I've already seen the movie, but this is a little blog post I wrote before that. I'll wait till its been out longer before I say anything spoilerish. This preview contains no spoilers. My excitement over this movie inspired several of the very short stories that have appeared lately.

Top 5 Things I’m Looking Forward To In The Dark Knight Rises

1. Bane: I was very skeptical when I first saw this look for Bane, but lets be serious, Bane in any format of Batman hasn’t exactly looked like a reasonable character. His character design has always been extreme. I’m looking forward to seeing how he is portrayed, is he just a strong mastermind or is there some element of him being unnaturally strong like there has been in the comics and other incarnations? Does he break Bruce Wayne’s/Batman’s back like he does in the comics, or does he just severly injure him? What’s with the large time gap that is supposed to take place in the movie? I don’t know, but I can’t wait to find out.

2. The music. I loved the music for both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises and am greatly looking forward to the music for this. I have both on my iPod and also the soundtrack to Inception, which is also by Hanz Zimmer, so clearly I’m somewhat of a fan. Can’t wait. Now, you might be asking if I can’t wait, then why don’t I go get the soundtrack which just went on sale this week? Because I don’t want to be spoiled. Soundtrack titles often spoil things and I’d rather hear the music for the first time with the movie.

3. What is Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s role exactly? I’ve been trying very hard to stay away from spoilers for this movie and his character holds a lot of mystery. He is another example of Chrisopher Nolan using an actor/actress that he loves in multiple movies. Michael Cain has appeared in seemingly all of Nolan’s movies and it looks like Gordon-Levitt has joined those ranks. But does he play a good guy? A bad guy? Some movie version of Robin or Nightwing? A movie version of Azrael (google it if you choose to, or not if your worried about potential spoilers). I don’t know, but I’m excited to find out.

4. Batman, duh: So many mysteries around Batman and Bruce Wayne for this movie. Just taking information from the trailer it becomes clear that he gets injured and has to make some kind of comeback. But how badly is he injured? How long does he stay away from being Batman? Years? What makes him come back? Does he die in the end? so many questions and I’m gonna find out on midnight Thursday night/Friday morning. Not only that but also the action, Chris Nolan makes Batman have INCREDIBLE action in his movies. Much more advanced than any previous incarnation of Batman on the big screen and he does it all for real, or at least seemingly for real. Not a whole crap ton of CGI-mess like that stupid Green Lantern movie.

5. The story, what’s it really going to be. Just like in The Dark Knight (spoiler alert) we knew the Joker would be there causing mayhem, thats what he does. But we didn’t know just how much, we didn’t realize the mind games that would be played, the major characters he would kill or ruin. So sure, we know Bane is going to be around and at some point he’s going to hurt Bats. But what else is going on? What stories is Chris Nolan drawing from? To make the previous two movies he drew heavily from Batman Year One, The Long Halloween, Dark Victory and maybe a couple others. For this one obviously there is a big Knightfall reference because that’s where we first meet Bane? But what else. I can’t wait to find out.

 
Three new stories today. One by frequent contributor C.D. Carter and two by me. You can follow Carter on twitter @CDCarter13.

His story is about a town with a Halloween problem. It's town history is built on strange religions and celebrating Halloween. It's part of what some might call a long term project.

The FITFO story is inspired by something I recently learned jerks say. I apologize for the harsh language but I figure anyone reading these stories is adult enough to deal with it. I also wrote it to try and play on what's going on a lot with the media and politics as it relates to big rich guys and regular people. I'm not actually on the side of the Occupy type crowd, it was just a story I had an idea for.

My second story is inspired by my excitement to see the Dark Knight Rises. I literally can't wait to see it, but I did hesitate on publishing it and the previous Batman centered story. I've gotten into a few arguments with people on the interwebs about using copyrighted material or how some people feel its their right to download things illegally. So I thought wouldn't it be kind of the same by writing a Batman story?

But I decided to for several reasons. 1) c'mon, fair use. 2) I'm not making one single penny and 3) if I can talk about the movie in this blog its almost like advertising for the movie. Like when the news does stories about it or stories appear in magazines, only they are actually making money.

So anyway, can't wait to see the movie and if your reading this feel free to contact me at [email protected] or use one of the submission forms to talk about writing a guest blog post. See ya.
 
Hey there, today's featured story is "Drunk Text". Thankfully this is not based on a true story although many stories are. I just had what I thought was a funny idea.

I also wrote another story appearing this morning, "Sat Nav Sky Net". I think there's a lot of jokes floating around about Facebook or Google being like Skynet from the Terminator movies because they know so much about us all. So this story is based off that and an episode of Doctor Who.

Also of note our frequent contributor C.D. Carter has a new short story available at the Kindle Store. It's called "Fantasy Football and the Mistake of American Unity". It's kind of about how a fantasy football league ruins a politician years later. Check it. There's a part you can sample for free, so why not? Why not??????

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B008MAJ61E/ref=mp_s_a_1?qid=1342607630&sr=8-1

 
Hey there. Today's Featured story of the Day is "The Hunt" by frequent contributor Wifi TypeWriter. This is a good example of what I like about these really short stories. The writer has just enough time to point you in a direction and then send you somewhere else unexpected and funny. It starts with the subject gathering equipment for a hunt, making you think that they are going to hunt a dangerous animal... but really they are hunting for shoes. Its funny.

So, if your reading this, this is what I like. You don't have to be limited by the format of very short stories. You can go to other planets, travel through time, tell a funny story, a heartbreaking story, a creepy scary story. It could be anything. You just have to be efficient with your language.

Anyway, thanks to Wifi TypeWriter who is also the new Featured Artist of the Week. This is a new feature that I am going to try and promote frequent contributors to the site to give them a little love.

 
Well, I'm still testing out this blog function. Right now I'm going to use it to talk about the Featured Story of the Day: "Another Day, Another Million Deaths"

I get my story ideas from mostly just going about my day. If someone, or several someones, almost run into me on the highway then I write a story about road rage. If I'm feeling super excited about The Dark Knight Rises, then I write a story about Batman (The Fire Rises).

Todays story I got the idea for after hearing someone mention the Grim Reaper on one of the many podcasts I listen to. They mentioned it in passing and it made me think a story about the Grim Reaper would be cool. So I do what I always try to do when I'm out and about (btw, do we really need the "about" part of out and about?). I opened up my phone and went to the "notes" app and wrote down the idea real quick. In this case all I wrote was "Grim Reaper story". Sometimes all I'll write at first is the title and that is enough to make me remember what it is I wanted to write about. Other times if I'm able I'll just take a few minutes and write the whole story right then.

Stories or ideas of the Grim Reaper being tired aren't new. They've been done many times from "Death takes a holiday" to the movie "Meet Joe Black" and I think several episodes of Family Guy.

So I knew this wasn't exactly an original idea and I didn't have a lot of space to get the idea across due to my self imposed restrictions on Miniature Fiction. So I wanted to quickly get a story told that showed the Grim Reaper feels like he needs a vacation not just because he works all the time, but because he remembers each and every person he encounters and is sad from sending the vast majority to hell.

Anyway, if your reading feel free to submit a story, new authors are always welcome.
 
I started this blog mostly because Weebly TOLD me to. I felt compelled to start it. Like Weebly is the puppet master and I'm just.... the puppet.


I'm not sure what to make of this site. I started it as a way to share very short stories because a different website that I use to participate on started to annoy me. Sometimes I think this site could really be something someday, others not so much. Only time will tell I suppose.