The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: 2012

  • The last year or so…

    Hello everyone! What a great way to make an introduction to this blog, by explaining how my writing has changed over the past year.

    The first and most recent change is I’m writing here now. Yay! I’m looking forward to sharing this space with some of the great people I’ve gotten to know over the past several months.

    The biggest thing that happened to my writing life was participating in National Novel Writing Month for the first time. And I totally kicked its ass. I don’t know if what I wrote is any good, but I know that before November, I wasn’t sure I had it in me to write fifty-thousand words in a semi-coherent structure with a beginning, middle, and end. Now that I can mark “Write a novel” off my bucket list, I have a lot more confidence in my writing than I did before.

    This year I’ve written a lot more than I have in the past couple years combined. Thanks to good friends, I’ve been motivated to take some of the crazy ideas bumping around and to put actual pen to actual paper and get some of them written down. Most didn’t pan out to anything more than interesting diversions, but just the process of regularly writing again has given me a focus that I sorely missed having in my life.

    I started out the year by beginning a journal full of whining and angst, and ended the year making the planet die a slow and suffocating alien death. I call that progress.

    Hopefully this time next year, I’ll have a lot more to say about how my writing has changed and improved. The biggest and best change this year though is that for the first time in a long time, I feel like I can actually call myself a writer. And that’s pretty cool.

  • 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…)

  • 2012 Year in Review (Week Ending Jan. 5)

    2012This week, we celebrate the end of one year and the start of the next. And with it, we here at the Confabulator Cafe also celebrate our first anniversary. The Cafe officially opened on January 1, 2012. Two days later, the first of our posts was published — and we haven’t looked back since.

    Until now. This week we’re asking our writers to discuss their favorite post (or posts) of 2012, whether their own or someone else’s. We may even have some who pick several in a theme.

    For those who have been reading with us since the beginning, we hope this week will remind you of some of your favorites. For those who are just finding the cafe, we hope you discover some gems in our archives.

    Until Next Week,

    The Cafe Management