The Confabulator Cafe

Author: slundberg

  • The Last Traveling Carnival (Flash Fiction)

    Anna’s brother had been sick for a long time. It was around Halloween when he finally died. Only eight years old and wanted to be a clown for Trick-or-Treating. She remembered it very clearly. The traveling carnival had been in town then, too.

    #

    Anna joined her two roommates at their usual table at the Cafe. She managed to set down her steaming cup of herbal tea without spilling. She had gotten good at hiding the tremors.

    Simon had a textbook open in front of him, but Anna could tell he was too distracted by his girlfriend to study for class.

    “I didn’t know the old-school traveling carnivals even existed anymore,” Lisa said as she inspected the flyer she had rescued from tumbling down the street.

    Anna wasn’t able to suppress the shudder that slid down her spine. (more…)

  • Writing is Simple but Not Easy

    The number of times I’ve sat down to write this blog and failed made me realize that basically everything about writing is difficult.

    The hardest thing about writing for me is just sitting down to do it.

    It’s like exercise. You know you need to do it. You know once you do it you’ll feel better and that it’ll be fun once you get into it. You know the results are worth it.

    But that doesn’t always mean that you’ll do it.

    It’s hard to get started but it’s also hard to make the time, stay focused on a project and see it through to the end.

    Of course I love to write, but you’d never know it sometimes. Given the choice, I will come up with a million other things to do instead. If I know I need to write, suddenly there are chores that need doing and errands that need running. Books to read or TV shows to catch up on.

    Because putting it off is easy. All the rest is hard.

    (more…)

  • Chat with Shane from Monsters of Lawrence

    Sara E. Lundberg: Hello Shane, welcome to the Confabulator Cafe. So glad you could join us here today.

    Shane: Yeah, awesome, thanks for having me. Love this place. Any café, really. I’m a barista.

    SEL: Excellent, I hope that makes you feel right at home.

    Shane: Totally.

    SEL: So, you are one of the supporting characters for the up and coming Monsters of Lawrence novel. Tell me a little bit about yourself.

    Shane: When you say supporting character, what exactly does that mean? (more…)

  • A World of Support

    I have always been incredibly fortunate when it has come to friends, family, and significant others and my writing. I have never once run into someone who said I couldn’t do it.

    I’m not sure my family, my Mom especially, ever really understood my drive to write, but they’ve always encouraged me. We’re a family of storytellers anyway, so that part I know they understand. I just choose a different medium. A medium most dyslexics shy away from.

    I’m pretty sure my extended family, as well as my close friends, think it’s really neat that I write. They always ask to read my work when I tell them I’ve been writing. Someday I might actually even share it with them! (more…)

  • Paper Cut Revenge (Flash Fiction)

    Sometimes relationships with your co-workers are tenuous at best. I was lucky; most of my co-workers were ambiguously nice. My boss was somewhat indifferent to me, but I was a temp worker at a huge company, so I didn’t expect much else.

    There was only one office resident that I had a mutual loathing for.

    I’ll never forget the first day we met.

    For months the office had been buzzing about it. Our new copy machine. One of these “multifunctional devices” that could print, scan, and copy all in one. All of the administrative support were in a tizzy over it.

    The day it arrived, I watched warily as the tech guys wheeled it in. It was supposed to be some fabulous new device to ease our workload, but it sat, enormous and ominous, glinting evilly in the corner of our copy room.

    (more…)

  • The Least of my Worries

    One night as I lay in bed, staring at the dark ceiling, trying to get my mind to quiet enough so that I could sleep, my body went cold and my mind seized up. I was struck with the terrifying thought: what if one day I sat down to write my next story, and I was completely out of ideas?

    My biggest fear as a writer had always been that one day my idea stockpile would run completely and utterly dry. That maybe one day I’d get published, and my publishers would expect another book, and there would be nothing left in me. (more…)

  • What’s in a Name That Starts with J?

    I admire the way writers like Tolkien and George R.R. Martin juggle enormous casts of characters. Martin has an entire appendix dedicated to all of the different houses, for crap’s sake. How in the world do they keep track of them all? Extensive note-taking, I’m sure. They are obviously masters of their craft.

    I have never had as much luck managing that many characters, but I’ve found a few tricks help me keep everyone straight.

    As shallow as it sounds, names are probably one of the most basic ways to avoid character confusion. I learned early on that names that sound the same or to have too many names that start with the same letter make it hard to tell everyone apart. I also tend to use simple names, even in my fantasy writing, to make them easier to remember. (more…)

  • Write for Yourself; Edit for Others

    I never worried about judgment of my writing before I started to submit my work. As I continue to put myself out there, and now that I have my first short story published, I find myself suddenly paranoid about what people are going to think when they read my stuff.

    I don’t think it ever really crossed my mind before, though, to worry what the people I know would think of the subject matter of my stories. Well, in the sense that they’d be offended, anyway. My main concerns about judgment were more about whether they’d think my writing was horrible.

    I don’t fear the horrible writing criticism much anymore, mostly because I know that I’ve grown a great deal as a writer over the years and most of what I write isn’t horrible. Also because I know I write better than a lot of bestsellers these days, so obviously there is no accounting for good writing anymore.

    Alas, I digress. (more…)

  • Munitions Run (Flash Fiction)

    “Can I come this time?”Charlotte asked, loudly popping her gum.

    Gale glared at his little sister. “No way. You’re still too young.” He slid the red wagon from its hiding place at the back of the playhouse, under the clunky wooden desk their mother had salvaged from some auction or other.

    “I’m not too young. Sassy goes with her brother all the time. Besides, you’re only three years older than me.”

    “Practically four years,” he said as he pried loose one of the floorboards. Inside, nestled in a cocoon of hay, lay the stash of coal black shotguns and boxes of shotgun shells. He gently picked each one up, checked to make sure they weren’t loaded, set them inside the wagon, and then added several boxes of bullets. “And Sassy knows how to use one of these. You’re still too sporadic.”

    She popped another bubble and crossed her arms over her chest. “Am not. I can hit three out of five.”

    (more…)

  • Just Write Awesomely

    So many nights I’ve sat down to read a chapter or two of a book before bed, only to find myself still unable to put the book down at 2am or later. One of my goals as a writer is to write a book like that someday: a book someone is so into that he or she just can’t stop turning pages.

    I’m still learning different techniques to do this, but here are some of the things I’ve tried so far – things I’ve gleaned from the books I can’t put down, and things that have worked in some of my own novels.

    (more…)