Playing Favorites

To 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.

A little over a year ago, a group of us sat around a table in a coffee shop and decided to embark on this crazy experiment. Some already had blogs of their own, but some had never written a single blog post before. The people who were new at it took off running. They didn’t let it scare them, and I’m constantly impressed with their posts.

Some of the posts this year have made me laugh out loud, and some have touched me with their honesty. I’ve learned about writing, editing, and life from my fellow Confabulators. No matter what the week’s question is, there’s always a diversity to the answers that covers every angle.

And let’s not forget about the short stories that have come from this little experiment. Each month, we’ve shared the same prompt to get us started, yet the variety of stories coming from each of those prompts is astounding. Between us, no genre has been forgotten. No style has been ignored. The Confabulators surprise me every month with the risks they’ve been willing to take in their storytelling and the creativity they’ve unleashed. I’m not going to lie. Some months are harder than others, but in the end, the stories get written. It doesn’t matter that the stories are largely for each other and posted in a small, obscure corner of the Internet. They put their all into these stories, and it shows.

So, no. I don’t have a “best of” post to offer you filled with links to favorite posts. All I have is my gratitude for being included with a great bunch of writers, and an immense pride for the work they’ve put out in the last year.

Thanks, guys. I couldn’t ask for a better bunch of friends, cohorts, and fellow writers. I can’t wait to see what the next year brings.

R.L. Naquin

Rachel is the author of the urban fantasy Monster Haven series from Carina Press. She believes in magic, the power of love, good cheese, lucky socks, and putting things off until stress gets them done faster at the last minute. Her home is Disneyland, despite her current location in Kansas.