{Q} What inspired the creation of the flash fiction series, and did you have any idea you’d ever be penning the 1,111th story?

{A} Well the stories have taken a variety of on-line forms so there’s no straight-forward answer to that one. Ten years ago, when I was emerging from my post-university slumber, thinking to myself, “Okay, so now what do I do?” I was lucky enough to move into a building with a lovely neighbor who gave me some guidance.

“You’re an actor,” she said, laughing at some absurd character that I’d just pulled out of my ass. She was majoring in theater at the University of British Columbia and suggested that I audition for a play that one of her instructors was putting on at a small community theater in Vancouver.

After landing the role of a thief in Aphra Behn’s The Rover, I became involved in other plays and then in ’99 I bought a video camera and started making shorts films with some of the actors I’d met.

Around the same time I started drawing little doodles as well as writing little stories. In 2003, I realized that a website would be a great place to bring together my acting, drawing and writing.

Writing a story everyday satisfied my growing desire to create things at least on a part time basis. It had been years since I’d graduated from university but I had finally found part of an answer to that question. What do I do now? I throw myself at everything and see what I stick to. I did that for a year.

In 2004, I did a one-person play for the Vancouver Fringe Festival and they set me up with a performer’s web-log. With the flexibility inherent in the format, I decided to shift my daily stories onto the blog. After a couple of months I started basing a story everyday on a piece of art that was cool, quirky or eye-catching in some way. That lasted for a year.

In my third phase I wrote a story everyday and then emailed it out to the people I’d met on-line. I asked that people print the story up and then hide it somewhere in their world. People who discovered the stories were asked to email me with their whereabouts, and I tracked the discoveries on-line.

The feedback was modest but memorable. My work was being read in print in Portugal and San Francisco. I was becoming the most widely read unknown writer in the world.

Finally at the beginning of this year I wanted to go back online but I needed a new idea and site. Wordpress seemed to offer a lot by way of bells and whistles as well as some nice and simple layouts. I racked my brains for weeks trying to come up with some underlying concept that would appeal to a lot of people but also showcase my specific styles of writing.

Then it hit me: the most common off-hand sort of joke made about the web is that of identity, people pretending to be something they’re not. If I prefaced my daily stories with introductions by a revolving door of different people, I would be addressing this central weakness and strength of the web.

The frame of the stories would be an identity borrowed for the day but the stories - for the most part - would still be able to stand on their own.

The entire premise for fast fictions was a kind of joke but I respect jokes. Ludwig Wittgenstein at one point said that an entire book of philosophy should be made out of jokes. They show frisson between ways of looking at the world. I hope that my site and stories leave people thinking and laughing at the same time.

Oh and I had no idea that I’d be writing over a thousand. Every so often I’ve tried to shift my attention to longer stories but I can’t get past the daily fix of writing and then publishing a story for all the world to read.

{Q} How do you decide on an identity to adopt when writing the next flash fiction installment?

{A} I keep it as varied as possible: A-list Hollywood actors, professional writers as well as hacks, monstrous criminals, nobodies, friends, family (my mother on Mother’s Day), inanimate objects, artists, philosophers and animals. I want to create a list of “contributors” as varied as the web itself.

As far as how I go about deciding on the next one, well it just depends, there are days when I’ve read something interesting on-line and I want to respond in some roundabout way or perhaps I’ve been reading somebody in print and I’d like to sneak them an online hello. There’s no overarching system.

{Q} What prompted you to write the book “Fast Fictions”? Is it made up of material from the flash fiction series, or somewhere else?

{A} The short-short stories in Fast Fictions are mostly drawn from May, June and July of last year. As these stories had been emailed out to a specific group of people – this was during my ballofdirt.com phase - I thought it would be good idea to offer it to everyone else.

A lot of friends were encouraging me to put together a print collection and when one friend, Naomi Macdougall, offered her book making expertise, I jumped at the chance.

{Q} The One Thousand Stories trailer/video is pretty cool, how did that come about?

{A} Once I had a book in print I realized that I needed a book launch but because the stories were so short I knew I couldn’t give any conventional sort of reading. So I decided to do 50 venues in one day. The stories were short enough for this to work no problem.

I love biking and so that seemed like a natural way to go about getting from A to B and once I started telling people about my launch I attracted the interest of some film students: Jeremy Schaulin-Rioux, Hunter James Wood, Trevor Renney and Brad Paul. They had two cameras on me all day, one of which was being held from the back of a tandem bike.

They’ve submitted the ten-minute film to eight festivals across North America and so far it’s screened once in Vancouver at the Paul and Ben Film Festival. It’ll make its second screening on the 24th of May in Vancouver at the Carnegie Center on Main and Hastings. A very interesting part of town.

{Q} You seem to be utilising every promotional method possible from grass roots to YouTube, to get the word out, what’s caught the most attention so far?

{A} Everything has worked and since the whole project keeps snowballing each method has necessarily brought more attention than the last.

At the end of the day, I’m hoping that I’ll pique some publisher’s curiosity and my next book can be a more ambitious compilation of stories culled from the past four years that will have a wider distribution.