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  • Everything Changes

    She looked out at the building from the backseat and scowled. “It didn’t look like this last year.”

    Her husband killed the engine in their little car. Without the mechanical whining the vehicle, the lack of life in the outside neighborhood seemed that much more stark. “It looks fine. We’ll only be here for a few minutes.”

    Abby looked up and down the street at the neighborhood surrounding. The homes were all in disrepair – but it had been that way during college college, hadn’t it? The upstairs apartment they’d rented through her undergrad had always been falling apart. At the time it had seemed charming. They’d made do with what they had.

    It was different, though. Having the baby made it different.

    “It’s a tradition, Abby.”

    She swallowed her uneasiness. “Sure. Of course.” She unbuckled Maisy while Bart retrieved the camera and tripod from the car.

    The first Valentine’s Day they had taken this photo – their first Valentine’s Day, four years ago – it had been a selfie against the cement wall. A whim, nothing more. Someone had spray-painted hearts on the smooth surface, all different shapes and sizes to create the perfect romantic backdrop. When they eventually married, Abby featured it on their save-the-date card.

    When they were still together the next year, they did it again. That year Bart had the tripod and remote. The next year, the picture had announced her pregnancy. Abby supposed, if she looked back, she remembered the other graffiti too near the hearts that second year. The cracks in the wall when she was pregnant with Maisy. Abby had loved the neighborhood dearly, but the crumbling houses had always had feeling paint, it had always lacked the life and verve she’d invented in her nostalgia.

    She pulled her baby close to her chest, carefully adjusting the little flowered headband covering Maisy’s downy hair. By the time she climbed out of the car Bart was already setting up his tripod, muttering to himself.

    “Go on, hon – I need to frame the shot.”

    She did so.

    Maisy nestled her little head against Abby’s chest, rooting for the breast and yawning. They’d tried to plan the picture around her nap time, but the car always lulled her right to sleep.

    “Hey, baby – it’s time to take your picture.” She tickled the baby’s cheeks and nose, smiling as Maisy giggled and stretched her whole body in Abby’s arms. Bart joined them, the remote trigger nestled against his palm. He ruffled Maisy’s hair. For a moment, it was calm.

    Not far enough in the distance, a dog began to yap and growl – quickly joined by another. Abby startled and looked up at the camera, then down at the baby. “I don’t think this was a good idea,” she said quietly.

    He kissed her forehead and squeezed her around the waist. “Don’t worry. In the photo it’ll all look perfect.”

  • A Time to Love

    I.

    Valentine’s Day is always the same problem for Cupid.

    “Why do you always have to work on Valentine’s Day?” Mrs. Cupid asks.

    Cupid liked to trace it back to Santa Clause. For a long time, people were content to celebrate their love and devotion on Valentine’s Day without a mascot. They celebrated their love every day and Cupid only needed to be present for a few special events throughout a person’s life. But then that fat old man got his own holiday and everyone started to think about why Valentine’s Day didn’t have a human personification of its own. And now they expected him to work every single Valentine’s Day. Visiting every couple. For eternity.

    But this isn’t what she’s asking and he knows it.

    (more…)

  • Reservations

    Fred slung his too-heavy bag off his shoulders, dropping into the rolling chair behind his uncle’s cherry stained desk. When his mom told him his uncle needed him to help out for a few hours a night leading up to Valentine’s Day, he’d imagined something more glorious than answering the phones. At the very least, he imagined a task that would let him work on his assignments that were piling up by the day.

    Still, as long as his uncle was willing to slip him a crisp Benjamin at the end of each night, he supposed it was worth giving up his free time. His elbow smacked painfully onto the desk when the phone shrieked to life. He pressed the down arrow on the volume even as he picked up the phone. Now that he was here, there was no need to have the volume up loudly enough to be heard through the clattering din of the kitchen.

