The Confabulator Cafe

Author: abaker

  • Leaving

    “I guess you know by now we’re leaving,” he says, tears freely falling down his face. My son, barely twelve years old, stands on a step-stool in front of a bookshelf full of knickknacks, a frayed yo-yo in his hands that he fiddles with, rolling it up and letting it fall before rolling it up again. He keeps his eyes downcast but can’t entirely hide his sobs or the glistening on his cheek.

    Of course I knew. I’m not stupid, despite what my wife thinks. I knew before he did. I’m pretty sure I’ve known for months, ever since I got sick the first time. Maybe I’ve known this was coming for years. But knowing doesn’t make it any easier.
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  • Detail Work

    My best friend Andy is rumored to have once said, “People always say, ‘I am my own worst critic.’ Well I’m not. August is my worst critic.”

    I take no small pride in my critiquing skills. When it comes to words, I have an eye for detail. Shifting through pages and pages of small type looking for mistakes is something I find enjoyable. Finding errors in writing is like getting a shot of dopamine. It probably says something negative about me that I enjoy finding other people’s mistakes, but I’ll take my pleasures where I can get them.

    When critiquing, it’s all too easy to be mean. There’s a certain satisfaction gained from being an asshole about other people’s mistakes. Often I find it necessary to reign that in. Not because I’m worried about hurt feelings, but because being a jerk isn’t the most effective way to edit. If the goal is improving the work, I find it best to be as neutral as possible.
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  • The Desire to Write

    Judging by the lateness of this submission, I could simply answer, “Not very well,” and leave it at that. However, a one sentence response probably won’t fly, so here goes an attempt to elaborate.

    While in college, I found the best time to write was during class. Not every class, but the long boring lecture halls were a creative gold mine while pretending to take notes. Instead of being bored, I filled a lot of notebook pages with outlines and the beginnings of stories that would never get finished.

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  • Stories of the Mind

    The world needs stories for a simple reason. Stories define us. Forget about the books you read or the movies you watch. Those aren’t the important stories. The important ones are the tales that never see the light of day. These stories exist only in the minds of every person everywhere, shaping our lives.

    I’m going to throw out a statistic here that I made up on the spot and is probably wrong. 99.9% of all stories will never been seen or heard by anyone other then the storyteller.. They’re the stories we tell ourselves, the fantasies we concoct when bored or the dreams we have in that awesome moment of sleep where we can kind of control what’s going on. They’re the lies we imagine about ourselves and others in order to stay sane. No one will ever hear them, no one will ever know them, but they are stories essential to the well-being of the mind.

    Stories are how we sort through our problems. When something goes wrong, this is how we cope. We make stories about difficult situations and potential resolutions. The point of these stories isn’t to find an actual solution, but to explore every possibility, and maybe relive some of the best ones, in order to get rid of the dredge so your problems don’t effect the rest of your life.

    The world doesn’t need stories as much as the individual needs stories. We need the narrative in our lives in order to get our way through the boring parts and relive the great parts. Unlike real life, stories almost always have happy endings. Even the ones that don’t end happily at least make sense and end with a purpose. Isn’t that something we all strive for in our own personal story?

  • Literature and History

    It was just a few years ago that I was writing non-fiction every month for school. Throughout my college experience, I was enrolled in several high-level English classes which often required study and commentary on works of literature. One of my favorite assignments was the analytical research paper.

    I enjoy arguing and a research paper is arguing in a controlled format. You make a point, and back it up with facts, anticipating criticism and opening debates. As an English student, I took a lot of literature classes, and my best arguments were on the writings of the English Renaissance.

