Category: Notes from the Management

April showers bring May flowers, right? Well, what if May also brought terror? I know, I know, usually October is the month for fright. But what if it was something completely not terrifying that was terrorizing a town?

The Confabulators explored that idea for this month’s prompt. Just when you thought you were safe…

We also have three returning Cafe contributors this month! We’re very excited to have them back.

Here’s the May lineup. Please visit us every Monday this month for new stories:

Monday, May 8: “Fear, Rejection and Spring” by Rob Conway
Monday, May 15: “Bunnies” by Anita C. Young
Monday, May 22: “The Election” by Sarah Bredeman
Monday, May 29: “Arbor Day” by Jack Campbell, Jr.

As a cruel April Fool’s joke, I was going to tell you that we had no stories for April.

That’s untrue. We do have stories! Several of them! Please visit us every Friday in April for brand new fiction. Our prompt this month was: a friend has a curse placed on them; what is the curse, and does the protagonist help?

We hope you enjoy these tales as well as the impending spring weather.

No fooling.

Here’s the schedule.

Friday, April 7: “Only You” by Anita C. Young
Friday, April 14: “The Touch of Her Hand” by Eliza Jaquays
Friday, April 21: “The Cursed Word” by Dianne Williams

Spring tentatively dipped its toe into the water, then did a cannonball into the deep end. But after that, it quickly fled again. We have no idea what season it is here in the Midwest.

Thankfully, as writers, it can be whatever season we want in our stories.

This month, the Confabulators wrote about an undeserved accolade someone was desperately trying to get rid of. We hope you’ll take some time to read our stories each week

Here’s the March lineup (no, that was not a March Madness reference–we don’t know much about sportsball here):

Wednesday, March 8: “The Wrong John Dunham” by Sara Lundberg
Wednesday, March 15: “The Brewmaster’s Armor” by Ashley M. Hill
Wednesday, March 22: “Wrong Place, Wrong Time” by Aspen Junge

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 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

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

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

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

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

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