    “Thank you for calling Rizzolini’s, this is Federico. How may I assist you?” His ear still smarted from the twisting his uncle gave it the first time he was caught answering the phone as Fred. Such an American name would never convince customers they were an authentic Italian restaurant. He was to go by the name his father put on his birth certificate—or else. (more…)

  • I’m Not Romeo

    I didn’t leave the chocolates for Juliet. I didn’t leave any of it. I’m not the type. Ask any girl I have ever dated, and they will all tell you the same thing. I’m cold. I’m unromantic. I don’t consider other people’s feelings. I’m an asshole.

    I dated Juliet out of spite, just to get a rise out of Mitchell. The poor guy never would have talked to her anyway. It was ridiculous, pathetic even. He tip-toed up to her dorm room like some sort of cartoon spy and left all sorts of sentimental crap. (more…)

  • And We’re Back! (February Stories at the Confabulator Cafe)

    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

  • The Cat Came Back

    My cell phone rang at two minutes of four in the morning. I swiped my thumb across the green ‘answer’ button, put the phone to my ear and grunted.

    “Meow?” came the reply. It was my cat.

    “Waffles?” I cleared my throat and sat up. I hadn’t heard from my cat in two months.

    “Meow.” She sounded sad and exhausted and I could guess why. She’d gotten herself a job and apparently she was—predictably—in over her head. (more…)

  • Leveling up

    I’m an eight-for-eight Nanowrimo winner. About every other year I go in with no idea, no inspiration, no outline. This was one of those years. All I had was a mildly unpleasant character and the LKFWriters’ Plot Twist Box of DOOOOOOOOOM! [0] Any time I got stuck or bored I’d draw another card.

    Every day I’d write my 1700 words and then not think about it for another 22.5 hours.

    I “won” on Saturday the 29th, killed off my character [1], validated my word count and stuck my notebook in a box, never again to see the light of day.

    Sunday, with time and little to do [2], I opened my calendar of writing prompts and 15 minutes later I had written a new story. It was short, less than 500 words, and unpolished, but it had all its fingers and toes. Beginning, middle, end, protagonist, setting, conflict, resolution.

    Huh. That’s never happened before [3].

    See, I’m good at thinking up characters and situations [4], but plots and structure are always hard. I can never think of an interesting antagonist, conflict, or response. But there it was, on the page, easy peasy.

    Yesterday I did it again. I’ll try again tonight. I wonder how long I can maintain the streak?

    This year’s Nanowrimo wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t all that fun, and it wasn’t exactly a swirling maelstrom of creative ecstasy and agony, but I’m pretty sure I leveled up my game.

    [0] AKA the Dare Box.
    [1] Trampled to death in a Zombie Walk/Fun Run populated by women he’d dated, then insulted on his blog.
    [2] All the people I’d normally hang out with on a Sunday afternoon were frantically pounding out their own last few thousand words.
    [3] No. Seriously. It hasn’t.
    [4] Bartender in an interdimensional speakeasy! City worker who maintains the municipal feng shui! Ten-year-old and her talking teddy bear in a Munchausian milieu!

  • NaNoWriMo Wrap-up: About the letters

    Every year during November, the Cafe comes alive again while we talk about our experiences as we write our novels for National Novel Writing Month. I decided to take a different spin on the “from the trenches” posts as we call them.  We write them the day they go live without another pair of eyes to edit them for us, in the heat of however we happen to feel about our novels at the time. Thus the “from the trenches” designation.

    I decided to write my posts using an extended metaphor of writing being a war zone and NaNo being my tour of duty. That is sometimes what it feels like to a “NaNo Veteran” (those of us who have done NaNo before call ourselves). I was able to project my thoughts and feelings about the writing, the struggle, the excitement, my duties as ML (and the loss of our family dog) to fit the metaphor.

    I did it to give myself an outlet for creativity in a month that sometimes feels like a slog. Instead of dreading my Cafe posts, complaining about how I was struggling with the writing or I was tired and my diet had gone off track completely, I looked forward to how I could turn my usual complaints about NaNo into something creative.

