The Confabulator Cafe

Author: apoland

  • Two Sides to Each Door (Flash Fiction)

    “You gotta understand,” Momma says to the doctor as though Annabelle can’t hear her. “She has always been a special child. Very particular, you know. Apple of her Gramma’s eye.”

    The Doctor peers over the top of her horn-rim glasses, tapping her pen against the pad of paper in her lap. Annabelle feels small when the Doctor looks at her, even though it was just her birthday and everyone was saying Look how big you’re gotten!

    The Doctor nods slowly and says in her strange, slow voice, “Annabelle, can you draw a door for me?”

    Her heart pounding in her chest, Annabelle looks from the Doctor to Momma before shaking her head. You mustn’t draw a door, young lady — Gramma had been clear about that. She could draw whatever else she wanted, so long as it wasn’t a door. Annabelle rubs her sweaty palms on the skirt of her nicest Sunday dress, trying to pretend she doesn’t know that Momma is glaring at her. “No,” she says, her voice so soft that it’s almost too quiet to be heard over the rattle of the air conditioner.

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  • On the Mixture of Forms

    I envy poets.

    I don’t “get” poetry, and honestly — I don’t go out of my way to read it. It doesn’t resonate with me as a reader, and I absolutely cannot wrap my mind around it as a writer. I wrote poetry as a teenager (please, feel free to laugh) and it was awful. I’m not just being self-deprecating here. There was no rhyme, reason, or rhythm to the poetry I wrote — it was just a sixteen-year-old girl ranting with arbitrary line breaks.

    The thing is, the poets I know who also write prose have some of the most gorgeous, intelligent prose that I’ve ever read. I imagine it has something to do with the form: that whole rhyme and rhythm thing. I feel like when a poet sits down to tell a story, they’re still bring that poet’s sensibility to the way they present their words. And the end result is something that makes me utterly green with envy.

    (Obviously, I’m generalizing a bit — I’ve known poets who had some trouble getting their thoughts out using prose.)

    I’m frequently told, “Oh, you should try it; it’ll inform your writing.” I firmly believe that. A form that requires you to use every word for the maximum amount of feeling? That encourages multiple meanings? That provides multiple forms, from the old school to the mathematical? As a writer, I can’t see a downside.

    It doesn’t stop me from being daunted. The very idea of poetry ties my stomach in knots. It feels like I’m expected to scale a wall without any safety equipment. It strips all the things I feel comfortable with in my writing — characters and dialogue and setting — and instead demands the introspective of me. I could write poetry as a character, sure; I could tell a story instead of reflecting on my feelings. (I have a friend who does both these things, and well.)

    I am a person with a lot of feelings, but the starkness of feeling that (I feel) poetry requires is a bit much for me.

  • What the Internet Taught Me About Submissions

    I have a weird relationship with sharing work and submissions. I’ve done it; I have my little pile of rejection somewhere in a box and I’m totally okay with it. For one: there’s something funny about how after something is rejected, you start to look at it and go, “Oh yeah, that totally wasn’t ready.”

    But my opinion of the submission process is very much affected by the way I’ve been sharing my writing since I was 17 — the Internet! (Ooooooooooh.) When it comes right down to it, the handful of submissions to small magazines and the single experience with sending a novel query is a minor experience compared to how I handle sharing most of my writing.

    Allow me to make this point with math! (Ahhhhhhhhhh.) Then I’ll tell you what the Internet has taught me about the submission process.
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  • The People You Know are a Well of Knowledge

    If my current hobbies end up informing my writing, it’s mostly on an accidental basis. For instance, I started out the last novel with the idea that I wanted to write a cyberpunk retelling of a fairy tale. That didn’t really happen, once the novel was edited to focus more on what it actually was. Instead, it turned out to be a sci-fi novel that was influenced by a lot of my thoughts on Internet culture and computer use.

    It makes sense; I pretty much live on my computer. I love the inside of it — I love the outside of it. I have a lot of feelings about it, and the way it shapes us as people. I don’t have nearly as many feelings about fairy tales.

    But you know whose hobbies I do like to use? Other people’s. All of my friends and family have interesting, varied hobbies (and lifestyles) that work as a knowledge base. Sure, I could Google information that’s relevant to my characters, but I would rather make a phone call or send off an email. For instance:
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  • Come to Your Own Conclusions

    I don’t like being told how to feel, and I don’t want to tell a reader how to feel. When I’m reading a piece of fiction and I feel like the author was trying to force a specific feeling on me, I get mad. I generally stop reading. I realize this is somewhat immature, because aren’t most stories built with the idea that they’re going to make me feel something?

    When I write, I write in third person. First-person works best, I think, when the reader is meant to relate to the word through one character. I recently read The Hunger Games trilogy, which is in first person. As the readers, we’re obviously supposed to feel the world through Katniss’ experience of it — we’re supposed to relate to the cruelty and kindness of other characters as she feels those things. It’s not wrong. Obviously, it works pretty well for Collins.

    But in the same way that I don’t want to tell the reader how a character looks — because it rarely has any bearing on the story what a character looks like — I don’t want to tell a reader how to feel about any character or institution in the story. Where I find a character to be a flat villain, another reader might see that character as a tragedy. I don’t want to force the reader to feel the same way about a character that I do. Maybe it means I’m doing it wrong.

    For my writing, third person is the most effective way to share a story without getting too wrapped up in a single character’s thoughts and feelings.

    (And much like with Highlander II, I shove my fingers in my ears and refuse to acknowledge that second person exists. Absolutely refuse.)

  • Erowid, BME, & Little Details

    I like writing about addicts. I don’t know why. I suffer no addictions myself. No addiction more serious than cigarettes has touched my family. But there’s something fascinating about a character whose motivations stem from something dark and hard within them.

