The Confabulator Cafe

Author: apoland

  • The Scavenger’s Jar

    It stood taller than Elijah, wrapped in layers and layers of light fabric that wafted around its’ frame as the boom of air settled. His chest heaved from where he stood in the corner, holding tight the broom his mother had thrown in earlier. You need to sweep that hellhole! she’d said with a laugh just before leaving for work, and all Elijah could think was that she was being literal and somehow, his messy room had summoned a demon.

    Under a large gauzy hood he could make out a human face, but he was utterly certain that there must have been horns as well. A large hump rose from its shoulder and back. He held the broom out, and in response, the demon whipped a long staff out of a loop of rope on its hip and pointed it at him.

    “You must take me to the town water,” it said in a voice that was sharp but entirely too high to belong to a demon.

    “The what?”

    “Town water.” The demon sized him up so obviously that it seemed an exaggeration, then slid the staff in the scabbard. It reached up with normal human hands and tossed the hood back to reveal an average human head behind the light fabric. Its hair was jagged, dark, and cut short over dusky olive skin.

    The demon was just a tall woman, dressed in drab, dusty fabric that covered her from head to toe. Even the hump on her back was just a bag, not some demonic deformity. It rattled and clanked loudly as she shifted her balance. She sighed and gathered the fabric of her cloak up to glance at what looked like an ice cream sandwich with a screen clipped to her belt. She squinted, then smacked it with her palm. Dust drifted to the ground at her feet.

    “I need to hurry,” she said. “This passage is not forever.” (more…)

  • The Brewmaster’s Armor

    “Ah, there she is — the beauty of Stowreath!”

    “I’ve told you, if you keep calling me that, I’ll start selling to other taverns.” Vigdis directed her hired men to carry the barrels of beer to the storeroom behind the bar. She followed behind them, past the smattering of customers at scuffed tables; this time of day it was only ever drunks or passing travelers, making it the perfect time to swap barrels and money with Allyn. “Micah down at The Yawning Goat has offered me a better sum per barrel than I get here.”

    Allyn feigned hurt, as he always did, clutching his hand to his heart. “You wound me, oh beauteous one. If I don’t have your brews, I only have my wife’s cooking to keep this place afloat.”

    “And she’d have no need of you at all.” Vigdis shook her head and was glad her beard could hide her amusement. “This is the last time I let you get away with it.”

    “On my honor, I’ll never do it again.” He winked beforing turning to the men as they brought in the fresh ale. “Come along, lads, I’ll lead the way to the empties.”

    Vigdis paced the length of the bar while Allyn led the men back, lost in the thought of planning her day. The wagon had deliveries needed in four neighboring towns. The weekly circuit took her from sun-up to sundown and being away from home for so long made her anxious anymore. It had been easier when she was young, working in her father’s brewery under the mountains. She had longed for the open road and the promise of adventure each time they loaded their cart.

    “So, you’re the Beauty of Stowreath?”

    “Call me that again if you’d like a bloody nose.” Vigdis squared her shoulders as she turned to face the stranger sitting alone at a nearby table. She longed for an axe, but tended to leave hers in the wagon; instead, she hooked her thumb through the empty loop on her belt and puffed out her chest, filling her breastplate.

    (more…)

  • Betwixt Hearts

    The woman may have come into Wendy’s tent trying to look common, but she had wealth written all over her. Even dressed down in dark trousers and a blouse, Wendy could see that about her. Her clothes fit too well. Her hair was too clean.

    “Do I have something you need?” Wendy asked as the woman sat at the opposite end of the rug cover the dirt inside the tent.

    “I reckon you do.”

    “And you are?”

    “Elizabeth Wagner.”

    Ah, Wendy had heard the name Wagner around the town, in the weeks she’d been doing her work on the outskirts and nearby farms. It seemed that Daddy Wagner owned about half the town, and wasn’t all too well loved. She hadn’t heard anything about a family, but rich men usually had a few daughters to barter.

    “Well, Miss Wagner, what brings you to me under the cover of night?” (more…)

  • The Monster Next Door

    I heard a tip about a werewolf but don’t have time to follow up. You want it?

    Marlene chewed on her thumbnail as she stared at the text message. In the four minutes since it had arrived she had written out several different replies, and deleted each. “Do you think I’m ready?” sounded too weak. “Hell yeah!” made her sound like an  overeager psychopath. She hadn’t found a happy medium between the two, and after another minute Silas sent a second text.

