Hello readers. Thank you for visiting our website, where authors create short fiction for you to enjoy for free every month. We are about to embark on our sixth month of monthly writing prompts. We hope you have enjoyed what you’ve read up to this point and will stick with us as we continue to get better and write toward new and different prompts.
For July, the Confabulators were given a setting prompt. The setting: a dining room. Stories had to take place only in a dining room. Flashbacks could happen elsewhere, but all action and all telling had to take place in a dining room. It seems limiting, but we put no restrictions on what kind of dining room. Maybe the dining room doesn’t belong to a human. Maybe the dining room is in outer space. Join us for the month of July to see where our writers took this prompt.
In other exciting news, we have our first two guest bloggers contributing stories to the Confabulator Cafe this month. We hope you’ll welcome Anita Young and Emily Mosher with the same warmth you receive the rest of us with each month.
Here is the July schedule, so be sure to check back each week on the days below for new free fiction!
Welcome to another month of free fiction at the Confabulator Cafe. We have a brand new prompt and a whole batch of new stories lined up for you this month.
For June, we were tasked to write stories to go with story titles we created. These titles came from a Wordle generated from titles of stories published in Clarkesworld Magazine. Clarkesworld is a science fiction magazine, so it’s actually pretty impressive that we ended up with our usual range of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror stories.
If you’d like, you can take a peek at the Clarkesworld Wordle to see if you can spot the titles the Confabulators used this month. There’s lots of good title potential here, so we may revisit this prompt again in the future.
Here is the story schedule for June. We hope that you’ll visit us every week this month and enjoy reading the stories as much as we enjoyed writing them.
The Confabulators are always looking for different types of prompts to fuel our creative endeavors. Thus far, we’ve used both themes and specific words for our stories. We thought we’d try something different this month. For May, we are using a photo prompt.
The Confabulators have played with the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words before. This time, we all wrote a story in response to the same picture. The internet fairies chose this photo for us to write about.
Enjoy this month’s stories, and think about where you might have taken a story based on this photo.
It’s April Fool’s Day, but this is no joke: this month, the Confabulators are writing about the three steps to world peace. Please join us on Mondays and Fridays this month starting next week to read what direction each author took this prompt. You can find April’s schedule below:
Hello everyone! We hope you enjoyed our February stories. Our return to the Cafe was a success, and we’re ready to share another month of free fiction with you.
For the March stories, the Confabulators were given two words and told that we had to use both words in our story. The words didn’t have to appear together so long as both appeared somewhere. Those two words were: unlikeable midnight.
As always, a diverse range of stories emerged from the prompt. We hope you’ll come visit us every week during March to enjoy our tales of unlikeable midnights. Here is the schedule for the upcoming month:
After a short hibernation, the Cafe is about to come alive again. Our authors have recharged after National Novel Writing Month and the holidays, and we’ll be sharing all-new stories with you every week.
Going forward, each month we will all write to one specific prompt, so all of our stories will have the same underlying theme or be related somehow.
During the month of February, our stories will all address the theme of Valentine’s Day in some capacity or other.
Please visit us starting one week from today on the following days as we share our tales of love and woe.
Friday, February 6 – “I’m Not Romeo” by Jack Campbell, Jr.
Tuesday, February 10 – “Reservations” by Amanda Jaquays
Saturday, February 14 – “Time to Love” by Dianne Williams
Wednesday, February 18 – “Everything Changes” by Ashley M. Hill
Sunday, February 22 – “My SAD Valentine” by Sara Lundberg
Thursday, February 26 – “No Regrets” by Neil Siemers
It’s a little dark in here right now. The cups and saucers and plates and silverware are all cleaned
You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to —The Outer Limits.
and put away. The tables are arranged in their proper order, chairs are set upside down on top. The coffee pots and espresso machine are unplugged. The door’s locked and the lights are off.
We’re closed for a bit. Not too long, though; only a couple of weeks while we all take a little breather.
We’ll be back on April 1st with more great posts about a wide range of topics and MORE FREE FICTION than ever before.
Every week our writers will tackle the topics we’ve asked ourselves about. Every day will be a single post allowing our faithful readers the chance to absorb and ponder the writing. You’ll have more chances to comment and keep up with what we’re doing. And every day will be different. Monday may be a Writer’s Life post while Tuesday is a Flash Fiction and Wednesday would be something about the writer’s process. If Tuesday is a Flash Fiction and Thursday is, too, it may be that the stories will be from different prompts, including our work in progress: Straeon Manor.
We’re jazzed to bring you these changes. We hope you’ll find them as exciting as we do. Thank you so much for your patronage so far. Bear with us while we make things better.
In the meantime, we asked the writers to share with you their favorite post of the last year or so. Feel free – in fact, PLEASE – check ‘em out and comment. Share your thoughts with the authors and stay tuned.
Amanda is off doing what writers do best… Getting drunk. However she is around people, so check back in a few weeks when she manages to recover from a panic attack inspired by social anxiety.
