The Confabulator Cafe

Author: abaker

  • Me, Myself, & I

    Knock knock. Knock.

    I opened the door.

    “’Hey.” The man at the door was barely an adult. He wore baggy jeans and a t-shirt, a pair of glasses sitting on a pimply face under a shaggy mess of hair. He slouched confidently, if such a thing was possible, thumbs hooked in his belt, looking at me expectantly like he expected to be invited in.

    I didn’t respond to him. Something wasn’t right. He wasn’t right. Everything about him bothered me. His slouch. His clothes. His glasses. His hair. He chewed on his lip as he waited for me to say anything.

    “Aw shit,” I said.

     A familiar smirk crossed his face. “Yep,” he said. “You gonna let me in?” I stood aside and he walked past me. There wasn’t really any other choice. He looked around, feigning disinterest but paying attention to everything about my small apartment. I knew what he was seeing. The dripping faucet, scuffed walls, dusty shelves, and dirty carpet. I closed the front door and followed him.  “This is where you live?” he asked.

    “Yep.”

    “It’s kind of a shithole.”

    I wouldn’t let most people get away with saying something like that, but I didn’t have a lot of options here. He looked out the window, and his face on the glass reflected next to mine. A slightly different haircut. A few less pimples. Other than that…. “How old are you?” I asked. (more…)

  • Market Crash

    9:45 AM. Wall Street. A legendary location, where fortunes are made and lost in the blink of an eye, where the fates of millions are up for grabs. Where greed is good, compassion has no place, and if you lose your edge, dozens of others will jump to take your place. Boldness is rewarded and hesitation loses fortunes. Bright computer screens lined every wall, floor to ceiling, numbers and letters flying by faster then I could comprehend, the shouts of buyers and sellers on the floor jumbling together into an indistinguishable roar. By the end of the day, the strong would be rich, the weak would be poor, and we would all get together tomorrow to do it again.

    I was not on Wall Street, but the same rules apply whether you are buying shares of companies or shares of lives.

    9:50. Numbers and values were inundating the salesfloor. Most of the buyers were jumping on the news that birth rates were up in the Southern Hemisphere. It was a good opportunity to get in on the ground floor for cheap. Other’s were frantic over increased tension in the Middle East, buying speculations and hedging bets, just in case a new oil war broke out. I was ready to jump in on the next wave of action, but was distracted by my phone buzzing in my pocket.

    9:53. I received a text, number unknown. Curious, I opened it. It was a simple message. “Earthquake. 10:13 AM. SE Asia. 200,000+ dead.” I looked around, as if the sender of the text would be visible, maybe staring at me trying to catch my eye. Instead, everyone around was occupied in their own little world, utterly oblivious to my new information. I checked the clock. I didn’t hesitate to trust the info. You hear stories sometimes of anonymous tips, and no one knew who or where they were from. Maybe from a higher power? We are money people, the big G word doesn’t come up very often, but I knew at least one guy who thought it was God himself. And who am I to disbelieve? There was no time to disbelieve or question. No time for “why me?”

    (more…)

  • Burning Bones

    Steven’s finger hovered over the “Accept” button, the soft green light of the ATM lighting his face. He hesitated and looked at his watch, as if the time wasn’t displayed prominently on every wall and every television. 6:52. He checked the nearest wall. Yep, it still had the right time. He looked behind him, stalling. If someone was standing behind him, waiting to use the ATM, then he would have to make a decision right there. He could hit cancel, take his empty wallet and mostly empty bank account home, and even get there in time to tuck his kid into bed. But there was no one behind him, no one waiting.

    His finger pressed the button. “Thank You For Allowing Us To Serve You,” the machine flashed, as his money started spitting out. Twenty dollar bill after twenty dollar bill, three hundred and forty dollars total. “Would You Like A Recipt?” The machine asked him in glowing green print. He stabbed at the “No” button. He didn’t need a piece of paper to remind him of the two dollars and fifty seven cents that were in his bank account. Besides, first thing tomorrow morning, it would all be back before anyone knew it was gone. All of it, and all the rest, and more. A big one was coming. He knew it. Not just a big one, but The Big One. His bones were burning, as his dad used to say whenever he felt a hot streak coming on. His bones were burning, and he was ready to walk out of this dingy place a winner.

    (more…)

  • Happy Thanksgiving

    Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

    There are three days left of Nano. I have 12.5k words to write, so about 4k a day. I haven’t done anything in the past two days thanks to work and general laziness. But with November ending with a weekend, I think I can get it done. And I really really want to.

    I don’t think I’ve talked about my novel too much here, so I might as well now. It’s titled “Alexander Hayes vs. The Seven Deadly Sins.” It started as an idea of a series of short stories about a cowboy preacher fighting evil. You know, “Alexander Hayes vs. The Poltergeist of Whisper Canyon,” “Alexander Hayes vs. The Obsidian Steam Tank,” etc etc. Now he fights his toughest challenge yet, as the embodiment of the Seven Deadly Sins from Catholic mythos are trying to bring about the apocalypse, and he has to protect the young girl who holds the key to it all.

    I have basically tried to think of every cool Western pulp trope and take it to eleven. There’s gunfights through a town, a train boarding, saloons and brothels, and everything else I can think of. I don’t know if it’s any good, but at least it’s fun. Which is why it’s a bit frustrating that I’m so far behind. I enjoy writing it, so damn it, what’s the deal?

