The Confabulator Cafe

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  • The Builders

    I wish I’d never seen the things.

    I wish I’d never gotten into this business.

    Now it’s too late.

     

    “You ready for this?” Martin said. (I won’t use any last names. I can’t bring myself to rat out my friends.) He had his hand on the doorknob and he looked dead serious. “Once you go through, there’s not turning back. You can’t unsee this, or unknow it, either.”

    What did I know? He hadn’t told me anything yet. Foolish, I nodded.

    We went through the heavy oak door and into a room that reminded me of a Viking mead hall. Candlelit chandeliers hung from bare rafters and there was only one table. Our footsteps echoed off the stone floor. The hall extended in either direction so far that it disappeared into darkness.

    Around the table were ten men, all looking like they’d come right off the construction site, same as me. Martin clapped his hand on my shoulder as we reached the table.

    “Guys, this is Tom. The one I told you about.” (more…)

  • Quote Collector

    I have collected quotes for most of my life. I used to memorize them: lines from movies I watched over and over again as a child until I could quote the whole movie. Later, I would memorize lines from my favorite books that I read over and over. I still can quote a few lines from the Ian Malcolm rants in the book Jurassic Park.

    Then I started writing them down. I still have some of those slips of paper in various files and folders in my filing cabinet. At one point, I started an electronic file for favorite quotes. But I’ve switched computers and harddrives since then, so much of my collection has been lost over the years.

    I’ve since started storing that stuff online: a place where things don’t get lost as easily (only buried). When I find a quote in a book that I really like, I use Goodreads to keep track of it. They have a huge database with quotes from every book you can imagine, and you can also add your own if you don’t find the particular one you like.

    I’ve also started collecting quotations on my own blog: Prospective Writer quotes page. When I find something memorable, whether from a movie, famous person, or friend, I record it there. I also encourage people to add their favorite quotes in the comments, but nobody has taken me up on that as of yet. I’d encourage you to visit my website and do so!

    I collect quotes that are anything that I find amusing, profound, inspirational, or just plain beautiful in their construction. So many things in life are experiences we all share, and when someone can perfectly capture that in a few lines, I like collect it so I can go back and relate to it again sometime.

    As a writer, I appreciate the crafting of a clever sentence, the capturing of a profound thought, and being reminded of life’s simple truths, so I am compelled to collect these gems as a dragon would hoard a treasure. And as a dragon does, I pull out these gems to admire them often.

    I can only hope that throughout my writing career, maybe I can produce a few of these gems, myself, and end up in someone’s collection somewhere.

  • The Head Bumps of Writing

    When I started writing my great non-nationalistic novel, tentatively titled “There Was No King,” I knew my characters and plot were loosely based on the biblical book of Judges. I knew the setting was the great post-nation-state Kansouri, one of the many regional confederations created after these United States were united no more. I knew the church would explode at some point. However, I did not know that Delia, one of the main characters, would be a phrenologist.

    But as I started on that rough draft, back in 2010, Delia decided on her own career. Somehow, in that future world, after all the institutions that preserve actual scientific knowledge disintegrated, my rational but passionate betraying minx became a student of head bumps, a pseudoscientist-psychologist-small business owner. I wanted her to be a border guard! Or maybe a courier for underground networks, or a low-level government worker, or a hacker like her boyfriend. Certainly not a phrenologist. But she decided, and all my attempts to coerce her into another career failed.

    Since I didn't know much about what she did, I had to investigate her job and education. And I found out a few interesting things. Phrenology wasn't really about the head bumps, but a theory that sections (organs) of the brain influenced different character traits; short of breaking open the skull, there wasn't any other way to figure out the size of those “organs” than feeling the bumps on the skull. It wasn't ever really accepted by the scientific establishment. It contributed a lot to racist pseudoscience and early criminology (“the criminal type” kinds of BS), but it also prefigured developments in neuroscience that recognized different parts of the brain did, in fact, serve different functions. There are also still adherents of phrenology out there somewhere in the world. Thank you, internet.

    Now, Delia won't have to depend on feeling the skull–she can do a quick mini-MRI of the future on her clients and offer them a detailed read-out. Of course, in the future, phrenology is more the province of prospective mothers-in-law than racist scientists. But Delia, like her predecessors in the 19th century, will practice her art with great ceremony and drama. She will offer counseling to understand the results. She will struggle with whether to practice adaptive phrenology, the altering people's brain architecture to change their personality. She will be a psuedo-scientist with the best of them, and she will think about the differences between popular science, fake science, and “real” science a lot. I look forward to learning more about this profession along with her!

  • Letting It Flow Naturally

    As with most things, I don’t think a lot about the mechanics of my writing — I just sort of put words down and figure out how it works later. This has lead me to abandon projects because holy shit, it needs wa~y too much mechanic work.

    By default for many many moons I wrote in what I sort of think of as the standard point-of-view: third person past tense. (I know there’s more than one type of third person, but go ask one of the English majors if you want more of that nonsense.) It came naturally, and I ran with it.

    Eventually, that changed.
    (more…)

  • Going to See the Godmother

    I needed to see the Godmother. The Godmother would fix everything. She would make it all stop hurting. She would make him love me.

    The Godmother grants wishes to those with worthy causes. And what could be a more worthy cause than a broken heart?

    I’d heard about her through one of my friends whose cousin’s boyfriend’s sister had gone to see her. I didn’t know what the cost would be. I didn’t particularly care. All I knew was that I wanted results. I needed results. Desperately. And the Godmother promised guaranteed results. (more…)

  • Ignoring Thunderdome

    I honestly spend very little time thinking about the future of the publishing industry. I find the blank page intimidating enough as it is, and I don’t need additional reasons to feel insecure about what I’m doing.

