The Confabulator Cafe

Author: dwilliams

  • Collections Hell

    To: mathew.logan@soulnet.org
    From: collections@hellnet.org

    Dear Matthew Logan,

    I am writing to inform you that your grace period of 15 years, as previously agreed upon by both parties, is coming to a close. On September 30, 2016 your fee of the energy from one human soul, hereafter known as your immortal soul, will be due. On or before this date, your immortal soul will be ripped from your body and transferred to the underworld for eternal storage. Please make whatever arrangements you feel are appropriate and schedule a visit with one of our many repossesion agents at your earliest convenience.

    Appointments for immortal soul collection do fill up fast during this time of year, due to the many contracts signed during the early autumn months. In order to ensure a convenient time to surrender your immortal soul, we do recommend that you make an appointment as soon as possible. The process is fast and we try our best to make it as painless as possible.

    If you have any questions or concerns, please contact your case-demon directly at: ralachi.collections@hellnet.org

    Ralachi
    Fifth Level of Hell
    Collections Department

    #

    To: collections@hellnet.org
    From: mathew.logan@soulnet.org

    How on Earth did you get this email? I did not and never have signed any kind of contract for my immortal soul. If this is some kind of joke, it’s not funny.

    Mathew Logan (more…)

  • Factory Fur Nightmares

    The dew of the early morning soaked the chenille corpse beside her. Polyester stuffing drifted down the alley in the wind. Izzie squatted and considered the remnants. It was a clean kill. She’d cut the belly open from stem to neck and severed the head from the teddy bear, just to be sure. She didn’t want the poor bastard waking up still alive. She wasn’t that kind of monster.

    Moonset wouldn’t come along for another ten minutes. She was patient. She could wait.

    She ran her knife along the plastic charms on her bracelet, making them swing. It was a cheap thing she’d bought on a whim from one of those kitschy places made for teens in the mall. She was way too old to be in there without a child accompanying her, but she couldn’t pass it up. Three little teddy bears dangled from it: two brown and one pink. Three down. She hunted a fourth now. (more…)

  • Accidental Kaiju

    Grendela climbed the volcano in the early morning light of her 13th birthday. Thirteen was a magic age. At 13 she would become a fully-fledged kaiju. Grendela: Destroyer of Cities. It was supposed to be a great honor in her family. They had a nice little village all picked out for her to smash into the ground this morning. There would be a ceremony while the villagers fled for their lives. Her grandmother had probably made a cake. It was probably cooling right now, waiting to be frosted.

    She wasn’t going to destroy any villages today, though. Let them eat her cake without her; she didn’t care. Her whole family were kaiju, dating back to the old days of the legendary monsters. But Grendela didn’t want to be a kaiju.

    She wanted to be an environmental scientist. (more…)

  • The 34-Year Harvest

    The old farmhouse survived the second alien harvest. Kate wanted to make sure it survived the third one. The 17-year anniversary was coming up and Kate sat at a dining room table covered in materials scrounged to make shells for her father’s shotgun.

    She always thought of it as her father’s shotgun instead of hers, though he’d been dead for over thirty years. Killed in the first arrival. Just like she thought of it as his house and his table. The china in the cabinet was her mother’s. The silver and the crystal water goblets were her grandmother’s. The only things that she thought of as her own were the post-harvest additions. The maps of the county pinned to the walls. The metal shutters. The supplies and pre-harvest books stacked up the walls almost to the ceiling. And the bunker. The storm cellar under the house that she and her neighbors had strengthened and stocked to hide from the attacks. These were the things that she would pass on one day.

    Her daughter, Jean, burst into the room. “Mom, there’s a man coming up the drive. Never seen him before.”

    “Run to Boyce’s farm and raise the alarm,” Kate told her, taking up her father’s gun.

    She waited until Jean was safely out the back door and into the fields before she stepped off the front porch. They’d converted it to a wheelchair ramp when they rebuilt it after the last harvest. Boyce’s farm was miles away. They wouldn’t get here in time to help, but at least it would get her daughter out of the way. (more…)

  • The Last Sunny Day

    This morning.

    It was the first sunny day they’d had in weeks. The gray clouds evaporated in the night and the Spring sunshine was finally able to warm the day. Nina’s mood soared as she woke up to the glorious feeling of the sunlight in her eyes. It arrived just in the nick of time since her daughter, Sophie, was on her very last nerve.

    Sophie was bouncing with boredom. After days of crafts, tea parties, and dinosaurs flying around the house, Sophie was done with her toys. And Nina was done with Sophie’s attitude. A beautiful day brought with it the promise of a trip to the park where Sophie could burn off her energy. And Nina could burn off her frustration.

