a field in which cash flows but creativity sits in a dirty little hole in a back room, where it grows algae and assorted bacteria and eventually starts smelling like something just a little bit worse than poop.

Well, as with all things, that came to a rather abrupt halt earlier this year, when complications from a car accident last year and my subsequent spine surgery put me in the position of being unable to lift the equipment used in my job. So I left that job, had an extended bout with unemployment, and now I do this instead. I’m working on doing some level of this as a paying gig, but don’t anticipate getting rich off it (dammit) any time soon.

However, that’s OK. I was pretty much raised broke, so I can make do without a lot of fancy spending cash and it really doesn’t bug me. What has bugged me, for years and years while I had all that spending cash, is the fact that my creative skills were languishing and my frustration was growing.

So like anyone else I decided to go to college and finish up my degree, because hey, college is where creativity is polished (not where it’s born, that’s another place), and boy did I need to get the mold off. Well, the thing was that I picked a shitty college with horrible administrators and lousy teachers (Dear Westwood college: The local dude from Kinko’s does NOT constitute a “graphics industry professional” teacher, just FYI!) Suffice to say that didn’t really work out, and after a tad less than three years I left that situation. Part of it was intentional, part of it not (don’t even ask), but in any case the reality is that what I had pledged my $60,000 in trade for was an Education, and I wasn’t getting it.

Note to prospective students: Go to college, just not Westwood college. It’s a scam and you will get short changed. No wait, I meant ripped off.

Anyway, so that brings me to today. Servers, UPS’s, racks and other fancy networking equipment is all damn big and damn heavy, and I can’t lift it anymore. Physical limitation. It sucks on the wallet side, but my sincere belief is that for every door that closes, another opens, and this is my new door. What’s on the other side remains to be seen, but I promise to do my best to make it something worth doing. So now, why are we here?

We are here because the internet has a lot of short stories, but some of them aren’t as short as you’d hope or want. Worse, some of the ones that are fairly short aren’t really well polished, in large part because they try to do too much. I am very familiar with this situation because I’ve long had a tendency to try and do too much with too little. Remind me to tell you about Something’s F.O.W.L sometime.

In any case, it’s my goal to try and hone my own creative writing skills, and I intend to do that via this site. My methodology is rather simple: I will write stories that take up no more than a single page in Microsoft Word, polish the holy living crap out of them, and post them here. Because I reserve the right to cheat a little bit, I may use the Narrow Margins option in order to cram more words onto a single page, and while you’re entitled to complain about that fact I’m afraid there is very little you can actually do about it. There is, however, a nice comments section, and you are more than free to state your opinions there. If you’re very eloquent you may even convince me to change my evil ways, but being realistic, you probably shouldn’t hold your breath. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for any deaths, after all.

What I’ll ask of you as a visitor is simply this: if you have criticism or praise, tell me about it! I don’t really have a solid gauge of my own creative capability as yet, so either of the above will help me in my quest to polish my skills up. And hey, whether you bitch and moan or sing my praises, just know that I do thank you for taking the time to do so.

And with that, we’re off!