Introducing...

I've given up on Fifteen Minute Story Fridays. They served a great purpose, which was distracting me from advertising. Now that I need no distraction, they seem soft and uninspired. I need something with a thread. A cable. Something with staying power, not burn-out brilliance.

When I wrote my column on advertising, a friend of mine read it, and said "I want to hear more about the Hive. Please, write about the Hive." And that's what this will be. I've decided to distract myself from life with advertising.

This will be a Friday serial in the Conan Doyle, Dickensian sense. And it's not about "The Hive." There are no characters ripped from my days in advertising. Those anecdotes are too precious and in-jokey to make good narratives. Traits, situations and perhaps quotes may be borrowed from experience, but the total package is fiction.

It has to be. Advertising is the biggest fiction around.