    She let Sophie dress herself this morning. As she waited to see what kind of combination her daughter would come down in today, Nina made a quick call to her husband. They tried to check in with each other daily when he traveled for work, and cell service got spotty at the park sometimes.

    “You’re going to miss her recital tomorrow?” Nina asked after Graham gave her the bad news. His return would be delayed a couple of days because negotiations weren’t going well. “Sophie’s been practicing for weeks and she’s so excited for you to be there.” (more…)

  • The Stork’s Feather

    The fortune teller studied the side of my palm. Her slender fingers traced the lines of my calloused hand, turning it this way and that to catch the light. I kept my eyes off of her, concentrating on the colorful tapestries on the wall. I knew what she was looking for. And I already knew what she would find.

    “You’ll never have any children,” she said.

    “I know,” I replied.

    Those lines had been scraped off of the side of my hand years ago. She must have seen the half line. The faint, broken line that signified my unborn child. She was tactful not to mention it. Most practitioners loved to bring it up. They liked to play it up to prove that they knew their business. But she sounded like she was giving me the specials. ‘You’ll never have kids, oh and the soup of the day is broccoli cheese.’ She didn’t even sound sad about it.

    “It doesn’t have to be this way if you don’t want it,” the woman said. (more…)

  • A little lost. A little found.

    Well, it’s day 20. Today we should all be crossing 33,300 words. I am not there and I won’t be for a while.

    Part of that is being hit by this virus that’s taken out half the writing group now. For three days last weekend I struggled to reach even 100 words a day. It took out some of the days that are traditionally my best catch-up days. And I fell further behind.

    Part of it is the week two blues, which have persisted into week three for me. The week two blues come with the absolute, gut wrenching belief that you have gone in the wrong direction. Somewhere along the way the plot you were writing stopped being the plot you were planning. You’re lost, you’ve ruined the novel, and nothing will ever be right again.

    In my non-writing time I travel to a lot of estate auctions in small towns around the area. I take an old-school approach to get to these. I print out directions from a map site and use them to get me close enough for the auction companies to draw me in with signs they put up. It’s nerve wracking following some back road I’ve never traveled on to some small town I’ve never visited and hoping to find a house or building that I’ve never set eyes on. I have to trust that the directions won’t lead me astray. And 99% of the time they get me there.

    But there’s often a point as I’m driving that I’m convinced I’m lost. That point where my directions say to follow this road for 5 miles, even though the road has forked and I’m not sure I took the right fork, and I’m way outside of town now, and did I just pass the county line? But I keep driving. Sometimes I keep driving because that’s the only choice and there’s nowhere to turn around just now. I keep driving because that’s the only way to find out if I’m lost. I drive a little further, and a little further, and eventually I’m there. With little auction signs to light my way.

    That’s something like noveling. I’m in that point in the novel that every writer seems to experience. My outline just took a major hit and needs to be reworked. My twist has revealed itself a full act too early. And I’m convinced that everything I’ve ever written is awful, even though I know this is categorically false. There are at least a few bits I like. Buried in there. Somewhere.

    The only way to know for sure whether or not I’ve broken the novel is to keep writing for a bit. It should come together in the next 10,000 words. Sometime soon I’ll have an epiphany to fix the third act. My character will find new and interesting ways to ruin her life. I just have to convince myself to keep writing so that we can find out. One word at a time. Until I can see the signs pointing me home.

  • I’m in a Glass Case of Emotion

    My NaNoWriMo wordcount holds no fear for me, anymore. I’ve written under adverse conditions. I’ve done 5k weekends and 5k Saturdays. I’ve written 11k in a single day, while still going to my day job and getting my work done. And one year I restarted halfway through November and wrote my 50k words in 14 days. I know that I can do this. There’s no question about that anymore. You could ship me to the moon and I would probably get my wordcount in for the month.

    So why am I running 2 days behind par? Why am I constantly and consistently writing 500 or 1,000 words a day instead of the 1,667 needed to catch up?

    I said last week that 1,667 was just a little too much for me and I need some downtime in between my good days. That pattern is holding. I wrote 5,800 words over the weekend and then promptly fell behind again. It’s not a question of time or energy. I have plenty of both when I’m pacing around my living room not writing. It’s a question of emotion.

    When I write, I need to feel emotions. I feel the adrenaline in my character’s body when someone is shooting at her. I feel her heart flutter when she sees Mr. Wright.  And I feel the gut wrenching betrayal that will come when she learns the truth about him. And there’s a certain amount of panic at the thought. My chest gets tight. My face scrunches up. My limbs tell me with every nerve ending they possess that it’s time to run away. Which probably explains why I pace a lot when I’m thinking about my writing.

