The Confabulator Cafe

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  • December Stories at the Confabulator Cafe

    NaNoWriMo has drawn to a close, and we’re back to our regularly scheduled stories for December.

    So, here we are, friends. The last month of the year and the last batch of stories for 2015. We hope you have enjoyed reading as much as we have writing this year.

    For December, the prompt was “unexpected gifts.” While some people took a holiday turn with that, others did not. However, all of these stories seem designed to make you think twice about accepting those gifts you weren’t expecting.

    Here’s the schedule below, so be sure to check in on these days for brand new, original free fiction! And happy holidays from us here at the Cafe.

    Friday, December 4: “WereTeddy” by Dianne Williams
    Wednesday, December 9: “What Kind of Mother” by Emily Mosher
    Friday, December 18: “The Smell of Christmas” by Eliza Jaquays
    Wednesday, December 23: “The Fruit Cake Invasion” by Sara Lundberg
    Monday, December 28: “The Gift of Flesh” by Jack Campbell, Jr

  • The Lackluster Finish

    I was really hoping to be able to make a sizeable dent in the bonus round this year.  That’s what I call any amount of words over 50,000.  I’ve never been able to write more than a few hundred words in the bonus round, which is a bit disappointing to me.  Heck, I even looked at a calendar, and picked my “from the trenches” day specifically so I could nab the 30th and talk about the bonus round.

    Come the end of the month, and it turns out I had to “cheat” and go rebel just to get anywhere close to finishing the 50k, let alone writing inside of the bonus round.

    Life.  What can you do?

    Maybe next year.

  • Two Stories, Two Styles

    I finished two short stories this month! That’s a lot for me. I tried different approaches for both of them because 1) I am attempting to find my voice as a writer and 2) I am like a writing shark. If I stop, I just don’t start again. Also I eat suits of armor.

    The first story, I used a technique I learned in a creative writing course in college and broke down a story by Jhumpa Lahiri into its most basic components (i.e. PROTAGONIST with PHYSICAL PROBLEM does THING) and then imposed my own plot and characters on the bare skeleton of the original story. Her story involved a refugee woman living in a poor neighborhood in India. Mine involved a washed up opera singer in a traveling theatre group in a low-tech future where a coronal mass ejection broke the US electrical grid and so no one has movies or TV and have to watch live performances of Batman. I had a lot of fun and came up with some good lines, but the ending felt forced and the story felt rambling.

    The second story sprouted out of a dream. I had a dream once that my cat got a job distributing salt and pepper packets to fast food chains. But he was just a cat, so he called me in a panic and I had to go help him. (He was just a cat, after all). This story turned out to be my favorite of the two, and I feel like it was more authentically my voice and style. But it did something that I didn’t expect. It went and wrote itself and the end product wasn’t at all funny like the original concept I’d started with. In fact it was really effing sad. I think it’s the saddest most wretched thing I’ve ever written, but I really like it.

    In both cases I injected something foreign into my writing (a dream, or a story framework). I feel like it helped my writing and both were useful exercises.

  • Making Up for Lost Time

    You may have noticed something missing last week. Around 10am I had a “CRAP I was supposed to write a blog post!” moment but was at work and did not have time to sit down and do it. So I told myself that evening I would go in and write it. Then it was Wednesday and I realized “CRAP. I forgot.”

    That was a pretty good summary of my last week. Potentially even the entirety of the month. Though I suppose it isn’t so much that I’ve been forgetting to write but rather that I’ve been lacking motivation. I have sat down every day and poured words onto the page. Some days it’s been close to 3k, other days it’s closer to 100 words. Per NaNo’s tracker my average daily word count is hovering around 1550. If I excluded the skewed data, my actual daily average would likely be closer to 1400. Which is really great!

    It’s also not a pace that I can even remotely keep up with throughout the rest of the year. I think my biggest takeaway from this month is that I’m fine tuning what does and does not work for me. Waking up early? Totally doable. Writing on my lunch break? Manageable most days, but sometimes I need to run errands. Coming out of NaNo, I want to make time to write every day, either in the morning or on my lunch break. I want to aim for 500-1000 words daily, but I don’t want to force myself. I want to write quality words not just quantity.

