Ficly

About Ficly

Ficly Is Going Away

As of 9/14/2014, you’ll no longer be able to write new stories on Ficly, login, send notes, etc. The stories will remain for as long as possible (hopefully that means decades), but it will no longer be a place where you can write new stories. There’s more information on the blog.

Thank you for five wonderful years of stories, sequels and prequels!

What is Ficly?

Ficly is about creativity. When I was originally thinking about this idea, I was looking for something creative I could do for the last fifteen minutes of my lunch break before I jumped back into coding and writing documentation. I’d originally had an idea for a much larger site for serious fiction, but realized that most people don’t have the time to write serious fiction. But, everyone can carve out fifteen minutes to either continue a story someone else has started, or start something of their own – something simple – two, maybe three paragraphs of a character, a plot or even just a place.

That’s the premise. We impose a limit of 1,024 characters because we think constraints are good. They make you choose your words more carefully. They also make it less daunting than starting at a never-ending blank screen in a word processor. All you have to do is write one kilobyte of something – something fictional. That’s all.

We’ll be adding other features to the site in the weeks and months to come that should make it easier to come up with ideas for starting stories and easier to find stories you might want to continue or create a new beginning for.

This is just the beginning. Thanks for being a part of the journey.

The Story of Ficly

Once upon a time, Kevin Lawver and Jason Garber built a lovely little site a few years ago called ficlets with three very talented designers: Ari, Cindy and Jenna. Ficlets was a lovely thing, built as an experiment and launched with all good intentions. They all thought we’d get to work on it some more, add features, and generally, make it better. That didn’t happen. Everyone went their separate ways and worked on different things. But, Kevin stuck around to keep ficlets afloat, until he too had to leave and do other things. Then, ficlets’ corporate overlords decided to pull the plug – and the wonderful people who loved ficlets were left homeless. This bothered Kevin and Jason. Kevin, with some help from the community, built the ficlets memorial and had dreams of resurrecting and rebuilding ficlets. But, he was very busy working at a small music technology company. But, Jason, being very persuasive, convinced Kevin that they shouldn’t leave the ficlets community without a home and that the two of them could build something new and wonderful in their less than copious spare time (what, with Jason working on a very nice news-sharing site). Jason recruited some amazing designers from Viget Labs who created gorgeous artwork for them to implement. Kevin found hosting from the best little hosting company in Savannah. Their friend Joe even helped out, because he’s awesome.

Ficly was built with love. The people who built it love creativity, writing and the community that ficlets left behind. They love working together and building beautiful web toys. As Jason says, “My job isn’t building web pages. I deliver happiness by the kilobyte.” Ficly isn’t a startup. It’s not here to take over the world. Ficly is here to build and bring joy. They’re not quite sure where Ficly will go, but for now “here” is enough.

It took them much longer than they planned. It’s not everything they planned… yet. But, it is Ficly, and it’s here.

And in case it wasn’t clear in our little story, Ficly is:

And we’d like to thank the following people and companies for being awesome: