The Confabulator Cafe

Category: Influence

  • Playing Favorites

    Love-CoffeeTo my surprise, this was one of the most difficult posts I’ve been asked to write here at the Café. Do I pick through my own posts and choose my favorite? Do I pour through the posts of my fellow Confabulators and decide — like some awards committee — who was the funniest, the most poignant, the wisest, or the most likely to succeed in the world of publishing?

    I tried, I really did. As it is, this is terribly late because of all the false starts and endless time spent scouring past entries from each writer.

    So, we’re going to avoid the question altogether. It was a great idea, but I don’t have it in me to pick and choose.

    Instead, I want to talk about how proud I am of this group. (more…)

  • Confessions for the New Year

    The end of the year is almost upon us and typically this time of the year is reserved for reflecting back on our accomplishments from the past year and planning for what the new year will bring us. It’s a time for making resolutions to uphold for the year to come. Or at least, ones we will try to uphold. Which means I have a confession to make.

    We were asked to write about which assignment was our favorite and if anyone’s response stood out the most. When I think back on it, I realized that I’ve done a very poor job at keeping up with reading the blog. I could make excuses a mile long and a few of them might even be legitimate, but the fact of the matter is, I haven’t made the time for it. Which means there really haven’t been any responses that have stood out to me. So next year I’m going to try to do better.

    Scratch that. I’m going to make that goal starting right now. There are still days left of this year and if I put off until tomorrow what I really should have started today… well. I’m a procrastinator and tomorrow is always right around the corner. Before I know it, tomorrow will be the start of 2014 and I still won’t have read anything. And it’s not that I don’t read any of the posts, it’s that I read them so infrequently and with so little consistency that I really can’t form an opinion about one response that stood out to me more than the others. (more…)

  • What Makes us Confabulators

    When we embarked upon this experiment a year ago, I’m not sure any of us were sure exactly what we were doing, or where we were going. The Cafe has evolved a lot since then, and we continue to define what it is we do with every assignment. I’ve learned something new about myself and my writing each week, not only because I’m forced to look closely at my process for each assignment, but also by reading how my fellow writers approach their craft. I think I’ve learned as much from them as I have from myself.

    One or two specific assignments stand out in my memory, but my absolute favorite category has been Confabulation. (more…)

  • Let Me Play and I’m a Happy Man

    I’m not usually a guy who engages in literary exercises. If I’m writing, I want the words I produce to count toward something.

    Now I understand there is value in learning, and no word written in pursuit of craft is ever wasted. I get that. But I also know myself well enough to realize that I get impatient when words on the page aren’t leading me toward completing a work in progress.

    It’s not a great trait, but we all work with what we’ve got. (I also don’t like to read books about writing, though I love to buy them and have a bookcase full, but that is a blog post for another day.)

    So after laying this groundwork, you’ll understand why I was less than enthusiastic when October rolled around and one of our assignments was to interview a character for our upcoming NaNoWriMo novel. I admit that I had an advantage over some of the other Café contributors because I’d planned to use the month of November to complete a novel I was already writing. But that didn’t stop me from doing a whole lot of internal bitching about the task.

    (more…)

  • 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…)

  • 2012 Year in Review (Week Ending Jan. 5)

    2012This week, we celebrate the end of one year and the start of the next. And with it, we here at the Confabulator Cafe also celebrate our first anniversary. The Cafe officially opened on January 1, 2012. Two days later, the first of our posts was published — and we haven’t looked back since.

    Until now. This week we’re asking our writers to discuss their favorite post (or posts) of 2012, whether their own or someone else’s. We may even have some who pick several in a theme.

    For those who have been reading with us since the beginning, we hope this week will remind you of some of your favorites. For those who are just finding the cafe, we hope you discover some gems in our archives.

    Until Next Week,

    The Cafe Management

  • (Peer) Pressure and (Face) Time.

    What is it that keeps me writing 50,000 words of only slightly mitigated crap through November? Peer pressure, of course [0].

    The Lawrence Wrimo group is amazing. The Lawrence Wrimo group is so amazing that people who have moved away to other parts of the country still participate— on Facebook, by email, through our blog, on IRC [1]. I fully expect that once the first Lawrence Wrimo goes to that Great Thank God It’s Over Party in the ceiling [2], they will still be logging in to talk smack bless us with their presence.

    We have thrice weekly write-ins through the month of November. We have nearly nightly chat-ins [3] which are raucous parties in their own right. We hold monthly Writer’s Nights Out year-round, and if all goes well may start scheduling the occasional Writer’s Movie Night [4].

    What was wholly unexpected when I started doing Nano lo these many mango seasons ago, is that we keep getting together because it turns out we like one another. And through that liking we support one another, suggest ideas, provide escape hatches for those who have written themselves into a corner, cheer on successes, mourn the loss of ideas that seemed good at the time but simply could not be brought to life, and hold one another accountable to our word/page counts.

    For something stereotyped as an introverted, solitary pursuit, writing is surprisingly social.

    [0] True story: I did not volunteer to be a Confabulator. I became one when Sara fixed me with her beady eye and said, “Pick a day to post. Saturday is open.” I was too intimidated to say no. [0.5]

    [0.5] Seriously, Sara, I love you. I just needed the kick in the pants.

    [1] That’s Internet Relay Chat, the great-granddaddy of texting, to you youngins.

    [2] Or basement, depending on how well they’ve studied the scripture according to Strunk and White and followed the tenets of good grammar.

    [3] I’m trying to get an early morning version going for those of us who do our best thinking before 3:00 PM.

    [4] The Hobbit, definitely. Anna Karenina or Les Miserables, possibly. Cheesy musical seventies porn based on fairy tales, there will be plenty of booze. Anything from the Twilight series, oh dear god no. There is such a thing as standards.

  • The More You Grow

    Last week I discussed how having a kid sort of disrupted my writing cycle, and this week I’m going to continue in a similar vein: how getting pregnant forced me to grow up a bit, and how growing up informed my writing.

    Before my son was born, I sort of did this party thing. There was a lot of drinking and poor life choices and loud music and it was all a blast. I even, sometimes, miss it. But given the narrow focus of my hobbies (video games, alcohol, and sex), my writing sort of reflected my immaturity. I wrote a lot of what I thought was some really deep, vaguely self-righteous, adult stuff about relationships and life that’s shallow in retrospect. It’s no wonder it never went anywhere.

    I’m not saying that kids don’t occasionally bust out wisdom and fantastic stories, but I, at least, was not one of them.
    (more…)

  • Bigger Than Just Me

    I’ve mentioned a time or two that I spent some time writing and drawing my own comic books. Nothing big time. They were photocopied minicomics that I distributed by hand and through mail order ads in The Comics Buyer’s Guide.

    This was still early days of the internet circa 1999 to 2001 and I didn’t have access to a scanner so I didn’t do a lot online. Believe it or not, a lot of things that younger people take for granted now were simply beyond my financial scope at the time.

    The second to last comic I drew told a story about the birth of the main character’s child. It was pretty similar to what I experienced in the birth of my own child.

    One of the last comics I drew had a much deeper effect on me though it was about an experience I shared with the entire country and many, many people around the world.

    (more…)

  • Where Am I, and What’s the Deal With This Handbasket?

    A number of years back I was poking around on LiveJournal and ran across the blog of a friend of mine who was describing this thing called National Novel Writing Month. Which sounded really interesting, and I decided I wanted to try it.

    The only problem was that Nanowrimo runs from November 1 to 30 every year, and it was already the day after Thanksgiving.

    I had just finished (? Was finishing?) grad school and I was looking for another all consuming obsession to fill the anticipated void. I had matured as a technical writer and writing term papers and giving in-class presentations was coming easy. Challenging, yes, because I still had to master the material, but the actual effort of repackaging [0] was running smoothly.

    Writing fiction, however, was a nut I had yet to crack.

    I remember that when I was a kid I had written a short play— the kind you act on a stage, not on a screen. I must have written that play three separate times because I was so in love with the story [1]. I never did get a chance to put it on, though, because as a shy, bookish, nerdy, introverted child I didn’t have enough friends to fill out the cast. Thank all the Muses that none of my schoolteachers ever found out about my playwriting— no doubt they would have considered producing said play the perfect social therapy for a shy, bookish, nerdy, introverted child. In the 1970s, the Geek had yet to inherit the Earth, and a girl who was smart rather than sociable was simply Not On.

    Anyway, I had to wait eleven and a half months for my first Nanowrimo. By the time it finally rolled around I had already read No Plot, No Problem! and tried my hand at creating story out of the motion of pen over page. However, I looked forward to the discipline of having a series of deadlines as I experimented with long form fiction.

    The book I eventually wrote was dreadful. But the experience was a revelation.

    For some reason it has never been the online Nanowrimo community that caught my passion, which is actually pretty weird considering that I have been participating in online communities since approximately 1989 [2] and at the time lived and died by email. The greatest part of the Nanowrimo experience turned out to be sitting at a sticky table in some random coffee shop with a dozen perfect strangers, most of whom I would never see again, and bonding over writing absolute crap and bitching about it. Cheering those who caught up with their word count goals. Speculating about those mythical Nanowrimoers who supposedly hit the fifty-thousand word mark within the first week. Responding to challenges. Sagging in relief when your own fifty-thousandth word was completed on November 29 or thereabouts, and you could Have A Life once more. Applauding wildly those who met their own fifty-thousand word goal at the write-in.

    A few years later some in my local Nanowrimo group started this thing they were calling the Lawrence Writers Group in order to continue that special energy of a Nanowrimo flash community throughout the rest of the year and for some reason the universal expectation was that of course I would be involved. I’m not sure why— fiction writing isn’t really My Thing, I don’t generally do recreational writing except in November, and I sure as hell have no intention of trying to get published. But Lawrence Writers turned into the Confabulators turned into the Cafe, and here we all are.

    Like writing a Nanowrimo novel, I’m going to keep moving pen over page and see where it takes me.

    [0] An actual term of art in library science meaning taking the stuff you learn for class and turning it into term papers and in-class presentations.
    [1] I have absolutely no clue whatsoever what that story is now. But when I was 9, it was the stuff of brilliance.
    [2] Yes, Virginia, that is three years before the formal invention date of the World Wide Web. Yes, I am older than e-dirt.