    I’m not very comfortable with strong emotion, you see. It’s something that I have a hard time tolerating. People sometimes describe sadness as a sea. For me, sadness and all of those other emotions are a great big ocean that I’m living in the middle of, on a little island, below sea level, with a rickety dam built all around to keep the feelings back. Let in a little bit, and the rest will break through the dam and flood me.

    I have a highly developed ability to keep it all bottled up so that I never feel more than a small wave to rock my boat. But I need those emotions when I write. In a safe way, so that I don’t get overwhelmed. I have to willingly pull a small part of them up out of me and use them up before their big brothers come looking for them. And I don’t always trust that I can do that.

    And if this is all sounding a bit melodramatic to you, I’m right there with you. My point, if I’ll ever get around to it, is that writers all write differently. Some of them work best on cloudy days, some in their writing sheds, some only on weekends. I write best in short bursts. Like ripping off a Band-Aid. One Band-Aid equals about 400-500 words. Now imagine how many Band-Aids you can tolerate ripping off of your skin one after another after another and you’ll get an idea of why I don’t hit par every day.

    But what I really need is an external deadline and a combination of enough passion for the project and just enough panic that it overwhelms everything else and short-circuits my emotions so that I can write. That usually kicks in around week three for me. Until then, I rip off a few Band-Aids here and there when I can stand it. And my wordcount slogs on.

  • Falling Into Old Patterns

    I’ve been doing NaNoWriMo for *does math* a lot of years and in the months between Novembers I forget how hard the day-to-day writing is for me. Every year I make plans to break my writing into chunks throughout the day, to write on my lunch break, to sneak some words in while dinner is cooking. And every year I sit down at nine or ten o’clock at night and frantically pound out some words while hating myself.

    It’s not a great pattern. On this, the sixth day of NaNoWriMo, I find myself turning back to familiar habits. I have not written this morning. I will probably not write on my lunch break. And I’m consistently running about a day’s worth of writing behind par.

    My NaNo stats always take on a sort of roller coaster feel (worse in some years than others). I have one really good day, followed by a day or two where I lag. Then another really good push, and maybe a 200-word day. And then I panic on Saturday and write 5,000 words, only to follow it up with a useless Sunday. Because 1,667 words per day is just a little too much for me. It’s just a little out of reach. I’m comfortable writing 500-800 words a day and finding 1,667 words inside of me does more to exhaust me than to energize me. So I need some recovery time sometimes. And that’s okay.

    This year started the same way. 1,700 words on day one, and then about 500-800 words on days two and three. Writing those words was like pulling teeth. Everything felt trite and contrived. I flew through some plot points like I was checking them off a list. Girl meets boy. Check. Girl likes boy and is stereotypical about it. Check. Girl is mistaken for spy. Check.

    These scenes are placeholder scenes. I’m getting to know the world that I’m writing and my characters, still. The early scenes are almost certain to change as I learn more and the plot/world/characters start to become richer. I know that, but it’s still demotivating to sit down and write only to have crap pour out of your fingertips.

    And then on day four the heavens opened up and I remembered how scenes work. My characters started to take on personalities and bits of their backstories became clear. Description started writing itself. I hit my word count and tried to sleep as my brain unfurled the next three scenes for me (semipro tip: Write down your ideas before bed. Your brain is about to fall asleep and hallucinate vividly for eight hours. It’s got other shit to deal with than remembering the intricacies of your novel’s plot).

    And none of that would have happened if I hadn’t slogged through three days of nonsense to get here.

  • Birdie

    Birdie and her family left their home after the great cooling came. Food was scarce and they hadn’t been fed in so long. The light was fading. Once bright and white, it had turned a golden color that plants couldn’t seem to tolerate. Their leaves changed to a sickly yellow color and fell. The days were getting shorter. Soon there would be no light left at all.

    It wasn’t so much a decision to leave as, well, one day some of them started walking. The rest followed and they didn’t see any good reason to go back. There was no one around to stop them.

    They didn’t stop until they came to a great field of corn. The stalks grew taller than Birdie’s head. She looked up at the fading light through their leaves. It was the first time she’d seen green in what felt like forever. The leaves here were already tinged with yellow, though, and turning brown at the tips. Some of the stalks had fallen to the ground under the weight of the ripe cobs. It was the first food they’d seen since leaving home and her brothers and sisters stopped to gorge themselves. (more…)