    If you’re busy, I can check in with another hunter. You’re the closest in the network by 50 miles.

    She tapped out her reply — Send me the details. I’ll get right on it. — and cringed as she hit send, wondering if it made her sound like she hadn’t been doing anything since finishing her certification for the monster hunting network. She had tucked her license in the hunters’ lockbox she’s been issued. It sat in a pile with along with a will, the notification details for next of kin, her relevant online passwords and account destruction directives, and an exhaustive list of what she wanted done if she were turned to any number of monsters. With all that put together, she had promptly taken zero cases.

    (more…)

  • Shiloh

    The notice screen lit up, filling their darkened bedroom with a soft blue hue. Quinn ignored it. They had drawn the blinds the night before, when they stumbled into bed exhausted after Quinn had cried, not for the first time, on the anniversary of his mother’s death. He had every intention of sleeping as long as possible, his head still throbbing from too much to drink, from the weight of his grief.

    “Quinn.” Elpida’s voice had faltered, as though she had tried to cut herself off from saying his name but couldn’t quite stop. He yawned and rolled over, blinking to bring her into focus. “Quinn, it’s from the population commission.”

    He rolled quickly from the bed and crossed the room, goosebumps forming on his skin. She wasn’t wrong — he didn’t think she was, but he’d needed to see it for himself. The official summons for their appointment at the seed library, six months following the submission of their marriage forms.

    The screen went dark. Elpida grabbed his hand and squeezed. “We knew it was coming. We’ve prepared.” But her hand shook.

    * * *

    (more…)

  • The Workers’ Tower

    İlkay kept watch long after the workers had retreated to their bed pods for the night. At fifteen, she could afford to stay up all night without it affecting her domestic work in the tower. The men and women needed their strength to survive their work assignments.

    She sat on the threadbare cushion her mama had made years ago, the yellow fabric faded to a dingy brown; it didn’t lessen the ache in her spine, but it brought her some comfort to have it with her. Her papa’s quilt protected her body from the icy wind, but keeping her hands out to hold the gun made her fingertips numb.

    Her papa had set the gun in her lap and whispered, “There are no bullets, little bird, but don’t let anyone know that.”

    * * *

    The moon was bright and high that night, and the wind blew brutal, whistling a high tune through the rafters. The netting that the workers had placed over the metal bones of their tower had blown away less than hour after İlkay’s watch began.

    The moonlight highlighted the man’s figure against the rafters, his clothing dark and his face obscured by a hood. He fiddled at the joints of the metal, pulling items from a sack slung over one shoulder.

    Practicing the movements like her papa taught her, İlkay shifted up onto one knee and braced the butt of the rifle against her shoulder. The blanket fell open around her as she pointed it at the man, the wind cutting through her clothes. “Stop.”

    (more…)

  • NaNoWriMo, Week Three: Better/Worse

    It could be going better.

    By the end of today, wrimos ought to be at 30,000 words — more than halfway to the target word count. This is one of the ways in which I think NaNo is an imperfect system for new writers learning the trick of the novel.

    By NaNo standards, you’re more than halfway done. If you’re trying to complete the novel in 50,000 (which, your mileage may vary) you’ve finally zoomed out of the saggy middle, which is one of the things that slows us down in week two.

    But most novels come in between 60,000 and 90,000 words, depending on the genre and the writer. I read somewhere that Brian Sanderson’s Elantris is around 200,000 words while Douglas Adams’ Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is just around 46,0001. So it’s not as though there’s a hard a fast rule. But at the same time, it can be hard to break out of the NaNo-set guidelines and learn better methods for structuring and putting together a novel. I think it’s also one of the reasons that a lot of people outgrow NaNo once they start writing outside of the confines of November.2

    This is a lot of navel-gazing about the length and nature of novels, and how the middle always drags, and where I’m aiming is this: I’m still at the plodding, sagging middle of the novel. Despite being firm into week three (my spirits should be rising!), I’m still living week two. I’m around 6,000 – 7,000 words behind par. And while things are slowly coming together in the novel, I’m worried I won’t meet my goal of winning again after several years of depression- and fatigue-induced failure, thus regaining the passion I had for writing before my life suddenly got Very Adult on me back in 2012.

    Hm.

    I didn’t realize it until I wrote it, but yep. That’s sort of the symbolic trophy at play here — the idea that having made real progress in many others parts of my life (most, I’d hazard to say), that all that’s left is to be at the place again where I was gleefully focused on my fiction and eagerly starting to reach for more.