    I love NaNo and everything it’s done for me. But I hate that I’ve written over 37000 words in 23 days and my data is still telling me that I’m behind. I keep thinking that maybe I’ve outgrown NaNo, but I keep going back to it. I like the deadline that holds me accountable. I NEED the deadline to hold me accountable. I love the community. I enjoy going out to spend time with friends. Drinking Starbucks twice a week? Definitely another bonus. But I have an awesome writer’s group that was formed out of NaNo.

    And we’ve got each other’s backs.

    (Also, Amelia kissed a girl… and she liked it.)

  • NaNo Rebellion

    I didn’t mean to end up as a rebel this year.  It just kinda… happened.  My first novel concept completely fell through, none of my backup ideas had enough substance to become a novel, and even my idea to write a mini-anthology of related short stories fell through.  I had to do something.

    So I ended up going back to one of my old NaNo projects.  The 2013 one, specifically.  Not a great year for my health, but it was my first year as ML, and the theme was that fantastic 8-bit setup.  I digress.  I’ve long felt it’s my most salvageable out of all of my manuscripts, and I’ve always meant to come back to it.  With nothing else to lose… here I am.

    (more…)

  • A little lost. A little found.

    Well, it’s day 20. Today we should all be crossing 33,300 words. I am not there and I won’t be for a while.

    Part of that is being hit by this virus that’s taken out half the writing group now. For three days last weekend I struggled to reach even 100 words a day. It took out some of the days that are traditionally my best catch-up days. And I fell further behind.

    Part of it is the week two blues, which have persisted into week three for me. The week two blues come with the absolute, gut wrenching belief that you have gone in the wrong direction. Somewhere along the way the plot you were writing stopped being the plot you were planning. You’re lost, you’ve ruined the novel, and nothing will ever be right again.

    In my non-writing time I travel to a lot of estate auctions in small towns around the area. I take an old-school approach to get to these. I print out directions from a map site and use them to get me close enough for the auction companies to draw me in with signs they put up. It’s nerve wracking following some back road I’ve never traveled on to some small town I’ve never visited and hoping to find a house or building that I’ve never set eyes on. I have to trust that the directions won’t lead me astray. And 99% of the time they get me there.

    But there’s often a point as I’m driving that I’m convinced I’m lost. That point where my directions say to follow this road for 5 miles, even though the road has forked and I’m not sure I took the right fork, and I’m way outside of town now, and did I just pass the county line? But I keep driving. Sometimes I keep driving because that’s the only choice and there’s nowhere to turn around just now. I keep driving because that’s the only way to find out if I’m lost. I drive a little further, and a little further, and eventually I’m there. With little auction signs to light my way.

    That’s something like noveling. I’m in that point in the novel that every writer seems to experience. My outline just took a major hit and needs to be reworked. My twist has revealed itself a full act too early. And I’m convinced that everything I’ve ever written is awful, even though I know this is categorically false. There are at least a few bits I like. Buried in there. Somewhere.

    The only way to know for sure whether or not I’ve broken the novel is to keep writing for a bit. It should come together in the next 10,000 words. Sometime soon I’ll have an epiphany to fix the third act. My character will find new and interesting ways to ruin her life. I just have to convince myself to keep writing so that we can find out. One word at a time. Until I can see the signs pointing me home.

  • NaNoWriMo, Week Three: Better/Worse

    It could be going better.

    By the end of today, wrimos ought to be at 30,000 words — more than halfway to the target word count. This is one of the ways in which I think NaNo is an imperfect system for new writers learning the trick of the novel.

    By NaNo standards, you’re more than halfway done. If you’re trying to complete the novel in 50,000 (which, your mileage may vary) you’ve finally zoomed out of the saggy middle, which is one of the things that slows us down in week two.

