Cafe Aphra: An Online Community for Writers

Our most sincere apologies, but Cafe Aphra is currently closed for submissions. Please watch this space!

A friend recently sent me a link to this wonderful article on the excellent blog, Writer Unboxed. It really resonated with me and reflected something true for the season, I think, which we tend to overlook. As ever, we should be taking our cues from Nature rather than our crazy hyped-up and currently rather unhealthy human society... Here is the article for those of you who are interested in the idea of allowing our creative side to lie fallow for a season and embrace it. Winter Rest All our best wishes from Cafe Aphra for this Christmas season and the end of 2017. Photo by Pavan Trikutam on Unsplash

And our personal Cafe Aphra favourite...

Greetings all!  So this year we thought we'd do something a little different for our Cafe Aphra November Challenge... a touch of tongue-in-cheek, a pinch of parody, something to make us smile in these dark and shortening Autumn days. Ever wondered whether your favourite classic novel would get published nowadays?  Well now's your chance to write that imaginary rejection letter from the publisher sent to the author of a famous classic, explaining exactly why their manuscript is unsellable, unpublishable or unreadable.  Or, if you'd rather, you can try and 'pitch' your classic manuscript to a sceptical modern-day publisher and see what he or she has to say in response. It doesn't have to be long, and you can either make it obvious what the classic in question is, or you can keep us guessing. Perhaps this all sounds a little confusing... A parody of a rejection of a pitch?!  What on earth does that look like?? Well if you want...

Happy National Flash Fiction Day 2017! Hope you've had a great day of reading your favourite super-short stories... Here are a couple of websites to check out:  http://nationalflashfictionday.co.uk and the marvellous: http://flashfloodjournal.blogspot.co.uk Well done to everyone who got their work featured! Hope you enjoy a sunny weekend of reading and writing little flashes of brilliance that dance in the light. :)

So it's that time of year again...... ......  as I was reminded at the weekend, when I went for lunch with some friends and saw that the table next to us had been reserved for a NaNoWriMo "Write-In" group! Yes, November is here again. Some of us will be taking up the annual NaNoWriMo challenge, but some of us may feel that we just don't have enough time, headspace or energy to turn out 50,000 words or more in 30 days.  If that is the case for you, and you fancy something a bit more personal and tailor-made, or just not quite so much pressure, then why don't you take us up this year on our annual Cafe Aphra November Challenge ? Here's how it works:   YOU get to choose what you want your writing challenge to be for this month.  You set your own goal, whether it is a daily wordcount, an overall wordcount to reach by the end of the month, or simply a writing project you want to get FINISHED by 30th November.  Sometimes we all need deadlines to ...

Today is the 1st of November and for many people the beginning of what is now a well established institution in the worldwide writing community... NaNoWri month! November has been 'National Novel Writing Month' for several years now and has produced spectacular results for many writers in need of an extra push to just get that baggy first draft finished. Here at Cafe Aphra, we offer our own take on NaNoWriMo via the Cafe Aphra November Challenge... (drum roll, please!) Essentially, this is the same idea but we just prefer to offer people a bit more flexibility in terms of setting their own writing goals, whether total word count, daily word count or something else entirely. Writing a novel is a highly personal experience and 50,000 words in 30 days in not necessarily be the right challenge for everyone.  We still think NaNoWriMo is a fabulous idea, however, and a really admirable institution - so we would encourage all our readers who are currently struggling to make...

Write a story of up to 150 words beginning: "If only I could remember..."  Post it in as a comment below!

An alien descends to earth and captures a film star to study for research into our species. Who and why? Tell the story in under 150 words. Post it in as a comment below!

The Accident. Write an accidental story, or a story of an accident, in under 150 words.  Post it in as a comment below!

"John would never have imagined that so many marbles could fit into a coffin." Write a story in under 150 words starting with this line (the word count doesn't include it). Post it in as a comment below!

Found. Write a story of under 150 words in which something is found. Post it in as a comment below!