Kevin Wohler: “Trophies” — Although this story was written as part of our Straeon Manor stories, it was actually an excuse to work on a character I had wanted to write for some time. Setting the story in the late 1920s gave me an excuse to do some research on that decade.
Sara Lundberg: My very favorite part of the Cafe is our monthly flash fiction assignments. I’m always so proud of what my fellow Confabulators come up with, and I’ve been pleased with the way the prompts have twisted my brain to produce some interesting stories. My favorite by far is the story I wrote called “Munitions Run.” Each word I put down begged even more backstory, so one of these days I’d like to flesh out the world. For now, here’s a teaser of what will hopefully someday be a full fledged novel.
Ashley: I think one of my favorite posts was still the first flash fiction I did — “The Dock Worker“, that one where aliens eat babies. (ZOMG SPOILERS) It’s not that it was my best writing or even terribly good (not even my favorite story to come out of the flash fiction, really). There’s just something about the character Abra and the situation that I’ve always loved. I’ve always meant to write more about Abra.
Jason Arnett: Picking just one favorite is difficult but there’s no need to go on about, I suppose. All of us have our darlings, our babies. The Straeon Manor stories were fun, especially the second one (“A Delicate Man“), and I enjoyed seeing how Ted Boone and Christie Holland both used bits of my first story. My favorite post, though, has to be my Revenge story, “What Is Best In Life“. That topic was my suggestion and everyone did great work on that one. I think all cylinders were firing for all of us then.
Christie Holland: My favorite part of the Cafe has always been writing fiction. While I love seeing my fellow Cafe members’ thoughts on different parts of writing, seeing how we interpret the same prompt is really fun. My favorite short story that I’ve written is “A Certain Kind of Magic“. It was the first story that I had in my head that came out exactly as I wanted it to. It’s also one of the first stories that I thought was really good and I was proud to show it to all of my friends.
Ted Boone: “Gravity” — The juxtaposition of ancient culture and far-flung future humanity was challenging, especially in light of the 1000 word flash-fiction limit. I’m really pleased with the end result.
If you’ve been around the Cafe, you know that we like to tell stories. Here’s a bit from the Wikipedia entry on ‘confabulation’:
Confabulation is considered “honest lying,” but is distinct from lying because there is typically no intent to deceive and the individual is unaware that their information is false.
So you can see we stretched it a bit, by definition. The Cafe is not any of the regulars’ primary job, though. All of us have square jobs we work at that pay the bills. Some of us work in various fields where we write for a living, but the work is such that the truth must be told accurately and within certain (sometimes frustrating) parameters.
Our special this week is to challenge the regulars to tell you what sort of non-fiction each would write if given the chance. The answers may surprise you given what we write in terms of fiction. Don’t expect a confessional, but you may be enlightened as to what interests us outside of what you may already know. Or think you know. There’s no ‘honest lying’ here this week.
Your table’s ready. Cocoa, tea, and coffee on request as long as you serve yourself.
The Brothers Grimm spent a lot of time gathering tales from Europe during their lives and then publishing what they collected. Others did, too. These stories were told around fireplaces or to children at bedtime and were passed from one generation to the next. Traditional stories are lots of fun because they’re familiar. They can also become tired. We aim to solve that problem this week at the Cafe.
Universally acknowledged by the regulars here a few weeks ago as one of the fun parts of the Cafe, our monthly confabulations this time take a classic turn. On special this week is each author’s take on a fairytale. Some may be obscure (there might even be a new one in there somewhere) and others will have that creeping sense of being cautionary. There will be sex, food, death, and certainly a villain or two.
So we present our versions of fairytales for you to enjoy. Don’t get hung up on which tale it is, but see if you can spot what we’re saying about the times we live in.
We take no responsibility, however, for last minute kisses from princes. And if you take a bite from that apple the witch is offering you, you’re on your own.
Genre is a French word meaning “kind” or “sort” according to Wikipedia. Genre, though, for writers is what we write, how we express ourselves, where we want to take our readers away from their everyday lives. Certain genres are overdone, some are less explored, and many are confused with the medium in which they are delivered. TV westerns are not necessarily the same as Hollywood westerns which are different still from Pulp westerns. However, they are ALL westerns.
Some of us here in the Cafe write in distinct genres, others still crossover from into another and then back again or perhaps into a third. As readers we are attracted to certain genres for entertainment: science fiction, romance, urban fantasy, high fantasy, etc… As writers sometimes we eschew what entertains us in favor of what we like to write or are good at. Or think we’re good at.
This week we’re exploring why we write in the genre we’ve chosen. We’re going to tell you what’s attractive about that genre to us and we hope you’ll tell us what you like. The regulars here know we run the gamut of any list of genre you might find anywhere, but why we write in these milieux is a topic of conversation over coffee, tea, or cocoa on a cold winter’s day.
Pull up a chair. You’re always welcome here but you’ll have to bus your own dishes.