    Please note: I meant no disrespect or offense by this comparison. I do not mean to belittle any actual veterans or imply that writing a novel is anywhere near as important as those in the military serving our country. Or that I have any actual combat or veteran experience. It was simply meant to be a metaphor.

    Thanks for reading. I hope you had a pleasant NaNoWriMo experience and that maybe my metaphor was something you could relate to.

     

  • Post-NaNoWriMo: The End is the Beginning

    thumbI did it. I conquered NaNoWriMo with a few days to spare, aided in part by vacation and in part by a sickness that kept me home from my day job for two half days and one full day. The benefit of writing as an occupation (or preoccupation) is that you can do it even when you are sick. There are many writers who talk about writing every day. Stephen King famously writes every day (although I call bullshit on how strict he claims to be about it). Other writers have said every day except for Christmas. There is a range of scribe diets out there, but it is possible to write well when you are ill. You are sitting down. You can take breaks when needed, and you don’t have to worry about getting anyone sick.

    Aided by medication and sheer willpower, I finished my novel, writing between four and five thousand words each day towards the end. I am happy with the first draft, overall. It clocked in at right around 54,000 words. It’s more the skeleton for the book than the book itself. I started out as a screenwriter. I tend to be a bit too sparse on description and sensory experience. I go back during the rewrites and flesh all of that out. The final book will probably be closer to 70,000 words, which is a good length.

    I like where the story went. It took some turns that I didn’t really expect, and there is a lot of work to do to clean up that mess and make it all work together. I’m not happy with the way I used present tense, and I changed a character’s gender about a third of the way in, which will be messy. Not to mention, this is a Lovecraftian novel, and the guy didn’t exactly pick common names for his deities. I can’t wait to see what a travesty I made of some of those names.

    That being said, December will not be a time to revise this book. I like to leave some distance between the first draft and my revisions. It helps me to see the book from a more neutral place and not fill in gaps automatically. I have several short stories that I would like to revise, as well as a novel and a novella from previous NaNoWriMos.

    The hardest part about NaNoWriMo, I think, isn’t November, but December. In November, you power through the draft by thinking that December 1st is just around the corner. Then you get to December and lose some of that steam. That’s fine. It is bound to happen, but I think the goal should be to lose less of that steam every year and carry that momentum forward in to a writing habit that will foster your creative productivity until next November. Easier said than done, but I am going to give it a shot.

    There will be short stories to write, and I have half a novel from a previous half-NaNo. Then, there will be revisions. Endless, tedious revisions that will remind me that the real work of writing isn’t getting the words on the page, but getting them to make sense to anyone else.

    Today, however, I can bask in the bliss of victory, knowing that I accomplished a goal, and that I have once again earned the right to be called an author. With that, I wave goodbye to Very Dangerous People, with the promise that I will return to it again, when I reach another end that demands another beginning.

  • Happy Thanksgiving

    Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

    There are three days left of Nano. I have 12.5k words to write, so about 4k a day. I haven’t done anything in the past two days thanks to work and general laziness. But with November ending with a weekend, I think I can get it done. And I really really want to.

    I don’t think I’ve talked about my novel too much here, so I might as well now. It’s titled “Alexander Hayes vs. The Seven Deadly Sins.” It started as an idea of a series of short stories about a cowboy preacher fighting evil. You know, “Alexander Hayes vs. The Poltergeist of Whisper Canyon,” “Alexander Hayes vs. The Obsidian Steam Tank,” etc etc. Now he fights his toughest challenge yet, as the embodiment of the Seven Deadly Sins from Catholic mythos are trying to bring about the apocalypse, and he has to protect the young girl who holds the key to it all.

    I have basically tried to think of every cool Western pulp trope and take it to eleven. There’s gunfights through a town, a train boarding, saloons and brothels, and everything else I can think of. I don’t know if it’s any good, but at least it’s fun. Which is why it’s a bit frustrating that I’m so far behind. I enjoy writing it, so damn it, what’s the deal?