    Shakespeare, Spenser, and Marlowe were (and are) my favorite, along with a healthy appreciation for other noteworthy works like the King James Version of the Holy Bible or the plays of Ben Johnson. For some people, these are nearly in another language, nearly incomprehensible. I find that with a little bit of study, what looks nearly incomprehensible becomes beautiful, expressive verse that cannot be matched by anything else.
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  • Cindy

    Charles woke up tangled in his blankets, head pounding. It was January 1st, the start of a New Year, and the previous night was mostly a blur. There was an office party, a bar brimming with booze, and a band whose bass was throbbing between his eyes as he sat up. One thing stood out in his wakening memories though: a girl, blonde and beautiful, wearing a pale blue shirt and tight jeans. Her smile drew Charles across the room, and he couldn’t take his eyes off her the rest of the night.

    He squeezed his temples, trying to pressure the throbbing pain into submission. He hadn’t paid any attention to how much drinking he did before midnight, enchanted by this girl, and after the ball dropped, well… he drank even more. He wasn’t sure how he even got home. He pushed himself to his feet and stumbled to the bathroom where the Tylenol, glorious Tylenol, waited. Sitting on the toilet for several minutes, head in his hands, he tried to not think. He failed.

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  • The Indeterminate Genre

    To answer a question about why I write my genre, I first would need to pick a genre as “mine.” And I can’t really do that. Sci-fi, fantasy, horror, romance, all these (and more!) appeal to me at different times. I can’t lock down on one genre as my favorite, or even having a preference. I’m much more likely to figure out the genre once I get a decent story idea in place, rather then say, “I’m going to write a fantasy story.” When I set about to writing something genre, I find it full of stereotypes and cliches. Deciding from the beginning to write a genre story is too constricting for me. When I make a plot, and a real character or two, and work the genre around them, I find myself with a much more interesting story.

    Looking over the past year of writing though, there’s one thing that most of my stories have in common: they’re almost always set in a contemporary setting with at least one foot in normalcy. Where that other foot steps is always the question. One story might be a monster-hunting horror story, another might be an alien invasion, and another might look into the heart and soul of loneliness, but in order for me to have relatable, sympathetic protagonists, I want that anchor in the real world. These stories always start out with a basic plot and character and go from there. The genre writes itself. Is it a comedy? Horror? Does it take place in the past or future? These are questions that don’t have answers until I have a story, and every story goes on a different path.

    Not to say a pure genre story is terribly hard to write or read, but I will usually find the story more enjoyable if I can look out the window and see some of the same things my protagonist would see. I guess you might call my favorite genre “urban”. Instead of a fantasy story in a mystical land, I’d much rather put the elves and magic in the modern, contemporary world and see what kind of trouble happens. It can even be set in the past or future, as long as it’s about real people doing real things. A Sci-Fi story about space battles doesn’t interest me; I’m much more likely to write about the people down at the planets surface and the effects of said space battle on their lives.

  • The last year or so…

    Hello everyone! What a great way to make an introduction to this blog, by explaining how my writing has changed over the past year.

    The first and most recent change is I’m writing here now. Yay! I’m looking forward to sharing this space with some of the great people I’ve gotten to know over the past several months.

    The biggest thing that happened to my writing life was participating in National Novel Writing Month for the first time. And I totally kicked its ass. I don’t know if what I wrote is any good, but I know that before November, I wasn’t sure I had it in me to write fifty-thousand words in a semi-coherent structure with a beginning, middle, and end. Now that I can mark “Write a novel” off my bucket list, I have a lot more confidence in my writing than I did before.

    This year I’ve written a lot more than I have in the past couple years combined. Thanks to good friends, I’ve been motivated to take some of the crazy ideas bumping around and to put actual pen to actual paper and get some of them written down. Most didn’t pan out to anything more than interesting diversions, but just the process of regularly writing again has given me a focus that I sorely missed having in my life.

    I started out the year by beginning a journal full of whining and angst, and ended the year making the planet die a slow and suffocating alien death. I call that progress.

    Hopefully this time next year, I’ll have a lot more to say about how my writing has changed and improved. The biggest and best change this year though is that for the first time in a long time, I feel like I can actually call myself a writer. And that’s pretty cool.