    It could be going worse.

    I ran into a problem with the middle of my novel. At first it was an issue with my main character being passive. I struck out a scene, reworked it, and seemed to have a solid footing. I had a red herring, even — I hadn’t noticed it until that moment!

    But then I realized the real issue with the middle: there wasn’t anything to put there. I had an outline, but no plan to get from “Nora chooses to follow her mentor” to “the climax starts.” This isn’t Rocky — a training montage wasn’t going to fit the emotional tone of the novel. I didn’t have enough supporting characters or any substantial subplots to move through the middle. All the same, I’m determined to put real effort into this project and to win this year, so I forced my way through it bit by bit.

    And then, finally, I had That Moment when it comes together. The problem wasn’t a lack of supporting characters — I have several, actually. It’s just that I wasn’t thinking of them as functional to the story. They each had a role in getting Nora to the point where she’s chosen to follow through with Defeating the Antagonist even though she really doesn’t have the skill to do so. I had a whole cast in this novel. They just needed to be given roles to move the story.

    So now that I have all of the blocks to build the bridge from Act II to Act IV in the outline (according to an outlining method Christie taught us that is quite excellent), I have to go work on my third version of the outline to flesh out those roles. To figure out how all of these supporting characters fit in the new roles I’ve given them. Once I know how they work together (and, of course, also against each other) to meet the goals of the plot, I think the middle will probably move a lot faster.

    1. I’ve never read any Sanderson, even though I love his podcast work, but Adams is one of my favorite authors. So I can only personally vouch for the latter, and yeah. Hitch Hiker’s Guide is a short book.

    2. Outgrowing NaNoWriMo is like outgrowing a really great friendship — it sucks. This is my tenth year, but I don’t need it the way I used to. What I really needed, more than the impetus, was the culture of writers working toward common goal. As our writers’ group has evolved to be that year-round, NaNoWriMo has become less valuable to me. It’s… not a very good feeling.

  • Motherhood Makes for Great Horror

    Remember how last week I said we’d talk about how writing in a real-life historical setting was hard? That was a lie. I have nothing to say about it that someone with, y’know, actual experience hasn’t already said. Instead, I want to talk about the specific sort of horror that comes with motherhood.

    My main character is a pregnant woman who has previously experienced a stillbirth, and I’ve enjoyed mining the horrors of pregnancy and birth to compliment the supernatural horror in the story. I feel like the very real nature of one lends weight to the fictional nature of the other.

    I usually try to be egalitarian when referring to the work and stress of parenthood, because a lot of the it is experienced more-or-less equally by both sexes. Both parents (and stepparents, aunts/uncles, grandparents, etc) experience the loss of identity, lack of sleep, fear of physically or emotionally damaging another human beyond repair, the anxiety of the world around you doing it even if you don’t, etc. And I do think that playing on those fears in my story is interesting.

    But motherhood as an experience of building and carrying a baby has some special layers of horror that non-carrying parents don’t personally experience. I will sum up the most obvious with this gif:

    Pregnant Woman, Baby Kicks Glass
    THE KICKS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE

    My fascination with mixing the body horror of pregnancy with the holy-shit-elation that comes with having a baby isn’t new. Back in 2012 I wrote a piece of m-preg (yeah, fight me) that culminated in the magic wearing off (long story) and both the father and baby dying. (Except not! Because angels fixed it. Supernatural-ex-machina for the win.) Writing the sequences wherein the main character was in the process of dying traumatically were fascinating.

    That said, while I have a weird fascination with the body horror — it’s easy. The hard stuff is psychological. Having a baby will fuck you up mentally. Something like 10% to 20% of mothers suffer from postpartum depression or worse. In particular, I’ve been reading about postpartum psychosis — wherein women have hallucinations and many other symptoms, and can ultimately end up harming themselves and their child.

    What does all of this have to do with my NaNoWriMo project?

    Right, so, I’m 4,000 behind par as of this morning. It’s… well, it’s week two. I’ve fallen down a bit of a rabbit hole in my novel. I have two important subplots, one I’d planned and one that’s sort of fallen into my lap.

