The Confabulator Cafe

Author: ajaquays

  • At Least My Friends Don’t Sit On My Face

    Prioritizing is a pain in the ass.

    There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. Something’s going to get pushed back until tomorrow… which comes with its own to-do list.

    Some things are easy to put first on the agenda. Obviously I’m not going to go into work naked because there just wasn’t enough time to get dressed after my shower—my office is COLD. (more…)

  • Grammar: One Novel at a Time

    At some point in my life, I’m sure I was taught grammar. It seems like it would be one of those things teachers are required to impart as you are funneled through the scholastic system. To be honest, other than gerunds in sixth grade, I don’t remember any of it. I’m not even sure what a gerund is, but that’s because we killed him off.

    What I know of grammar, I learned from reading, so if I do it well, it’s because the authors I read had a firm grasp on it–or a really good editor. It’s why I like to believe that I can write with—fairly—decent grammar, but couldn’t begin to tell you what part of speech a word is. Other than the obvious ones like verbs and nouns. Over time, I learned to trust my natural instinct when it comes to sentence structure. So long as I don’t overthink something or make a typo, I’m likely to get it right on the first try. I’m pretty good at pointing out when something is wrong, but I’d never be able to tell you why. It just is. (more…)

  • The Blood on His Sleeves (Flash Fiction)

    I wasn’t expecting to meet him like that. When I’d received the call from a Keeper that my intended was at the station I wasn’t sure what to do. Ideally my father should have taken the call, but he was off at the train station, where he was to pick my intended up. How had he ended up in a Keeper’s custody?

    I pulled on my sensible navy wool driving coat over my practical lavender day dress, checked to make sure my driving goggles were still in my reticule, and summoned our driver to take me to the station. Belatedly I cursed my foolishness and had the butler send for a public car. It would not do for me to arrive at the station in a hackney cab.

    He was sitting in the chair with a Keeper standing at his back.

    “You must be Mr. Garrison.”

    “John.” He inclined his head with no trace of a smile. If I stared at his whiskerless cheeks, I could ignore the drying blood on his shirtsleeves. He looked at ease sitting under the watchful gaze of the Keeper. (more…)

  • It’s None of Your Business!!!

    Censorship is a double-edged sword. There are several books on the banned books list that I’ve read simply because they were banned whereas I’ve never decided not to read a book because somebody else banned it. I never really paid attention to what book was and was not banned. For most of my life, the bookstore, and occasionally a public library, was where I found most of my new reading material, not a school library.

    The only people who censored what I read was my parents. And that’s precisely how it should be.

    I don’t think it is right that any single person, or group of people, should be able to decide that a book is inappropriate for the masses. That decision should be between a parent/guardian and his or her children. It should be a boundary that fluctuates as the children grow older and can decide for themselves. Something that isn’t appropriate for a seven year old shouldn’t necessarily be banned from a seventeen year old.

    There were several books my parents told me I couldn’t read until I was older, then they pointed me in the direction of other books to read that would have more appropriate content for someone my age but a high enough reading level to challenge me. The problem arose when I’d read through my parents’ collection and still wanted to read more. I was too advanced a reader to read Animorphs or Goosebumps with my classmates and the YA sections at libraries and bookstores didn’t offer the same variety of books they do today. I wanted more than two hundred pages in my books, so I turned to the Sci-Fi and Fantasy section. Picking a book off the shelves, it was impossible to tell from the cover if it was going to be rife with gratuitous sex and violence. The chick in the chainmail bikini on the cover was going to be there regardless of the content on the inside.

    Books should be rated and labeled, not banned. Movies do it. Video games do it. Why don’t books? Don’t just slap an arbitrary letter or age on it. Is the rating high because the characters all swear like sailors? Or is it because ten pages in there is a graphic torture scene? Is there more sex than in a romance novel? Give a clear rating of what a reader can expect to find in the book. Put it on the back flap by the bar code.

    Then let the parents decide what their kid is ready to be exposed to. Because really, it’s nobody else’s business.

  • Seriously, Try This at Home

    Sometimes external influences are awesome for writing. Sometimes they’re really not. Sometimes only in moderation.

    There are three things that do wonders for my writing ability when consumed in moderation:  caffeine, sugar, and alcohol. Of those three, caffeine has the most positive effect on me… it is also what I can have the most of before my story mutinies against me and my fingers vomit letters on the page—sometimes they even form words, even more rarely they form complete thoughts. That’s all provided that the shaking doesn’t do me in first and I don’t end up in the fetal position twitching. (more…)

  • Too Vain for Vanity

    Growing up, the only form of self-publishing I was aware of was vanity publishing and that only because it was the route my great-grandfather had taken. Up until very recently, whenever I thought of self-publishing my immediate thought was, “You mean I have to pay someone to publish my work?”

    After all, wasn’t the whole point to being a published author that somebody else paid you to write? Having to self-publish at a vanity press was like admitting that my work wasn’t good enough to be accepted by a real publisher. Maybe that was the case, maybe it wasn’t.

