June 13, 2016

Dumas’ Castle, Première Partie (Part 1)

Dumas’ Castle, Première Partie (Part 1)

Paris, 2 Novembre, 2013. While on a writing retreat in rural France, I read an article about the famed author Alexandre Dumas’ magnificent Chateau de Monte-Cristo in France Today magazine. Located in the small village not far from Paris, the three-story home of the novelist who penned The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, and hundreds of other works, gave me great cause to want to see his palatial estate. Most particularly, I wanted to visit his writing studio, the Chateau d’If, situated within the beautiful gardens. Dumas was born in 1802. He lived through – even participated in – the Second French Revolution of 1830. He was a prolific author who helped found Romanticism and is said to have written over a hundred thousand words [with a quill pen, mind you] for dramatic…

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June 8, 2016

Announcing the Fictional Café’s Children’s Literature Issue!

Announcing the Fictional Café’s Children’s Literature Issue!

Kids at the Café?! Yep! Next week, we are bringing you a full issue of children’s literature featuring short stories, poetry, art and narrative for and about kids. We are very excited for this issue, which was put together by some of our very own Fictional Café members. They worked hard for months on this issue, so we are happy to be putting it out just in time for summer vacation. So pull up a carpet square and grab a juice box; it’s story time! On a historical note: with this issue, we are marking a new milestone at the Fictional Café. Our purpose in running this site is to bring people together from all walks of life – whether they are on a different continent, in a different age bracket or of a different…

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June 1, 2016

Are You Listening? – June Submissions

Are You Listening? – June Submissions

Last week, I posted a teaser of our featured work for June. We continue with the idea of vulnerability this month, as our submissions focus on communication. Whether it is the basic act of trying to interact with another human being or looking to the depths of our souls and expressing who we are, communication is a fundamental component of humanity and one which we perhaps take for granted. Our fiction this month comes from William Torphy, who has written two pieces of flash fiction about telephones – our lifelines to connection and communication. What can the telephone teach us about the mystery of who is really on the other end of the call and what happens when our cell phone batteries die? Stay tuned to find out. Hannah Carmack uses her poetry to convey…

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May 25, 2016

The Vulnerability of Creating

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Singing
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Reading
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Mural artists
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Building
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Songwriting
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Sand sculpting
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Cooking
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Flair bartending
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Arts and crafts
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Photography
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Poetry reading
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Modeling

Those of us who are creators know how vulnerable it feels to put our work out there. Whether we are writers, artists, architects, bartenders, musicians, inventors, etc., the act of making something and displaying it for the world to see can be scary. It takes so much courage to be as honest as we are when we are creating – to stick our necks out there like we do. This month’s featured poet, Bonnie Amesquita, shared what it’s like for her when she’s creating: “Have you ever wanted to write something really good, a poem or some great something-or-other.  Still, when you try to spill those words on a page you discover that they’re just noise. Oh Jeez. Finally, you settle down and you ask yourself what you want to say and about whom or…

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May 17, 2016

Book Review: The “Brilliance” Trilogy by Marcus Sakey

Book Review: The “Brilliance” Trilogy by Marcus Sakey

I’ve spent the past few months reading Marcus Sakey’s Brilliance trilogy. It’s been a helluva trip. Set in the unspecified near future – maybe tomorrow? – it’s a story that could have come right off the front page of a major newspaper. Sakey has character development that makes a writer pine and a plotline that’s terribly engrossing. This is a trilogy, so it’s three full length novels: Brilliance, A Better World, and Written in Fire. You can get a plot briefing on Amazon, but the brilliant aspect, for me, is the brilliants. Sakey posits an event occurred some thirty years ago, that humans with extraordinary powers – in a word, brilliance – were unsuspectingly born. Over time, average mortals have grown largely resentful of the brilliants, and some have decided to assure they will never…

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