This is for my family, friends and anyone else who might care to follow along as I head off to DC to celebrate my daughter’s 18th birthday, and see the city, and watch the fireworks on the Mall. I will be tweeting, twitpiccing and audiobooing. For those of you who don’t bother with Twitter or Facebook, you can just check here for the latest Trip tweets etc begin Wednesday the 2nd. Also, Happy Birthday to my gorgeous 18 year old girl, July 3rd

For the latest Audioboos from DC, check the sidebar ———————————>

Latest Tweets:

Latest Twitpics:

View the rest.

Latest Videos:

Also visit Minimelia.com to the kid’s tweets, Boos and pix

Ficly (formerly “Ficlets”) is back – and better than ever.

I wouldn’t have used this description over a year ago, but Ficly is like Twitter for fiction writers. And like Twitter, there is great freedom in restraint.

A long time ago, I followed a link recommendation from Wil Wheaton, which brought me to the most wonderful, awesome site for writers I’ve ever known: Ficlets.com (I won’t link because that site is now dead.) Ficlets restricted your story to a mere 1,024 characters, or a few brief paragraphs.

Some of the things you could do with it included prequel or sequel any author’s story and hopefully get a chain of different authors adding to one story; issue writing challenges; write your own little series; comment/rate stories (leading to one of the most instructive, constructive feedback sites I’ve used); use creative commons pictures from Flickr as inspiration for a story; use quotes or starters as inspiration.

A lot of fun packed into a neat little site. Ficlets (and the nifty Flickr inspiration) helped me break through a problem I have always had whenever I tried to write a long story – namely, I could never write anything longer than a short story.  But Ficlets helped me create a story, with characters I fell in love with and storylines galore. and with the help of being able to write brief sequels, I found myself with a workable outline that eventually grew into what I hope will be a book in the near future: CherryPopMcGee.com.

So I have a deep love for Ficlets. Imagine my dismay when I learned it woul be closing down. For reasons I won’t go into, the creator of the site was made to shut it down. Oh we had warning and most of us were able to save our stories – our babies really – before the last day.

And then, one day, came the word that he was rebuilding it. That he was taking his time to make the improvements he couldn’t make before. That he and a core group of people, out of the kindness of their hearts and love for the community they had originally built, were going to bring it back.

And after a very long wait, this weekend Ficlets returned with a new name, Ficly, a beautiful makeover, and a crowd of voracious writers ready to make it what it once was. As of this writing, already over 600 Ficlies have been written. To me, that is phenomenal and worthy of a visit, if writing is your thing I give it the highest of recommendations I can give it.

This is a fun little site that creates word clouds based on text you give it. I gave it a link to the blog here and it turned this out

I’m sitting in the Senior High auditorium for the last time right now. Tonight is Shannon’s final orchestra concert after 7 years of musical education. I think out of all that time, I’ve missed two of her shows.

The high school orchestra has mostly consisted of about 800 violins, cellos and violas, and about 4 or 5 wind instruments. Shannon plays clarinet. Only once in the 4 years of high school have I been able to see her, because the instructor tucks the winds way at the back.

But tonight is different. Tonight she’ll be called up to sign the Big Yellow Bass as is traditional for departing seniors and receive her Letter. I think it will be lovely.

It’s about 8 minutes to showtime. The stage is empty but I can hear strains of instruments coming from the nearby bandroom. The seats are filling up and we are ready to enjoy the likes of Bartok, Mozart and Bach.

I can’t think of a better ending to my birthday

I wrote the above stuff as I sat waiting for the show to begin (I heart my iPod Touch). Below, I’ve added some audio I took as well as some pix.

The first song:

The last song:

Shannon talks about the last concert:

She’s back. After quite the hiatus, I’m back at it with the CherryPop McGee story that I hope one day becomes a book. In fact, I know it will because I’m going to self-publish it, hehe So whether it’s crap or really good, I will at least be able to say I wrote a book

I hope it’s good though. I’ve also revived the website, and I’ve released three chapters and the prologue so far. Interspersed with the chapter releases are blog posts from the two main characters themselves: CherryPop and Liam (the Zombie). Liam and CherryPop are also on Twitter, though things aren’t looking so good for our girl as she’s become the victim of a Stupid Zombie bite that was infected with something and now she’s out cold. You’ll have to follow them on Twitter to find out what happens next.

I’m slowly building up a little ‘verse for my story that I hope can get noticed and (hopefully) is enjoyed by folks who dig on Zombie/Magic/sci-fi-y type stories. Ican’t narrow down a genre to pin this to yet.

I also have plans to do a podcast, maybe 30 minutes or so on Zombies that would end with the release of another chapter of the story. I figured I could do Zombie trivia, have someone review a Zombie movie and umm, other Zombie stuff. It’s a Zombcast. Or will be if I can recruit helpers. If anyone reads this, get a hold of me and let me know if you’d like to help me out

So that’s me done pimping what I’m up to. This is my main project right now in my free time and I am having an absolute blast working on this.

We did a wander around a couple of parks on this Day of the Zombie. Weather was cold and gloomy, but we enjoyed nonetheless. These were taken at Stolley Park and Pier Park in GI. My dad might want to note that the cool cave he told me kids used to play on has been cleaned up and reopened in all it’s fort-like glory

Jonathan Coulton is my new hero.

(A fan video, because in addition to writing awesome Zombie songs etc, Mr. Coulton releases his stuff under Creative Commons license which allows these cool fan vids to get made without fear of the dreaded Takedown Notice. You go Mr. Coulton.)