The Confabulator Cafe

Author: jcampbell

  • Bring me another!

    We have been asked to look back at all our assignments over the last year and pick a favorite. I’ve been over the calendar multiple times, trying to think of a specific week that spoke to me. I’ve scanned over the posts, mine and my colleagues, waiting for something to jump out.

    Nothing has. It isn’t that we haven’t had interesting assignments. We have. It isn’t that we haven’t had good contributions. They have been great. The more I’ve tried to isolate an assignment, and the more I have failed to do so, I’ve realized my brain just doesn’t work that way.

    Ask me about my favorite story I’ve written this year, and I won’t be able to answer it. I’ve already moved on. I rarely think about the things I have written in the past, unless I am currently re-writing or submitting them. The other day, a guy I know asked me a question about “Perfect 10,” a horror story I wrote for Insomnia Press. It took me a second to understand what he was asking about. I hadn’t thought much about the piece since it got published. (more…)

  • Holiday Wishes

    From fatchicksings.com
    From fatchicksings.com

    Holidays are a strange time. For some, they are a joyous occasion involving  a celebration of gifts, family, and friendship. For others, they take a dark turn. Holidays can be a devastating time. You hear joyous music, you see bright lights, and you see the glow on children’s faces that can only be the prelude to material gluttony. Unfortunately, not everyone is in on the game. Some people don’t have families and friends, at least nearby. Some cannot afford to take part in the all-you-care-to-eat buyer’s buffet. For those people, the holidays are less about what they are about to get, and more about what they feel they will never have.

    I’ve been on multiple sides of the holiday season. My family celebrates all holidays pretty much the same way. We plug Crock Pots full of casseroles, baked beans, mashed potatoes, and turkey into overloaded networks of power strips. We praise each other’s culinary achievements and avoid that weird marshmallow salad that is inexplicably topped with cheese. In the glory days, there would be as many as sixty or seventy people at lunch. That number has fallen, via emigration from the rural area in which my parents live, and the inevitable overturn of generations. (more…)

  • Santa Claus is Coming

    black-christmas-house

    Bathroom – 1988

    I lay in the empty bathtub, beside the bloody knife, the porcelain chilling my shivering skin. My hands cover my face, catching warm tears from one eye and hot blood from the other’s vacant socket. I wish that Santa Claus would stop singing.

    You’d better watch out. You’d better not cry…

    The blood on my skin congeals, sticky like a thin layer of strawberry jam. Mine? Mark’s? Probably both. I want to turn on the water, to retrieve the soap from the wire basket screwed into the wall. Why are the screws different? One Phillips head, one flat. One rounded, one smooth. One old, one new. Old, new, round, smooth…

    Santa Claus is coming to town… (more…)

  • Toolbox Stocking Stuffers

    The holidays are upon us and that writer in your life is almost impossible to to buy for. Forgive my ending that sentence with a preposition, because do I have some deals for you.

    A couple of years ago, I saw the Alphasmart NEO in a Writer’s Digest advertisement.

    This baby may not look like much, but it is pure creative functionality. It starts up instantaneously, runs on two AA batteries (which will last 700 hours), and best of all, it does not have internet. No Facebook-ing. No tweets. No “research” before you get started. Sit your ass down, because that is all this thing does. Want to write for 12 hours straight in a blackout? Done. Export your work to any program you want. The NEO  emulates the keyboard of your computer and re-types it. (Which looks awesome.) For editing, you will still want your computer, but for quick and dirty first drafts, this is ideal.

     

    (more…)

  • Failure and other F-Words

    Did I succeed or did I fail? It is a matter of perspective. Given my course load for grad school and the responsibilities of being a single parent, I set a small goal of 25,000 words for Nanowrimo. I managed that. So success?

    It doesn’t feel like it. It was tough watching other people’s word counts climb as I spent my time writing papers on thematic conflict and duality as a literary mechanism. It felt bad not making it write-ins, being on the outside of all the inside jokes.  Failure to meet a word count is bitter pill to swallow when your girlfriend is the municipal liaison, the person whose job is to badger people about their word count. Although in fairness to her, there was no badgering.

