Author: barista

  • February Stories at the Confabulator Cafe

    Welcome back to the Confabulator Cafe, my friends! After a month off, we’re back and feeling refreshed. We hope you’re ready for another year of original, free stories. We even have a new guest contributor, so please welcome Kita Haliwell to the lineup this month!

    Have you ever found yourself in a circumstance that led you to befriend someone you might not have otherwise? Hit it off with someone you never thought you would? The Confabulators toyed with this idea for this month’s prompt: an unlikely friendship.

    We hope you’ll join us each week this month for fresh, new fiction. Here’s the schedule for the month of February:

    Tuesday, February 7: “The Dragon’s Lost Library” by Sara Lundberg
    Tuesday, February 14: “Betting it All” by Amanda Hadley
    Tuesday, February 21: “Dolphin” by Emily Mosher
    Tuesday, February 28: “Rocky Start” by Kita Haliwell

  • December Stories at the Confabulator Cafe

    December is upon us, and 2016 is drawing to a close. With this month’s batch of tales, we’ll be wrapping up another year of stories here at the Confabulator Cafe. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading as much as we’ve enjoyed writing.

    As of now, we’re not sure what the New Year brings for the Cafe. Hopefully more stories.  New prompts, new writers, and new readers.

    But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We still have a whole month to enthrall you. And this month, we allowed the Confabulators to choose how they wanted to do that. The prompt for December was “freestyle.” Writers were invited to submit anything they chose–whether a story for one of this year’s past prompts, something entirely new, or something entirely different.

    So grab a cup of hot cocoa and a cozy blanket and hunker down to enjoy our winter wonderland of freestyle stories. Here’s the schedule:

    Friday, December 9: “Betwixt Hearts” by Ashley M. Hill
    Friday, December 16: “It’s Snow Problem” by Dianne Williams
    Friday, December 23: “Frozen Reflection” by Eliza Jaquays
    Friday, December 30: “The Last Christmas Tree” by Sara Lundberg

  • November Stories at the Confabulator Cafe

    Hello, friends. We hope you enjoyed our line-up of stories that featured a child in need last month. We also hope we adequately warned you about the creepy/sadness of some of them. What did you expect, after all? It was the month of Halloween.

    We’re continuing the Halloween-ish feeling this month, as well, as we make our way further into fall. Our prompt this month was trickster tales. The Confabulators wrote tales featuring a trickster of their choice for this month.

    We hope you’ll visit us every Friday in November for fresh, free fiction. Here’s this month’s schedule:

    Friday, November 4: “Cat in Heels” by Emily Mosher
    Friday, November 11: “The Crow Keeper” by Anita C. Young
    Friday, November 25: “The Whispers Within” by Eliza Jaquays

  • October Stories at the Confabulator Cafe

    Crunchy leaves, hot tea, pumpkin spice everything, sweaters, boots, crisp and cool days, pumpkins, apples, Halloween, ghosts, children dressing up like creepy things, children being creepy in general…

    It’s October here at the Cafe! Our prompt very much lends us to the creepiness of the season, although not all of our writers embraced that for this prompt.

    The October prompt is a story inspired by a situation: a little kid runs up to you, tugs on your sleeve, and says…? What does the child want or need?

    Confabulators didn’t have to use this exactly, but the story had to be inspired by the prompt, so the stories will all include a child in need. It’s up to the individual authors what direction they went with that need…

    Join us every Friday for a new, free story. Here’s the schedule:

    Friday, October 14: “Find Me Tonight” by Sara Lundberg
    Friday, October 21: “My Half Hour Child” by Eliza Jaquays
    Friday, October 28: “The Dragon Lore” by Anita C. Young

  • September Stories at the Confabulator Cafe

    Summer is nearing and end, and fall quickly approaches. The summer months are long and lazy, and some of us haven’t been writing like we should. Others have created wonderful stories for September.

    The Confabulators were challenged to write a story about a repo man of their choosing for September. To find out what kind of things are being repossessed due to defaulting on a payment, check back every Friday this month to read our original, fresh, new fiction.

    Here’s the schedule for September:

    Friday, September 2: “Collections Hell” by Dianne Williams
    Friday, September 16: “Awkward Silences” by Rob Conway
    Friday, September 23: “Laying Down the Law” by Anita C. Young
    Friday, September 30: “Not Actually Very Funny At All” by Emily Mosher

  • August Stories at the Confabulator Cafe

    I don’t know about you, but us here at the Confabulator Cafe are having a tough time wrapping our heads around the fact that it’s August. Where has this year gone?

    While we sit here pondering the fluidity of time, we also have to look back on this year and recognize how many awesome stories we have written over the last seven months. I am incredibly proud of this amazing group of writers. We’re still going strong!

    This month, we bring you even more amazing fiction. The August prompt is: “she added a charm to her bracelet for every life she took.” We encouraged people to think outside the box here, and I think this month’s stories achieved that wonderfully.