    I try to avoid news about who is merging with whom or what Mrs. Megapublisher’s stance is on digital rights because I know what would happen if I ever started down that particular rabbit hole. My eyes would be opened to a larger reality that would do nothing to instill confidence in my aspirations. In turn, I would feel the need to exhaustively search for as much positive news as I could, stories about how it’s not nearly as difficult to break in as I had feared.

    (For the record, I equate the difficulty of reaching and maintaining success in publishing somewhere on the order of surviving Thunderdome.)

    (more…)

  • Ten Minutes until the End of the World

    In ten minutes, the world was going to end. Henry watched the news, barely believing it was actually happening. If reports hadn’t been on every channel, every affiliate turned into the national news, he might have thought it was all a hoax. But unless it was the most elaborate hoax in human history, this was real. The Earth was doomed. This was The End. Armageddon. Ragnarok.

    Call it whatever, it didn’t change the fact that Henry Irvine, resident of 127 BB Lame, Apartment 16, had less then ten minutes to live. He pressed the channel buttons on the remote, scrolling through nearly identical pictures. Every time the screen flickered, it showed a stunned newscaster trying to make sense of the unthinkable, while in the lower right corner a digital timer ticked down. The faces changed, but the countdown stayed the same.

    Nine minutes. Henry got up and took a look outside. Yep, definitely looked like Doomsday. Outside, people were running around, screaming, crying, flailing about like children in a playground. He couldn’t quite explain his disgust with it all. “C’mon, at least have some dignity,” he muttered. His focuses changed, and his own reflection mouthed the same to him. He hadn’t shaved in two weeks. His eyes were baggy from alternating between being unable to sleep and being unable to wake up. His hair was a jumble of untamed curls. His last shower had been… when? (more…)

  • In Search Of…

    Art by Sean Phillips from surebeatsworking.blogspot.com
    Art by Sean Phillips from surebeatsworking.blogspot.com

    Investigations are part and parcel of being a creative person especially a fiction writer. Something triggers a thought and that leads to one thing, which leads to another and likely to another.

    But what’s the trigger? A piece of conversation. A throwaway line of dialogue in a film. A song lyric. The way a sunbeam falls across a picture in the living room. The way a bird is perched in a tree. The snake that’s ready to steal the bird’s eggs.

    Any of these can lead me down an investigatory path.

    Like Sara, I love to learn and keep on learning. Like her I have learned to read and appreciate reading for information. I can’t read as much non-fiction as she does (One a month? That’s waaaay beyond me.) but I do read a couple of magazines that get delivered to the house, usually from cover to cover. I’m reading more fiction than ever before, though, and reading a wider range of genres (including literary fiction) more than ever before, too. (more…)

  • Voices

    Government and scientific writing is usually done in this really bizarre institutional voice. You know the one I mean; you’ve read it and struggled with it, even if you’ve never deliberately tried to write it. It’s a weird, hyper-formalized, passive-verbed, long-winded writing style that you discovered had invaded your own writing when you were just starting out. You were probably praised for it, too— told it was “good English.”

    Actually, it’s terrible English. Institutional Voice, aka Bureaucratese, avoids sentence subjects. All verbs are rendered in the passive. “It was discovered that…” “The decision was made that…” “The result was…” “The Department’s investigation demonstrated…” “The data show…”

    Removing the subject was supposed to discourage egotistical self-aggrandizement; the text would be the authority, not any particular author. What really happened is that removing the human subject removed any sense of humanity, that yes, there is a caring, feeling person behind the keyboard. Or, as sometimes happens, that there is a person behind the keyboard who doesn’t care, or in fact glories in your misery. Institutional voice functions to put distance between author and reader. The reader cannot judge the author’s intentions or morals, and the author can say the most horrible things without once considering his audience. [0]

    Part of our journey as writers is discovering our own authentic voices. Like glitter, Institutional Voice is pervasive, and as soon as you think you’ve removed the last of it from your writing, you’ll find it cropping up in the most bizarre and unexpected places. We spent our lives learning, “This is the Voice of Authority, this is the Voice of Somebody Who Knows What They’re Talking About,” and we’ll slip into it in order to disguise our own uncertainties about our prose.

    It sounds easy to stay away from Institutional Voice. “Just write the same way you speak!” they’ll tell you [1]. There’s two problems with that approach. First, have you ever read the transcript of a live interview? People speak in sentence fragments and run-ons and run-on sentence fragments all the time. And second, once you’ve been writing this crap for so long, you’ll start speaking that way, too.

    [0] “The contents of Boxcar 113 will be disposed of according to the standard procedures.” To be spoken in a funny German accent, because, hey, we’re all about stereotyping and the glory of Godwin in this blog.
    [1] “They” lie.

  • Awakening Without a Dream

    Dreams slip from my mind upon waking like dry sand through my fingers, leaving only the memory that they had been there. I wake with the memory that my sleep was filled with fascinating dreams but I have never been able to recall the details. Any attempts I make only succeed to chase them further from my mind. To this date, I can only vividly recall two dreams and both of them nightmares from my childhood. Dreams that left me screaming as I woke, too terrified to sleep.

    I have woken knowing I have dreamed that dream before. Yet still I have no recollection of what the dream itself was. My mind lives a dual life in my sleep, one that I will never recall.

    I’m slowly learning to accept this, though I find that I frequently will attempt to force myself back into sleep in hopes of continuing the dream I was having. Because even though I do not know what it was that I dreamed, I remember that I enjoyed it. That I wanted to experience it again. Perhaps I live in hopes that if I manage to complete the dream, that will be the one that I remember upon waking. (more…)