About Ficlatté

What is Ficlatté?

Filatté is about creativity. It's about looking for a way to allow anyone to carve out fifteen minutes to create and write, whether that's to continue a story someone else has started or to start something new of their own, with just two or three paragraphs and a simple idea.

That’s the basic premise. We impose a limit of 1,024 characters because sometimes constraints are good. They force you choose your words more carefully, to make the maximum impact with a minimum of syllables. They also make it less daunting to write than it might be if you were staring 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 it. That’s all.

The Story of Ficlatté

Ficlatté is the third-generation of a micro-fiction website that began nearly a decade ago with ficlets, the experimental brain-child of AOL, helmed by Kevin Lawver and Jason Garber. ficlets lived for 18 months and gathered a community that generated over 45,000 individual entries. Then AOL mothballed the project and moved on to other things.

Fortunately Kevin and Jason weren't content to leave it at that. In 2009 they built the successor to ficlets, called Ficly and breathed new life into what ficlets began. Many members of the ficlets community migrated to Ficly, and over the next five years, the community grew again into a vibrant hive of creativity and imagination.

But alas even Ficly was ultimately forced to close its doors and the community was once again temporarily homeless. But they didn't have to wait long or go far. In 2015 Paul Robertson launched the first version of Ficlatté and got the skeleton of a new castle off the ground. Many members of Ficly's community found their way here; many others got lost along the way. But over the last several years, we've slowly been developing this barebones castle into a fully-featured fortress, and the stories being told around the various hearths within these walls have kept us warm during many a cold night. We hope Ficlatté will outlast both ficlets and Ficly combined, and we continue to construct new rooms, corridors, and secret passageways throughout the castle with that hope in mind.

We hope you'll join us. For most of us here, this is a kind of surrogate family, a home away from home, if you will, where the stories are always fresh, the coffee is always hot, and the companionship and camaraderie are always warm and welcoming.

Who Are We?

Ultimately, Ficlatté is made up of everyone who spends time here -- writing, creating, critiquing, and commenting. Without our community, this place could not be what it is.

However, our current development team is comprised of three individuals:

In addition, we'd like to acknowledge the following people, companies, and resources without which our castle would be little more than a pile of stone blocks lying in a field:

And we're not done building. If anything, we're just beginning. So stick around, grab a hot cup o' joe, and keep writing!