The Confabulator Cafe

Author: ajaquays

  • Refusal to Move (Flash Fiction)

    She was driving ninety-five miles an hour again. She knows I hate it when she goes that fast. I’ve tried to tell her to slow down, but she never listens. I knew she was trouble from the moment I saw her, walking into the dealership in her ruby stilettos and short skirt. She practically had the dealer eating out of the palm of her hand. It was disgusting. An hour later, he placed the keys into her hand. My keys. I’ve hated her ever since.

    This time, when she stuck the keys into the ignition, I refused to start. She called in service technician after service technician, and I started up perfectly for them. But the moment she slipped on her ruby heels and slid into my seat, nothing worked. She’d cajole me, she’d threaten me, she’d scream obscenities. But for once, I had the upper hand.

    If she doesn’t learn to listen soon, I’ll wrap us around a tree.

  • An Idea of an Idea

    The ideas I actually end up seeing through are the ones that come to me in a flash and leave me quivering with excitement. The ideas that won’t let me sleep until I’ve started them. The ideas that force me from the shower still half covered in soap so that I can begin writing. Those ideas are too powerful to write down for later. They demand immediate attention.  But right now I’m busy… so they’re hiding away in a closet, talking amongst themselves and getting ready to battle it out so that when I’m ready for them, they’ll be there, and the best idea can present itself to me. I’m not actually included in the decision making process.

    At least… that’s what I’ve been telling myself, because they’ve been pretty quiet lately.
    (more…)

  • Keep the Cast Small, With an Ax if Necessary

    Nobody ever told me I was supposed to have a large cast of characters! This is actually something I have a bit of trouble with managing. In short works I tend to limit my characters to a central protagonist and a few sidekicks. I mean… side characters. Depending on the length of the piece, my story might not actually have more than two characters. Sometimes more characters are mentioned in passing, but not always.

    Even in my novel, I tried to limit the number of important characters my viewpoint character interacts with. I’ve found that writing in first person really allows me to get inside my protagonist’s head and allow her opinions and views of the other characters to color how they are presented to the audience.  She has very distinctive opinions about different characters, and I hope that those opinions allow them to become more memorable. (more…)

  • My Parents are Reading What??

    My mom is typically one of the first people I send my stories to for feedback. She received a draft of my novel even before I went back and did the first pass of editing. She’ll continue to receive each draft after I’ve finished editing them. But let me let you in on a little secret; most of what I write is geared toward young adults, and the things that aren’t are usually short vignettes that don’t have the page length to develop into something racy or never see the light of day. I’m not going to put anything into my young adult novel that I wouldn’t feel comfortable with my mom reading, because then it wouldn’t be appropriate for the intended audience.

    I think part of my decision to write young adult literature stems from the sheer terror of writing about adult topics and letting other people read what I’ve written. Sharing it with a few friends is one thing, but I’m not comfortable enough with some topics to share them with the whole world… especially not when that world contains my parents… and my grandparents. I freely admit to anyone who asks that my ultimate goal is to be a published author, which invariably leads them to question if I’ve written anything they might have read. I don’t think I could admit to a stranger that I wrote erotica without turning crimson, and I definitely don’t want to have that conversation with my parents. So I’ve fallen into the comfortable safety net of writing young adult literature. (more…)

  • Trapped in a Doll’s Body (Flash Fiction)

    I wanted to cry out for him not to leave, but my lips were just stitches on fabric.  He was the best brother a girl could ask for, but he was going to get himself killed.

    When I was seven, I fell into a magical coma. I accidentally triggered the warding spell in my uncle’s study and nobody knew how to contact him to get him to reverse the spell. For as long as I could remember, it was just me and my brother living in our uncle’s house. Our parents left when I was a baby, leaving behind a stuffed tabby cat and two children. Suddenly becoming legally responsible for our well-being didn’t change our uncle’s ways.

    He was never around, always off at some overseas conference or another. He really couldn’t be bothered to raise us—didn’t have the time or desire—so he left us to the tender care of the cook after I started kindergarten. Mrs. Toffee was a sweet and caring lady, but she left for the day after dinner was over and cleaned up, and we were left to our own devices. We were expected to finish our homework and go straight to bed, but that rarely ever happened as planned. (more…)

  • Poetry in literal motion

    In college, I took a class on writing poetry—I needed another creative writing course to graduate, and this was the only one I didn’t have credit for already that was offered that semester—and it only served as confirmation about something I already knew. Poetry and I don’t get along. The final for that class was to describe who we were as a poet, and I believe I summed it up best by saying: “I am a reluctant poet.”