  • Nano 2014: Week 2

    Quick status update on the novel. It’s still quite a bit fun to write. My protagonist has little developed character besides shooting evil things in the face, and I kinda regret that, but it’s also kinda nice to just shoot things in the face.

    That sounds worse then I intended.

    I’m typing on my phone again this year with a wireless keyboard. I’ve done this for each Nano, but this year I’m using Google Docs, whereas in years past I’ve used a couple different word processor apps. I’m not a tech person by any means, so I can’t give you any hard details about what separates Google Docs from other apps, but there are three things that stick out to me. The first being that being able to access my novel from any place without having to transfer files is very convenient. The second is that it gets laggy when there’s about 1200 words on the page, necessitating different documents every day, which is rather inconvenient. The third is that there is no word counter.

    I actually love that there is no word count on the mobile version of Google Docs. There are a lot of psychological benefits. I don’t worry about word sprints, I’m not obsessively checking my word count every few minutes, and I don’t feel the need to be “finished” if I hit my word count for the day. I can just write, and I’m usually pleasantly surprised when I check my word count when I get home, and see just how much I got done.

  • Nano 2014

    I’ve had two very different experiences with Nano so far. Two years ago, I completed a project that I was deeply invested in. It was a personal story, that just happened to have a bunch of aliens, psychos, and the Earth being destroyed in the most slow, suffocating way I could think of. Needless to say, I enjoyed it, and felt pretty accomplished afterwards.

    Last year, well, not so much. The project I worked on was too ambitious, and I didn’t really care about it. Writing it became a chore, and one I didn’t really feel was working out. So last year, I did not finish. I think I hit about 30k words by the end, but really, I had given up within the first 15 days or so.

    This year is something a little different. I’ve had an idea kicking around for several months now about a Wild West setting involving demons, steampunks, and anything else that sounds cool. While it’s not a personal story, it’s fun to write, something I couldn’t say last year. Whatever cool crap I can think of is being thrown in, and be damned if it makes any sense. I’m going for a pulp-western vibe, and after last night, when my bible-toting gunslinger dispatched a Russian with a mechanical arm, I can say I’m pretty excited about it.

  • November Reflections

    I’d like to take a few minutes to talk about last month.

    Most people have already done their National Novel Writing Month thoughts and reactions. It’s taken me a while to get my thoughts together about those thirty days. It was a fun time: I always enjoy hanging out with my fellow Lawrence writers. But it wasn’t a particularly productive time. I didn’t “win”. Officially, I gave up at about 35k words and three days to go, but I’m pretty sure I actually gave up sometime in October.
    (more…)

  • Review: Doctor Who 50th

    In just over a week, we will arrive at the annual End-of-December holiday, one we have been building up to for weeks maybe even months. I refer, of course, to The Doctor Who Christmas Special. With his special event nearly upon us, I thought I would take a look back at the most recent episode to air, the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special.
    (more…)

  • status

    I don’t think I’m going to win Nano this year.

  • Genres, a brief distraction

    While I type this, I can’t help but think that every word here is a word not being added to my nano novel that is several days behind.  Oh well.

    When a bunch of us writers get together, and there’s some new blood in the mix, the one question that always gets passed around the table is “What do you write?” I hate that question.  I envy those that can answer with “Fantasy,” or “Young Adult” or “Post-Apocalyptic Disestablishmentarianism” or whatever.  For me, genre’s not important.  What’s important are the characters, what they do, and why they do it.  The “where” is less important to me.

    If the novel I wrote last year ever hit the bookshelves, it would probably be filed under “Sci-Fi”.  There were aliens in it, giant bug things that swarmed the solar system, draining it of all its resources.  They weren’t the story though.  There are no bug-alien characters.  In fact, if I recall correctly, the protagonist only gets close to a live alien once.  The rest of the time he sees them at a distance, or as lights in the sky, or the devastation they leave behind them.  The aliens aren’t the story, the alien invasion is a catalyst that puts the story in motion, sending our main character on his Hero’s Journey, where he has to overcome many obstacles that have nothing to do with aliens or spaceships or anything else commonly found in Sci-Fi.  There’s no high-tech doodads, no sentient supercomputers, just a guy treking across the country on a bike during a disaster to find the woman he loves.  But aliens = science fiction, right?

    This year, unconsciously, I decided I would show just how ridiculous genre can be.  My main character exists in our every-day world, a sort of stream of consciousnesses narrator going through his day to day life.  There are three other stories though.  There’s a Game of Thrones inspired medieval fantasy story, a science fiction space war set in the relatively near future, and a contemporary Fast and Furious inspired criminal story.  All three of the alternate protagonists are persona’s of the main character, showing off different traits he is unable to see in himself.  The plots follow the same basic structure of boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy loses girl.  Each story focuses on a different aspect of the way relationships work or don’t work, and when put together with a little bit of extrapolation, they show the history of the main character and why he is the way he is.

    I’m learning a few things while writing this.  First, this is way to complicated to do without outlining.  I was a fool.  A fool I say!  Second, I am enjoying all the different stories I’m telling.  Even the main character, who annoyed me to no end at first, has become more tolerable as more of his backstory is being told through his alternate personas.

    I’ve never felt the need to write a sci-fi story, or a fantasy story.  When I start out with a story idea and all I have is a genre, you can bet I’m going to be very bored with it very quickly.

    And there are 550 words that could have been in my nano novel.  Meh.