    The first in instrumental to the plot. My main character, Nora, is a rich man’s second wife — his first wife died “in an accident” ten years previous, which tragically also killed their newborn son. Nora comes to learn throughout the story that the “accident” was that she leaped off the roof of their home, believing something to be coming for her and the baby. I was telling August last night that this subplot is interesting to write, because Nora unfolds this bit by bit, thinking that the woman’s death was caused by the supernatural. However, I want to unfold in such a way that the reader can see the truth: Amelia was just very sick and not getting the help she needed because her family didn’t want to overreact.

    The second came in one of those day-one scenes: my main character goes to visit a casual friend who has newborn twins, and is obviously (to the reader) suffering from PPD. Recognizing this in her friend, and trying to find a way to help is one of the first autonomous steps Nora takes in the story.

    Unfortunately, I’m having trouble digging out of that second subplot and getting to the actual plot of the novel. The further I get into this portpartum mental illness plot, the more I start to get overwhelmed by imagining the scope of my edits. I was telling my friends the other day that I’ve never successfully edited a novel, and the more I look toward that inevitable end-point for a story I really like, the more I shrink back.

    So tonight, I need to go back and find the spot where I diverged away from “Nora decides to get her daughter back,” because she’s too far from that plot. I think once I get back into the main plot, I can recover better.

    I’ll report back in a week and let you know how it went.

  • On Using NaNoWriMo as Intended

    Welcome to the dawn of day four (of NaNoWriMo), and a new liveblogger! (Not new. You know me. I’ve been here forever.) Since you haven’t met my novel yet, let me start you off there:

    NaNoWriMo 2015, "The Departed Daugther," Ashley Hill
    I just really wanted to write about twilight sleep.

    There are a lot of things to say about the challenges of writing a story set in 1914 in a city I’ve never visited, but I think we’ll come to that next week. This week, let’s talk about what I really hope to get from this month.

    My goal this year has been developing a less frantic process, and that really culminates for me here during NaNo. In years past, I’d write and write and write until I was exhausted — and I’d be fried by the end of November. I wouldn’t work on anything for months, and tended to spend the rest of year poking my writing at a plodding pace. I’d say I had no ideas, and just resign myself to only being a NaNoWriMo writer.

    Two things are different about this year for me.

    The first was that I submitted a short story to a magazine and subsequently had my first short story published this summer. While I didn’t instantaneously become Ashley M. Hill, Extremely Serious Author, I did find myself thinking, Hey, maybe people could actually like what I write. So I’ve started to be tiny amount more serious with myself.

    The second was that I started keeping a checklist of my ideas when I had them. I use Google Keep, so that I have one note that is my checklist, and then write any additional notes in a different note when necessary. And as it turns out, I have a lot of ideas. They’re not all novel ideas, but they’re all stories to be told.

    I just have to get into the habit of telling them.

    So this year I’m working on writing to a logical stopping point, and then stopping when it feels right. Instead of forcing myself to keep going further and harder, I save my progress, log my word count, and do one of the many other tasks that fill my evenings. I have a lot of things to do with my day-to-day life. I have to make sure my son is taken care of half of the time. I need to meet my other, non-writing goals. Sometimes I want to read. My boyfriend recently bought me Don’t Starve for the PS3, and I need time to enjoy that.

    If I can do all of that stuff and only lose my mind once in a while, I can also find time to write.

    The teal deer version — I’m doing with NaNoWriMo this year what Chris Baty intended: finding out how being a writer can fit into my life filled with social stuff, family stuff, and a day job.

    (P.S. My stats are fine, if unremarkable. I ended day one with a buffer, and have written ~1600 words each day since, so I’m staying just ahead of the curve. I’m usually at about 1.25 par for the day.)

  • In Possession of a Mother’s Intuition

    “I just don’t understand why you throw away all the scraps. You could make a stock, you know.”

    Alethea grimaced as she tipped the last of the vegetable odds and ends from the cutting board into the trash, her back to the dining room. She closed her eyes. Maybe the woman would go away if she just waited…

    “Did your mother not teach you how to make a stock? I can’t imagine that she would want to see you being so wasteful.”

    Holding in a sigh, Alethea dropped the cutting board on the counter. She arched her back and pressed her hands in at the base of her spine to try to massage away the unending ache. The last trimester was wreaking havoc on her body, and the last thing she had any patience for was to wait out the ghost yet again. The woman could talk about nothing for hours; they had come to discover that more than once when they were trying to clear up from dinner.

    But Alethea couldn’t bring herself to ignore the old woman. The old woman certainly never ignored her. (more…)