    It’s not that I believe poetry is a lesser art form, it’s just that it doesn’t click with me. I like things straightforward most of the time. If I read a poem about a dandelion, to me it will be about a dandelion—not the intangibility of life.

    I spent an entire semester writing poetry and having far more meaning read into it than I’d intended to put there. My usual response to “What were you feeling when you wrote this poem?” was “That it was due in less than an hour and I still hadn’t started it.” (more…)

  • Some hobbies just don’t translate…

    Some hobbies translate better to writing than others. For instance, my grandmother attempted to teach me to knit at various stages of my life with varying success. When I went off to college, it finally stuck. When I was writing my last novel, I thought it would be useful to have my character be able to knit—at least so far as darning socks is concerned.

    Let me tell you something about knitting, it is mind numbing. I usually work on it while I’m doing something else—like watching TV or listening to a book on tape, because otherwise I would lose all interest in the project.

    If the actual process is that mind-numbing and dull, imagine reading an entire paragraph where the only thing of note that takes place is that the protagonist darns a pair of socks. It was awful. Don’t do it.

    So I suppose a good rule of thumb for hobbies is that if it is boring in real life, it won’t translate well to paper.

    Other than writing itself, I don’t really see any of my hobbies cropping up in my stories. Perhaps if I wrote urban fantasy instead of doing world building, I would see more of an inclusion, but somehow sitting in front of a TV playing video games all day doesn’t really fit in to a sword and sorcery style novel… and I’m not about to attempt to pick up swordsmanship… that’s a good way to end up with broken or missing fingers… and then how am I supposed to write?

  • Burnt Lasagna Dreams (Flash Fiction)

    The house was on fire again.

    It wasn’t my fault. Really.

    I work in dreams. Daydreams, nightmares, wet dreams, if you can dream it, chances are I—or one of my coworkers—had a hand in it. The longer your fantasy, the longer I’m pulled away from whatever it is I’m working on. The pay is great. It has to be. You can’t hold down another job when working this one, well, maybe if you’re a writer, but even then some months there’s barely enough time to sleep, let alone work freelance.

    I can’t help when I’m called away. I don’t have business hours. I can sometimes squeeze in a day off—usually on a Friday or Saturday night when the world is too inebriated to miss dreams. If I’m needed, I’m yanked away from whatever I’m doing without so much as a by-your-leave. A minute’s notice would be nice—just enough time to pull my pants up or turn off the stove. I’d rather throw out a half-congealed mess that went cold than have to move for the eighth time because my kitchen caught on fire or the apartment flooded. (more…)

  • “Two” be Avoided at All Costs

    I have a policy about finishing every (fiction) book I start to read. In my life, I can only come up with a couple of instances where I just couldn’t force myself to the end.

    Perhaps I should clarify, that policy only applies to books written in first and third person.

    If I’m reading something written in second person, it is because some sadistic professor thought it was a good idea.

    Unless it is a Pick-Your-Own-Path adventure story, I see no point in second person. Maybe that makes me a bad English major. Maybe it makes me a bad person. I don’t care. Second person aggravates me. (more…)

  • Can I have my settings back?

    When I can make myself laugh on a read through six months later, I know I’ve done something right. Either that or my sense of humor hasn’t developed any. There are moments in my writing that I’m quite proud of, moments where I go “I wrote that? That was me? Damn I’m good.” Sadly those moments aren’t quite as frequent as I would like, but they happen, and that is what is important. They’re often enough to satiate my ego.

    My first writing instructor complimented me on my settings and then suggested I work on improving my dialogue. It was both the best and worst advice I could have received, because I went on and took a play-writing class. If you’re not familiar with what happens in a play script, it’s a lot of dialogue, a few directional cues, and the briefest amount of setting instructions possible. I spent an entire semester learning how to write dialogue. By the time I came out of it, I was actually pretty good at it, or at least, that’s what I tell myself. (more…)