    We hope you enjoy this month’s batch of stories. Here is the August schedule:

    Thursday, August 4: “Mantis Memory Beads” by Emily Mosher
    Monday, August 8: “Three Favors” by Amanda Hadley
    Thursday, August 11: “The Muse of Suicide” by Aspen Junge
    Thursday, August 18: “Factory Fur Nightmares” by Dianne Williams
    Monday, August 22: “Jericho’s Note” by Rob Conway
    Thursday, August 25: “Soul Bracelet” by Anita C. Young

  • July Stories at the Confabulator Cafe

    Welcome to the second half of 2016 here at the Confabulator Cafe! We’ve been going strong, with great new stories and a bunch of new faces! We hope you’ve enjoyed what we’ve served up so far.

    This month, with Independence Day nearing and summer vacation in full swing, we decided to explore family traditions. Picnics, block parties, pool play dates, firework wars, water fights…only, since it’s the Confabulator Cafe, we decided to make it a little more interesting, so we are delving into bizarre family traditions this month.

    We’ll leave it up to you to decide if these family traditions are ours or if they are completely fabricated. Although I suppose confabulation is a key word, here.

    Here’s the schedule for July! Enjoy. And try not to blow any fingers off on the 4th.

    Monday, July 4: “Accidental Kaiju” by Dianne Williams
    Monday, July 11: “Luck and Whiskey” by Eliza Jaquays
    Monday, July 25: “The Unbrella” by Anita C. Young
    Friday, July 29: “Wedding Breakfast” by Emily Mosher

  • June Stories at the Confabulator Cafe

    We had an amazing turnout for our May stories. So many cases of mistaken identity! We’re back with another awesome line-up for June.

    We’re turning our attention to something a little more otherworldly this month. We’ve decided to explore the age-old question of what happens after death. Although perhaps not in the metaphysical or religious sense, exactly.

    Our prompt was “the business of the afterlife.” This can be anything from the mundane to the magical, but all of these tales touch a bit on what the afterlife might look like.

    We’re also pleased to welcome another brand new guest author, Amanda Hadley! We’d also like to welcome back August Baker, another long-time Confabulator who is back with us this month.

    We hope you enjoy our stories. Here is the schedule for June:

    Thursday, June 2: “Market Crash” by August Baker
    Monday, June 6: “The Resurrection” by Emily Mosher
    Monday, June 13: “Honour The Dead” by Anita C. Young
    Thursday, June 16: “Shop Girl” by Eliza Jaquays
    Monday, June 20: “Old Mother Nitala” by Aspen Junge
    Thursday, June 23: “My Only Human” by Sara Lundberg
    Monday, June 27: “White Collar” by Amanda Hadley
    Thursday, June 30: “Working for a Living” by Neil Siemers

  • May Stories at the Confabulator Cafe

    Welcome, friends. Welcome back to the Confabulator Cafe. Or, if you are here for the first time, welcome! Have a seat, sit back, and enjoy some fresh new stories, written just for you.

    This month, the Confabulators were tasked to write about a case of mistaken identity. Each author went about this in different ways, so we hope you will enjoy the diverse range of stories.

    We have an old familiar face who hasn’t been around here in awhile, so welcome back long-time Confabulator Jason Arnett. We’re all excited to have them join us this month.

    Here is the schedule for May. We hope you’ll stop by to read each of these stories!

    Tuesday, May 3: “Swagger and Sway” by Emily Mosher
    Friday, May 6: “D.M.(S.R.)” by Jason Arnett
    Friday, May 13: “Picture Perfect” by Eliza Jaquays
    Tuesday, May 17: “Fall Interrupted” by Rob Conway
    Friday, May 20: “Lessone the Firste” by Aspen Junge
    Tuesday, May 24: “Alexandra’s Awakening” by Anita C. Young
    Friday, May 27: “The Monster Next Door” by Ashley M. Hill

    (and a bonus story: “What Happened to the Goat,” still a case of mistaken identity, but written as a follow-up to “Picture Perfect.”)

  • April Stories at the Confabulator Cafe

    While the Confabulator Cafe is a virtual place, a handful of the writers for the Cafe live in Kansas. We’ve been having some strange weather lately. Fires, snow, tornadoes, and eighty-degree afternoons when it was below thirty in the morning. The old saying that if you don’t like the weather in Kansas just wait five minutes is hyperbolic but not entirely untrue.

    It feels a bit apocalyptic at times. Perhaps that is why, when consulting a random prompt generator, we all acquiesced when it spat out: a library, a road warrior, and self sacrifice.

    Look, we know it’s a little Mad Max. But that’s something worth aspiring to, right? We hope you’ll enjoy this month’s stories. Here’s the schedule for you.

    Friday, April 8: “Snakebite” by Eliza Jaquays
    Friday, April 15: “Shiloh” by Ashley M. Hill
    Friday, April 22: “The 34-Year Harvest” by Dianne Williams
    Friday, April 29: “The Wandering Library” by Sara Lundberg