Finding Old Friends That Never Knew You

Back in the days when I used to live in an ugly apartment and spend my time hussling about in a white delivery van, there was precious little to look at on the Internet (besides porn, of course). This was eight years ago, I guess, and I was obsessed with two things: overclocking my computer and trying to figure out if anything from Trivinity, a long-winded, senseless thing I finished writing (actually, quit is a better word) a year earlier, was salvagable. I had success with the former (a Pentium III overclocked from 333 to 456...can I get a "Hell Yeah" from the geeks in the room?) and only wasted hours of my life rewriting and editing things that were better left buried on my hard drive with the latter. Somewhere in that time, I came across Xander Mellish, a struggling writer who started a website based on her many short stories. The characters in her stories were always amusing because they were these extremely smart yet completely innocent women who were forced to become treacherous despite their golden hearts. Romance novels were full of women with such potential but unlike romantical heroines, Xander's heroines did not contain the vital "Swoon Gene" which is so prevalant in most female leads. Once a month, I would get drunk enough to write Xander about writing, inspiration, the simple randomness of it all and she would always reply with a positive, uplifting response that always completely annoyed me. Still, she was nice and she could write and I followed her site as she went on the quest to finish her first book, The Five Georges. She would update her site about how things were going until, one day, it just stopped. I found out later that she moved to Denmark and started working for a paper there. Today, I discovered that her site is back up although it is no longer just the funny short stories of the past, instead it has an array of stories about many different things although her old stories are still intact in the "Classics" section. If you need a good read, this is a good place to get it. I suggest you start with Xander's stories about Denmark because them Danes are a bit of a peculiar bunch.

You can find Xander here.