    I don’t like watching other people succeed at something, knowing I can’t do it myself. It builds a sort of artistic jealousy that is fairly common in writing. It is generally a good thing. Your friend sells a story and you think it could have been you. Another reveals a new book cover, and it could of been you. You use it to drive you. In a race, no one tries harder than the person in second. In this case, person after person finished writing a novel, and it could have been me.

    This isn’t competition, and I am happy for everyone who made it. Happiness and jealousy are often handmaiden’s in the arts. In the end, I just have to hope that the next couple of years with writing as a secondary focus to my education will be a worthwhile sacrifice, and that the experience will make me a better writer.

    I certainly hope so. As much as I have enjoyed my classes and think I am producing good literary criticism, my creative writing is getting left behind, and I don’t like it.

    The good news is that I think what I did writing of Heaven’s Edge is promising. It has a ways to go, but I think it has a chance to be a fun book. I look forward to finishing it, even without Nanowrimo.

  • Moral Victories

    We approach the end of November and my colleagues are hitting their goals. Every day, it seems a new person in our region wins Nanowrimo. I am very proud of them, but also sad for myself.

    It isn’t that I am doing terribly. When I set out on my Nanowrimo tour of duty, this year, I told myself I wanted to write at least 25,000 words. I hit that goal today. However, it will make me a little sad if I am unable to hit 50,000 and get that winner’s bar.

    Writing, and life, are about little goals, and little accomplishments. While most of us aren’t getting any immediate financial gain out of Nanowrimo, although some write with their sights set on publication, there is a lot of satisfaction in saying that you did it. You prevailed against all the other distractions and managed to meet a goal.

    It’s not just any goal. You can’t write 50,000 words in one day, or even one week. It requires a constant commitment sustained over a period of time. That is what life is really about.

    This year, and maybe the next, as well, I know it will be hard to make 50,000 words. There are too many books to read and too many academic papers to write. If I counted all of the academic writing I have done this month, I would easily be beyond 50,000.

    That is part of the price of my master’s degree, to delay my writing career in some way in hopes that the next couple of years will take my writing to an entirely new level. The Nanowrimo after-party will be bittersweet this year. All of the winners will be proud, and I will be proud of them. I will think to the future, to next month and the finishing of my novel, and to all the subsequent Novembers that are bound to be more fruitful.

    Sluggish from leftover turkey, and eyes red from staring at a computer monitor too long, I will be thankful for the experience of Nanowrimo, and all that writing has given me.

    On top of that, I think the novel is going well. My character has had some setbacks, and he has come back more pissed and sarcastic than ever, working around a corrupt system in order to find justice. I am interested to see how it goes for him, and if he gets the girl, who happens to be a nun.

  • Days Late and Dollars Short

    It has been a stressful, busy month, and I apologize for this post being a day late. I’ve been behind on my NaNoWriMo novel, as I expected might happen. I possibly have one of the lowest word counts of anyone within our region. Still, I haven’t given up, and in the grand scheme of things, I don’t think I am doing too badly.

    As I write this, I am at just over 19,000 words. That isn’t near where I would like to be, but is actually pretty good, considering. This year, I set a sort of unofficial goal for myself of 25,000 words. I should make that pretty easily. Perhaps I can finish the rest of the novel during Winter Break.

    The writing itself is going pretty smooth. Things are starting flesh out, and every time I think I don’t know where I am going next, the book takes a bit of a twist. Right now, I am working on an interaction between my investigator, Mac, and a young hacker named Pin in the vein of William Gibson’s console cowboys. Pin has stumbled upon a way to hack into the spinal chips that provide the residents of Heaven’s Edge with their personalized environmental experiences. Pin has been pushing it farther than anyone else dared dream, hacking into the last sensory moments of executed convicts. Mac has realized what Pin has been up to and is hoping Pin might be able to use his talents to get Mac a lead on the dead man in the penthouse.