    Self-published books weren’t widely available when I was growing up, especially not since I did the majority of my book shopping at a used bookstore and the rest of my reading from a various selection of libraries. My opinion on self-publishing never had the opportunity to change. Even now, I don’t go out of my way to read something self-published. Most of my reading is done off of recommendation or by pulling books off of shelves and oohing over the cover. Well, that and fanatically following authors from one series to the next. (more…)

  • Pants on Fire

    After reading a really good book, or watching a TV show or movie, I find myself adopting the speech patterns of a character that I identify with. Sometimes it sticks around for a few days, other times it sticks around for months or even years. If you’ve ever watched Deadwood you can probably guess what my favorite curse word was for a very long time.

    There are a conglomeration of authors I need to thank for who I am today as a writer. Embarrassing as it is, I must begin with the myriad of authors who wrote for Dragonlance, but in particular Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. Thank you. I discovered a love of fantasy literature through your guiding hands. Without Dragonlance I may never have graduated past reading about girls and their horses. Without them, I may never have discovered the authors who would later directly influence my writing. (more…)

  • My Squishy Red Couch

    When I entered college, I was suddenly required to write—and to take notes in class. My days in high school writing fanfiction in a spiral notebook while Coach “Drone-On” was discussing the civil war were over. I was completely unprepared. I needed to find a way to squeeze in hours of homework along with a suddenly active social life (they didn’t have those back in the small rural Texas town where I went to high school). Something in my life had to give and I decided, rather foolishly in retrospect, that of everything, sleep was the least necessary. At this point I discovered a tendency to binge on Mt. Dew and chocolate, pulling all-nighter after all-nighter to spew words onto a page. Sometimes I wrote for pleasure, but more often it was for an assignment. I’m not sure which part of my new lifestyle was the least healthy, but combined it was a terrible force to be reckoned with that my system still has yet to recover from.

    I came to a few realizations about what helped me to write during those exhausting years, so the self-induced torture sessions actually had some lasting worth. I couldn’t listen to music with vocals in it without trying to pay attention the lyrics and not my writing. So I would queue up my Final Fantasy soundtracks on my Zune—I was too cool (cheap) for an iPod—and delve into my writing. It was the perfect amount of background noise to drown out the sound of other people typing.

    Out of extreme laziness, I discovered another writing assist. I didn’t want to haul a backpack full of reference books up three steep flights of stairs only to find out halfway through my paper that the books weren’t what I needed after all, so I took to writing in the bowels of Watson library. If I was lucky, I could find a desk where the overhead lights only flickered occasionally. I nearly gave up when I turned on my computer and couldn’t access any wi-fi networks, but then I looked at the mountain of books, remembered how much I’d struggled just getting them all the ten feet to the desk, and decided I could tough it out, just that once. When I finished the assignment, it felt like I’d been down there for hours, possibly days. I was suffering extreme Facebook withdrawals. But after looking at the time, I realized that I’d written the paper in about a quarter of the time it took when I had access to the internet.

    Over the final two years of my college career, I perfected the technique. It quickly descended into a quantity over quality approach to writing as I rushed through assignments so that I could go check the latest staff updates.  Thi method is one I heartily recommend for college students trying to squeeze short stories in between lengthy research papers that all coincidentally happen to be due the same week, but not for people who with aspirations to publish.

    Then I went and graduated college. I was too busy job hunting to devote any time to writing something that wasn’t a resume and for a while I despaired of ever having time to write again.

    The inevitable happened: inspiration struck me and I suddenly couldn’t write enough. I spent two weeks typing furiously, turning out words faster than I thought humanly possible. I wrote from the moment I woke up until the moment I fell asleep… with the occasional pit stop for food. And after two weeks, I was burnt out. I then attempted to bribe myself into writing which was great for the word count but not so much on the bank account. A new pair of heels every few weeks adds up pretty quickly. I attempted to set goals and deadlines for myself. That didn’t work with the same successful results as bribery. (more…)

  • Positively Steaming with Ideas

    If I ever get stumped in a story, or need to come with an idea, I head straight for the shower. It’s about the only place I can go in my apartment where I won’t be interrupted by my adorable cat demanding to be petted and cuddled. It’s a retreat.  But that isn’t the only thing that makes it so ideal for writing. Something about the hot steam and water beating down on my scalp helps clear my head and chase away all the stress of the real world, giving me time to figure out where I need to go in my story from there. Maybe it’s because showering is such a necessary part of the real world that I don’t feel guilty for sitting around and doing nothing. Maybe steam is magical. I’m tempted to believe it is a mixture of the two.

    Once I’ve stepped into the shower, there are usually two ways I gather ideas. In the first way, I draw from situations that happened in my life and left such an impact on me that I still remember them with startling clarity years later. These usually have a tendency to be moments of grief or embarrassment. These ideas tend to come to me unplanned and then float around in my head for months until I finally come up with a way to manipulate them into something interesting and find characters who want to tell that story and make it their own. This is how my latest NaNo novel got started back in May.

    Sometimes as writers, we don’t have the luxury of thinking about an idea for months on end, nor any sudden bursts of inspiration at precisely the right moment. As a Creative Writing major with writing classes every semester, I developed a second way of gathering ideas. I learned how to force myself to come up with stories. Once again, I returned to what I knew. Rather than taking from personal experiences, I turned to my other classes for inspiration. When I took a course on Cleopatra, I wrote poetry about her life. When I was completely uninspired in one of my fiction writing classes, I turned to a play I had written years earlier and found a way to convert it into another format. The story took on new dimensions and allowed me to explore the characters in ways the play formatting had not allowed me to do. (more…)