Who are you?
I’m Brendan Adkins.
What is this?
It’s a constrained forced-writing experiment. I wanted to see if I could write 101 words, and exactly 101 words, of fiction five days a week. I started on July 18, 2003, and went public on June 21, 2004. There are over 1000 entries now. So far I’m doing okay.
Why?
A few reasons–my failure to accomplish anything during NaNoWriMo, a book by Dan Rhodes called Anthropology, the uneven but brilliant Girls Are Pretty, and my friend Stephen’s now-defunct Daily Scribble writing journal. But mostly because I want to get better at writing, and there’s exactly one way to do that.
You used this name more than once.
That means it’s the same character, but at a different time or place. Some of the characters (particularly those in the categories) show up regularly, either because they’re involved in longer stories or because they’re useful voices. Others may only come up a couple of times and then disappear; the majority are one-shots.
For the record, yes, the names are getting goofier because I’m running out of unused real ones.
Are you ever going to expand any of these?
Maybe. Probably. Some of them already are expanding, if in a very loose fashion which may be difficult to follow. But the point of this exercise is to develop my prose, overcome writer’s fear and learn to edit myself very harshly; I’ll get to long-form when I’m ready for it.
This story doesn’t make any sense.
I’m sorry. These are a daily forced exercise, and not all of them are going to be very good.
Where do you get your ideas?
I think very hard for a long time, usually on the bus.
Why “anacrusis / ommatidia?”
“Anacrusis” is a real word, and also a fake word. The official explanation is that they’re 100 words long, with a 1-word upbeat just before they begin. I stole that from Will because it’s much better than the real explanation.
“Ommatidia” is also a real word; suffice to say that since its inception, the I or Is in the various titles of this site have been highlighted, and it took me years to realize I was making a dreadful pun.
Can I write one of these and send it to you?
Maybe. Let me get back to you on that.
Can I use this story in a compilation? On a t-shirt? In my game design? In–
While requests like this are always flattering, the fact is that you don’t even have to ask! Everything in Anacrusis is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license, which means you can redistribute, alter, build upon, compile, print, draw inspiration from, and even sell these stories however you like. The only restrictions are that you must attribute proper credit (”[Title] by Brendan Adkins” is fine), and you must release your derivative work under the same terms. Of course, it would make me happy to know what your cool project is!
If you want to know why I think Creative Commons licensing is important, I’d be happy to discuss it with you–just let me know.
What else do you do?
I try to draw a comic called Xorph and I keep a journal called not falling down. There’s more stuff about me on my own about page.