    But most novels come in between 60,000 and 90,000 words, depending on the genre and the writer. I read somewhere that Brian Sanderson’s Elantris is around 200,000 words while Douglas Adams’ Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is just around 46,0001. So it’s not as though there’s a hard a fast rule. But at the same time, it can be hard to break out of the NaNo-set guidelines and learn better methods for structuring and putting together a novel. I think it’s also one of the reasons that a lot of people outgrow NaNo once they start writing outside of the confines of November.2

    This is a lot of navel-gazing about the length and nature of novels, and how the middle always drags, and where I’m aiming is this: I’m still at the plodding, sagging middle of the novel. Despite being firm into week three (my spirits should be rising!), I’m still living week two. I’m around 6,000 – 7,000 words behind par. And while things are slowly coming together in the novel, I’m worried I won’t meet my goal of winning again after several years of depression- and fatigue-induced failure, thus regaining the passion I had for writing before my life suddenly got Very Adult on me back in 2012.

    Hm.

    I didn’t realize it until I wrote it, but yep. That’s sort of the symbolic trophy at play here — the idea that having made real progress in many others parts of my life (most, I’d hazard to say), that all that’s left is to be at the place again where I was gleefully focused on my fiction and eagerly starting to reach for more.

    It could be going worse.

    I ran into a problem with the middle of my novel. At first it was an issue with my main character being passive. I struck out a scene, reworked it, and seemed to have a solid footing. I had a red herring, even — I hadn’t noticed it until that moment!

    But then I realized the real issue with the middle: there wasn’t anything to put there. I had an outline, but no plan to get from “Nora chooses to follow her mentor” to “the climax starts.” This isn’t Rocky — a training montage wasn’t going to fit the emotional tone of the novel. I didn’t have enough supporting characters or any substantial subplots to move through the middle. All the same, I’m determined to put real effort into this project and to win this year, so I forced my way through it bit by bit.

    And then, finally, I had That Moment when it comes together. The problem wasn’t a lack of supporting characters — I have several, actually. It’s just that I wasn’t thinking of them as functional to the story. They each had a role in getting Nora to the point where she’s chosen to follow through with Defeating the Antagonist even though she really doesn’t have the skill to do so. I had a whole cast in this novel. They just needed to be given roles to move the story.

    So now that I have all of the blocks to build the bridge from Act II to Act IV in the outline (according to an outlining method Christie taught us that is quite excellent), I have to go work on my third version of the outline to flesh out those roles. To figure out how all of these supporting characters fit in the new roles I’ve given them. Once I know how they work together (and, of course, also against each other) to meet the goals of the plot, I think the middle will probably move a lot faster.

    1. I’ve never read any Sanderson, even though I love his podcast work, but Adams is one of my favorite authors. So I can only personally vouch for the latter, and yeah. Hitch Hiker’s Guide is a short book.

    2. Outgrowing NaNoWriMo is like outgrowing a really great friendship — it sucks. This is my tenth year, but I don’t need it the way I used to. What I really needed, more than the impetus, was the culture of writers working toward common goal. As our writers’ group has evolved to be that year-round, NaNoWriMo has become less valuable to me. It’s… not a very good feeling.

  • And Life Goes On

    This has not been a good month for me.  Which is very frustrating, because normally this is my favorite time of year.  I want to start over, but I can’t.  Neither life nor the universe work that way.  I’m going to have to wait an entire year to get another shot at it.  It’s frustrating, to say the least.

    The original concept for my novel involved my MC being forced to learn about the world of magic upon the sudden death/murder(?) of his uncle.  This lasted for about 18 hours.  That night, I received news that my aunt had passed away suddenly.  She went from flu-like symptoms, to hospitalization, to terminal, all within the span of about 48 hours.  It’s very hard to write a novel with death as a major plot point when you suddenly find yourself in a similar situation.

