The Confabulator Cafe

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  • New Year, New You? (Week of 6 January 2013)

    Winter is a time when things reset, readying themselves to be born anew when the weather warms up, and for assessing what needs to be done. And 2013 has a great deal of promise for us here at the Cafe. Several regulars have been published and are continuing to be published in the months ahead.

    But we wanted to take another look back over the past year and see if anything’s changed for us. Are we still writing in the genre of our choice? Why? Has our writing changed? If it has – why? On close inspection (or just off the top of your head) do you think you’ve changed as a writer? Grown? Gotten more or less confident?

    Why?

    Our awareness as writers has shifted, certainly, and it’s time to take that deeper look and see if we’re still the same as we were last Winter. Can some cycles be broken or should they be embraced?

    Pull up a chair, wrap your hands around that warm mug of tea, coffee, or cocoa, and let us regale you with our thoughts. We promise it’ll be informative.

  • Ephemera – Writing Resolutions for 2013

    Here we are, the first weekend of 2013. The Cafe has survived it’s first year, and most of us are still here. This past week we wrapped up the end of the year talking about our favorite topics. For this first Ephemera of the year, we asked the Confabulators what their resolutions as far as writing were for 2013. We all have big dreams, and lots of us reached them last year. This year, we’ll all continue to work towards even bigger ones.

    Ted Boone

    Finish NaNo 2012. REVISE NaNo 2012. Write every day. Pick a manuscript to Pitch at Backspace 2013 in NYC.

    Christie Holland

    I hate resolutions in general, but I have several that are very specific to writing for the year.  The most significant is that I will read and/or write something every day this year.  I spent too much time in 2012 sitting in front of the television when I could’ve done something better.  I also plan on editing/rewriting my 2012 NaNoWriMo novel and I want to start submitting my short stories for publication.  I’d like to say that a resolution is to get published, but seeing as how that is out of my control and is slightly terrifying, I’ll focus on baby steps.  To get published, I have to start submitting!

    Jack Campbell, Jr.

    2013 will be another tough year. I will still be working on my master’s degree. That severely cuts into writing time. However, this year has been very productive as far as short story submissions. I should have several pieces published this year. I would like to continue that run of success, as well as finish writing the first draft of Heaven’s Edge. I am also eager to edit my first novel, Kill Creek Road, but school comes first till August of 2014.

    Sara Lundberg

    I’m hopeful that 2013 is the year I learn to edit a full length manuscript. I have two novels that I wrote in 2011 that deserve attention. I haven’t decided if I want to continue to submit short stories for publication or not, or if I want to focus on novel-length works. I’d also like to take a crack at writing another novel or two this year, since I ended pretty much novel-less in 2012. It seems that 2012 was Year of the Short Story, since I wrote at least one a month over the course of the year, had one published, once accepted, and three short-listed.

    Kevin Wohler

    Practice, practice, practice! My biggest goal for 2013 is to be more consistent in my writing. I’m setting aside two nights a week (and one day on weekends) to work on my novel or short stories. I actually made a short story sale to an anthology last year, and it felt great. I’m going to try to do more in 2013.

    Jason Arnett

    I’m determined to see the novel in the hands of a publisher. I really believe that’s going to happen this year. Additionally, I’ll be sending out more and more short stories (inspired by Jack’s and Sara’s success) so that they’ll be published somewhere. I need to finish the sequel to the novel (still have 50K words to go as of this writing) and then I’m inspired to go back to another unfinished novel and work that until it’s ready. And more short stories.

    Larry Jenkins

    Write more frequently and get something accepted for publication. The two go hand in hand, but that last one is especially important. My fellow Confabulators are kicking ass in the publications department, and I’m starting to feel the pressure.

  • Backwards, Forwards

    Disclaimer: Given I’m always late on my submissions, I get to peek to see what everyone else is doing during the weekly assignments. I see that many folks are looking at all of the various assignments and weighing in on the entire body of work that is Confabulator. I, however, originally thought the question posed to us was intended to focus upon only our own postings, so that’s all I originally looked at while working up my answer. As a consequence, my musings below may seem a bit egotistical. That’s not at all the case. I get at least as much enjoyment and food for thought from my fellow contributors as I get from my own efforts.

    I like this assignment. It encouraged me to go back through the last year of Confabulator posts and revisit them, which allowed me to recognize how much insightful commentary and inventive fiction we’ve generated as a group during the last twelve months. It’s pretty damn impressive. (more…)

  • Post in Review – 2012

    I have to admit to something you might not know about me: I have a terrible memory for things I read and especially the things I write. It has to be exceptional for a detail to really stick out in my mind. Or I have to read it multiple times. So I’ve had to glance through my own posts to even remember what I’ve written.

    Of my own posts, my favorite is the character interview week from the second week of October — Everything In Its Place. It was fun to write from the point-of-view of my favorite minor characters, and to explore a post-novel scenario I hadn’t really given much thought.

    In fact, that was probably my favorite week to read. Check it out; it started October 8th with Jack’s Meeting With Mitch. We’ve discussed before how writers are sort of insular — I’ll write most of my novels while making every effort to avoid divulging concrete details. That particular assignment revealed a lot about not just what sort of writers we are, but the sort of characters we write.

    Generically, any assignment that gets into the depth of our processes and systems is fun to read. I like seeing not just how we’re all different as writers, but how we’re also the same. Even though some of the other writers tackle genres that I don’t usually read, the process that get us all to the end product isn’t so different.