    I still think it will be a short novel when it is completed, but I am happy to see the story coming together in ways I hadn’t previously considered. I know how this book will probably end and how Halo’s Slip should begin. First things first. I need to get Heaven’s Edge complete, and then I will worry about the rest of the trilogy.

    Grad school is still the priority. I’ve had plenty to do. Finals are coming up. However, my son leaves for his mom’s house for a week starting tomorrow, and I should have time to make some headway this week. We’ll see how it goes.

    I’m still in this, I am just going a bit slower than I would like. As Thanksgiving approaches, I am thankful for the progress I have made. I will keep plugging away until the book is complete.

  • I’ve been robbed!

    Two weeks in to NaNoWriMo, and it has not gone as badly as I feared. Time has been an issue, but  I haven’t fallen behind as much as I thought I would. In order to manage that, I’ve had even less downtime than normal. All of my free time has been spent on homework and writing for school. My novel has been written in big chunks, three thousand words at a time.

    The sad part of this year is that it robs me of the greatest part of NaNoWriMo. This is supposed to be a month of daily writing, of working on a project in a near constant stream of consciousness. Last year, when I was not writing, I was thinking about what happened next, what my characters were like, what they were thinking, and what they were doing when they weren’t involved in the story.

    This year, when I am not writing, I am thinking about how part one of Alice Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman provides a parallel display of life cycles that will become a predominant theme in the rest of the book. Instead of wondering what makes Mac so sarcastic and cold, I am comparing Aristotle and Hume’s concepts of aesthetics. What is the role of critical research within the arts? Apparently, the role is to delay my fiction writing.

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  • Off like a herd of turtles in a pot of glue.

    As my girlfriend will tell you, I am pokey. My son is pokey. When you want to go anywhere, it always takes us a bit to get going. My dad used to say, “And we are off like a herd of turtles in a pot of glue.”

    That is how I feel about NaNoWriMo this year. Last year, I came out of the gates swinging, knocking off three or four thousand words a day like a machine. But, of course, last year I didn’t have grad school. Last night, essays by Aristotle, Leo Tolstoy, and John Hosper. Today, a defense of James Joyce’s “The Dead” as a fantastic work of art. Tomorrow, Alice Munro’s “Love of a Good Woman,” read, study, and analyze.

    When am I supposed to write again? And of course, I have my son full-time, rather than half-time like last year.

    As of writing this, I am sitting at 4800 words. I am hoping that by the time this post goes live, I will be over 6000. Far off last year’s pace, but pretty good, considering all I have going on.

    It has been going well. I started with nothing more than a cool name for a book, “Heaven’s Edge.” Since then, it has evolved to be a hardboiled dystopian story starring a private investigator that is a throwback to Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane.  First-person narration Lots of witty sarcasm. Short sentences. Set in a futuristic dome perched above a smog-blanketed Earth.

    It has taken me a bit to isolate the voice from my usual style, but I think it has a chance to be a lot of fun. I don’t have any sort of plan. Bad things will happen to lots of people, and we will see who is left standing.

    Hopefully, in the end, I will be left standing with a finished novel. So far, my morale is intact, even with feeling like there aren’t enough hours in the day.

  • Remember, Remember the Last November

    Last year, I decided to finally take the plunge from writing short stories into writing an actual, honest-to-God novel. I joined the local writing group for National Novel Writing Month.

    I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had been writing for quite awhile, but I hadn’t really socialized with other writers. As part of a recent re-affirmation of my writing efforts, I decided I needed to throw my hat in and become a full member of the literary community. This meant joining a great group of speculative fiction writers called the Dead Horse Society in Kansas City, a group called Writers of the Weird in Lawrence, and the Nanowrimo group, which would become the basis for this website.

    Writers of the Weird never totally took off, and the commute and time conflicts have kept me from the Dead Horse Society, but this group, and this site, is obviously still going. It all started with Nanowrimo. In more ways than one, Nanowrimo changed my life. I became an author, I met my girlfriend, and I solidified my writing career. Since Nanowrimo, I’ve submitted consistently and have had five stories accepted for publication. I completed my fifty thousand words in just over two weeks and finished the month with around sixty-five thousand words. (more…)