    It had been over 15 years since the last time a member of my immediate family passed away.  I knew it was going to happen eventually, of course, but… well, none of us expected Death to skip over my remaining grandparent or my constantly frail uncle when it did.  Life is funny that way, I suppose.  And while I did not lose a grandma, or a mother, or a wife, as did others in the family… well, it doesn’t really hurt any less.  I have to remind myself of that.

    Factor in my already precarious mental health, an abnormal sleep schedule, and the myriad physical illnesses from which I have not been able to fully recover, and… well, it seems the common theme of these past few weeks has been dropping the ball.  Granted, I am undoubtedly the harshest critic of myself right now– I’ve spent the past few weeks either vaguebooking or outright denying what has happened, and you all have still been nothing but supportive.  However, no acts of kindness or displays of empathy can change the undeniable fact that the ball is on the ground.  The word count ball, the social activity ball, the responsible adult ball, the simple chores ball, and countless others… dropped or falling.

    I am not okay.  But… I will be.  With luck, sometime within the next two weeks.  But if not… well, so be it.

    Life goes on.

    So will I.

  • Week 2: Down with the Sickness

    For the last week, I have had about the worst cold of my life. I’ve worked through sickness before. The flu, colds, and other ailments are generally mild inconveniences for me. But this illness is the most soul-sucking, lung hacking respiratory ailment that I’ve ever had.

    I’m tired, because I can’t sleep. I spend all night coughing and twisting, trying, in vain, to find a position that doesn’t make me feel like I can’t breathe. All in all, it has been a bad week.  The coughing has been distracting. The exhaustion has suppressed any creative drive that I have.

    Now, with the halfway party only a few hours away, I am nowhere near halfway through my novel. What I do have is pretty good, although there is a long way to go. I am about to launch in to a point of the novel where I really don’t have much of an idea about what is going to happen. This is nothing new for me. I don’t really plan novels. I just have a general idea about what is going to happen.

    Up until this point, the book has taken place at the old run-down motel that my protagonist manages. Much to my surprise, he just got fired, and the book is pushing off towards parts unknown. I really didn’t plan for this, and it is probably going to involve some research on the fly, and a lot of editing for continuity later. Still, that is part of the game, and I am excited to see where the book leads.

    In the meantime, there has to be some way to get rid of the plague. NyQuil and DayQuil have made valiant efforts, but really haven’t taken the edge off of the sickness. Mucinex has called in reinforcements, but still, we seem to be losing the battle. Every day, I get a little more behind. Hopefully, the sickness will leave me soon, and my ability to work will return.

    Current word count: 13,000

  • The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Written

    I haven’t participated in NaNoWriMo since 2012, but I’m still reaping the writing rewards of that one year.

    My fiction before that NaNoWriMo had been mostly successful. All of my plays were awarded staged readings and most of my short stories got published. Of course, I had only written two plays and three short stories over the course of 11 years. Five things total. I was a 29 year old woman who had wanted to write fiction all my life, but I just didn’t do it.

    It would have been embarrassing to turn out something from my own imagination that was imperfect and less than brilliant. And so I didn’t write fiction. I wrote news articles, academic papers, and grant proposals successfully. After all I could write, but those weren’t pieces of my Very Own Personal imagination on display, so I felt less exposed.

    In 2012 I could see my 30th birthday approaching and I had always thought that I would have finished my first novel before I was 30. Still just the two plays and three short stories. So I jumped on the NaNoWriMo bandwagon.

    Writing for a word count taught me to just keep going. My novel was wretched. I did have a couple of moments of brilliant extemporizing that were exhilarating, especially so since I am an avid plotter and in no way shape or form a seat-of-your-pants writer. But mostly it was horrible.

    I found it freeing to have written something horrible. Whatever I wrote next couldn’t possibly be the worst thing I’ve ever written. Nope. That was my NaNo Novel. Crown taken.

    So, I have learned to keep going through painful stories, through half formed ideas, bad plots, weak characters, etc. I have decided that I can learn nothing from stories I don’t write. And so, whenever I can make time for my fiction hobby, I write. I’m getting better, too.