    Its been a fun year, doing this with a writing family that’s supportive, fun, and talented. Here’s to another year!

  • Confabulating is a Calling

    http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2012/03/rainbow-brain-map-science-aaas.jpg
    Somewhere in there are the stories waiting to be discovered and told. Some of them are beyond me right now and that’s pretty exciting.

    It’s been a year since we launched the Confabulator Cafe. The meetings we had leading up to this launch were fun and filled with lots of writers who were interested in contributing and some others who were looking for something different from the group. It took us a while to separate the Cafe from the writer’s group but that’s finally happening thanks in part to NaNoWriMo but that’s another story for others to tell.

    Over the first year of the Cafe we’ve covered a ton of topics and done a lot of writing. By my count I’ve written well over 45,000 words for the site on everything from the politics of writing and storytelling to flash fiction to my influences and so many other things. I’ve unknowingly echoes thoughts of my fellow Confabulators and been far afield from the majority, too. I’ve learned a great deal about how I write, why I write and even when I write best.

    As a storyteller, the monthly fiction assignments have been the most fun. I missed one assignment early on, but I’ve had the most fun writing every story. Being ‘forced’ to write short/flash fiction on a monthly basis has been sometimes nerve-wracking, but it’s always paid off. I’ve always gotten something I can be proud of despite the amount of sweat that’s gone into the writing.

    (more…)

  • Sleeping Through Class

    I have a confession to make.

    I have not been a very consistent Confabulator Cafe reader.

    Because I have a life, and sometime between that and keeping up with Facebook and LOLcats posts, the Confabulator Cafe just keeps stacking up in my feed reader. I have to choose how to use my time— do I want to write for the Cafe, or do I want to read it? Pick one.

    And so, with a heavy heart and no small amount of guilt, every few months I declare blogroll bankruptcy and Mark All Read. No more Crunchy Betty. Sayonara Captain Awkward. Goodbye Unf*** Your Habitat.

    I expect things will be somewhat better from now on, though. I’ve taken up Editor Minor duties at the Cafe. Another year of Nanowrimo has reinforced bonds of friendship and resparked my interest in how other writers do their thing. I’ve reoriented my blogroll away from cute cat videos and more towards literature.

    We started this experiment a year ago. We’re still here. This exercise in group writing, which could easily have died of neglect well before the last frost date still has a dozen active participants. We still like one another, we’re each still posting pretty much every week, and we have yet to run out of things to write about. So let’s keep going and see how far this road will take us.

  • Greatest Hits of 2012

    Pencil on calendarWhen I started writing for the Confabulator Cafe in January of 2012, I didn’t know what to expect. I’d had my own website, my own blog, and I’d worked on several others as a contributing writer or editor. The Cafe, however, took me into experimental territory.

    The idea for the Cafe was born out of the Lawrence writers group, specifically Sara Lundberg (our editor-in-chief and founder). She proposed a group blog where our collective writing experience could be shared with the world at large. It seemed like a good idea, but I didn’t know if nearly a dozen people could write each week on a single topic and not come off sounding derivative or repetitive.

    I shouldn’t have worried. While we did have weeks where we seemed to be singing the same note across the board, we also had weeks where differing opinions created serious tension in the Cafe.

    (more…)

  • Playing Favorites

    Love-CoffeeTo my surprise, this was one of the most difficult posts I’ve been asked to write here at the Café. Do I pick through my own posts and choose my favorite? Do I pour through the posts of my fellow Confabulators and decide — like some awards committee — who was the funniest, the most poignant, the wisest, or the most likely to succeed in the world of publishing?

    I tried, I really did. As it is, this is terribly late because of all the false starts and endless time spent scouring past entries from each writer.

    So, we’re going to avoid the question altogether. It was a great idea, but I don’t have it in me to pick and choose.

    Instead, I want to talk about how proud I am of this group. (more…)

  • Confessions for the New Year

    The end of the year is almost upon us and typically this time of the year is reserved for reflecting back on our accomplishments from the past year and planning for what the new year will bring us. It’s a time for making resolutions to uphold for the year to come. Or at least, ones we will try to uphold. Which means I have a confession to make.

    We were asked to write about which assignment was our favorite and if anyone’s response stood out the most. When I think back on it, I realized that I’ve done a very poor job at keeping up with reading the blog. I could make excuses a mile long and a few of them might even be legitimate, but the fact of the matter is, I haven’t made the time for it. Which means there really haven’t been any responses that have stood out to me. So next year I’m going to try to do better.

    Scratch that. I’m going to make that goal starting right now. There are still days left of this year and if I put off until tomorrow what I really should have started today… well. I’m a procrastinator and tomorrow is always right around the corner. Before I know it, tomorrow will be the start of 2014 and I still won’t have read anything. And it’s not that I don’t read any of the posts, it’s that I read them so infrequently and with so little consistency that I really can’t form an opinion about one response that stood out to me more than the others. (more…)

  • What Makes us Confabulators

    When we embarked upon this experiment a year ago, I’m not sure any of us were sure exactly what we were doing, or where we were going. The Cafe has evolved a lot since then, and we continue to define what it is we do with every assignment. I’ve learned something new about myself and my writing each week, not only because I’m forced to look closely at my process for each assignment, but also by reading how my fellow writers approach their craft. I think I’ve learned as much from them as I have from myself.

    One or two specific assignments stand out in my memory, but my absolute favorite category has been Confabulation. (more…)