    Herein lies the problem: write what you know utterly fails me here. I lived with a friend who smoked pot when I graduated high school1; I have a handful of relatives and friends who roll that way as well, or used to. That’s it. Beyond my skin-deep understanding of the lifestyle of mid-twenties recreational pot smokers, I need research. For that, I have Erowid.

    I have a love/hate relationship with Erowid. The layout is ridiculous; it’s like someone designed it in 2001 and hasn’t looked back. But you know what? The information is great, and there is a lot of it. Psychotropic plants and legality and chemistry? Seriously, if you’re going to write about a drug, check it out.

    Body Modification Ezine (BME) is another interesting resource for writing about characters — and it feels significantly more modern! They’ve got a pretty solid wiki and there are lots and lots of photos and thousands of personal stories. I feel like it’d be a solid resource for character concepts., if you were writing about someone with heavy modifications or wanted to see inside the head of someone who does.

    My other favorite? Little Details on LiveJournal, which has the ever-so-awesome tag line “A Fact-Checking Community for Writers.” It’s not supposed to replace the basic Google/Wikipedia search, but rather to augment it with personal experience. Like, first the page (as of this writing) has posts about what to call a collection of dragons, help translating phrases into Chinese, how two semi-nolbes would refer to a Pharaoh in conversation, and my favorite post — wherein the author was convinced not to write the story in question: “Would mandatory gayness shrink Earth’s population?”

    To go a little more mundane, I couldn’t name characters without Seventh Sanctum. It’s got a generator for pretty much everything — there are fourteen different categories of generators, and sub-generators beyond that. If you just need a placeholder or if anything will do, it’s the place to go.

    1. And, you know, once in a while I helped. I’m not ashamed of it.

  • When All Is Said & Done

    There’s an exact moment when I read something I wrote and I go, “Damn. I am so right for this business.” Or I suppose, more accurately, there are two moments.

    The first comes during the raw writing process. When everything is still in idea form, and you’re just cruising on the adrenaline of creation going Yeah! No one has ever been this brilliant or creative or well-written ever! I like to think that’s about a third of the actual writing process — cruising on pure ego. The other two thirds are agonizing through the parts in-between, when you realize this story is ridiculous and derivative and your parents were right, why didn’t you just go into accounting like your sister?1

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  • The Dock Worker (Flash Fiction)

    “I think I got everyone.” Abra checks the list again, each genetic family carefully contained in twenty vials per box. “Twenty boxes of Earth-native embryos — you’re all set.” She pats the top box twice and tries to smile at the dock worker’s face as it scans the code on each box, even though she would rather examine its long, multi-knuckled fingers. The debriefing she got at the shuttle port made it clear: don’t stare, and don’t ask stupid questions. Any action that might constitute a risk to the planet will be considered treason, and punished accordingly.

    The dock worker begins to speak, before it seems to remember that it speaks outside her range of hearing. It removes the voice box from its belt. As it holds down a button, it speaks again: “This is accurate.” It waves over another worker with a cart, and a group of aliens appears from seemingly nowhere to start loading up the boxes. “The consortium thanks you for your contribution.”

    “What do you need so many embryos for?” Abra asks before her brain catches up with her mouth and she realizes that it might constitute a stupid question, or a risk to Operation Olive Branch. The dock worker tilts its head at her, and it takes her a moment to understand the twist of its serpentine mouth as a smile. She swallows and barrels on — her platoon was going to have a hundred questions when she returned, so she may as well go for broke. “Some of the guys think that it might be, um, planet seeding? Because that would make a lot of sense. The scientists back home are going wild with curiosity.”

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  • A Hole With No Bottom

    Ahahahahahaha.

    I only laugh because it hurts when I think about all the things I do when I ought to be writing. I’m terrible at task management. I tend to put things off until the last minute, or tell myself that I’m going to do one thing and then proceed to spend thirty minutes stalking that Ridiculously Photogenic Guy meme. (I was there when it was cool! I never get in on a meme until after it’s already lame, so that was a very exciting week for me.)

    The weird thing about posts like this, is that I’m sure in the preceding four days my fellow writers have cited legitimate reasons for not having time to write, and much more eloquently. So I’m going to go the immature little girl route: other things are cool, and writing is hard.

    I like to say that my work prevents me from spending as much time from writing as I’d like, but frankly I’m lying to us both. There are times, when I need to work more to make more money, where I don’t have time to do anything but work. But that is not my average day. My average day has tons of opportunities to write (and edit) in it, if only I were better at task management.

    These are the things I do, when I could be writing instead.

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  • When Real Life & Fiction Collide

    I’m not the kind of writer who brandishes the threat, “You might be in my next novel.” It’s not that I have any problem with it — that Joe Buckley thing is hilarious — but it’s just not my thing. I feel weird appropriating the people and situations I know.

    I actively have trouble using real places, because then I feel an intense pressure to get everything right. I’ve got no trouble making details up on the fly. This town has an indoor pool! This town has a series of underground tunnels! These are cool when I’ve invented a town and there are no real-life rules to follow.

    Real world example!

    I was living in Manhattan, Kansas, when I was working on my first novel. Every day I used to drive home from work on Anderson, and I’d pass a street called “Edgerton.” I thought to myself That’s a cool name for a town. My main character should be from Edgerton, Wisconsin. Cool. I make up a town and set two chapters in it. I move on with my life. Good times.

    Fast forward several years later, because this is a blog post and blog time is like that. My husband and I are driving up visit my family in Wisconsin. I happen to be skimming the atlas while we’re driving, and what should I see?

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