voice – Confabulator Cafe

Voices

Aspen Junge - April 25, 2013

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 […]

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

Cafe Management - January 6, 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. […]

How to Waste Twenty Years on One Story

R.L. Naquin - February 1, 2012

When I first started writing, I mean really writing, I was in love with a book called The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip. It was high fantasy, poetic, and beautiful. I still have my original dog-eared copy, bent and torn with pages falling out. In youthful admiration of that story, I began to […]

Listening to the sound of my voice

Kevin Wohler - January 31, 2012

When I first started writing, I never intentionally tried to mirror a favorite writer. The problem was that I hadn’t found my own voice yet. So when I started creating stories, it surprised me when I discovered the stories were not my own. One of my early attempts was to write a science fiction epic […]