Greetings fellow Aphra-ites! National Flash Fiction Day UK is almost up on us... the date has been set this year as this Saturday, 27th June. You can check out the NFFD website here As we have done in the past, at Café Aphra is running its NFFD challenge on the 27th and will be publishing writing prompts at regular intervals throughout the day for you to write up to 150 words on and post up as a comment. We had some really lovely responses last year and people really enjoyed the immediacy and interactive nature of the day. We will be posting writing prompts up at the following times (GMT) on the website: 9am 12pm 3pm 6pm 9pm You can do it from anywhere and you don't have to post your piece up at any particular time of day - if you want to post up a response to the 9am prompt at 3pm, that's fine! We look forward to reading everyone's responses on Saturday - here's to a flash flood of sudden fiction! We hope you have fun with it. Happy writing, ...

Want to get the joy of writing back? Today I have discovered a brilliant live online project called 'Lost in Track Changes', which is part of if:book Australia. That's the curated version of the flash fiction event, with well-known Australian authors 'remixing' each other's work, week by week.  The un-curated version of the event, however, is open to everyone - that's you and me - and is called 'Open Changes'. What it involves is reading a few pieces of flash fiction and using any part of the them that catches your (mind's) eye as a writing prompt to set you off with writing your own piece. The maximum wordcount is 200! Ouch! This is a seriously fun writing exercise, though. I actually made myself laugh today. And who knows, your 'comment' might be selected and used as one of the pieces for next week's prompts for other writers. There are several publishing incentives, as well as just the fun of doing it. And there are only ...

Saturday, 21 st June was National Flash Fiction Day – the third, in fact, to be held by the folk here http://nationalflashfictionday.co.uk/index.html and Cafe Aphra decided to get in on the action with a Flash Fiction Challenge of our own. We gave out five writing prompts at three-hourly intervals throughout the day and encouraged you to post your inspired pieces of 400 words, or less, as comments on this blog. The beauty of flash fiction is that its compact size and brevity allows you to create a glimpse into a life, a world or even just a thought and then, once seen, close that door behind you. There is such freedom in that level of concision. Without the necessity of laying out the background of characters, setting the scene or establishing a theme, plotlines or lengthy metaphors, you can throw whatever combination of words you want on a page and step away. It’s a format that promotes the domestic, encourages the bold, celebrates the fantastic. On the pages of Café Aphr...

I was fascinated by this article I read in the the New York Times about exiled Syrian writer, Osama Alomar, who lives and works as a taxi driver in Chicago. I thought I'd share it here on Cafe Aphra for all our flash fiction fans and other writers... Taking Fares, and Writing in Between Osama Alomar Pursues His Literary Ambitions in Exile By Larry Rohter MAY 2, 2014 CHICAGO — In the Arab world, the Syrian writer Osama Alomar has a growing reputation as the author of short, clever parables that comment obliquely on political and social issues. But here, where he has lived in exile since 2008, he spends most of his time as the driver of Car 45 at the Horizon Taxi Cab company. Up to a dozen hours a day, six days a week, Mr. Alomar cruises the northwest suburbs around O’Hare Airport in his bright blue cab, dictionaries and a volume of Khalil Gibran piled beside him. When parked in line waiting for a fare to appear, he pulls out a notebook and tries to writ...

Cafe Aphra's Alternative NaNoWriMo has been getting some great feedback from a steadily increasing number of writers. People have been telling us how they've been more committed to their writing through setting their own targets. These conversations are less about how many words we've written and more about our reflections upon our writing practice - how and where and why we write. We've been celebrating and sharing our writing and our reflections upon writing via this blog, the Cafe Aphra facebook page, through emails and face-to-face conversations. And this all makes me feel more guilty about the fact that I have fallen off the bandwagon. It's not just that I've slipped. One minute I was there, sitting among the trombones and the music boxes and all the other bits and bobs which would be part of any halfway decent bandwagon, and the next minute I'm all alone watching everyone else share the bandwagon's journey over the horizon. There are many ex...

Do you need to kickstart your writing this month? Has your November challenge so far been less than prolific? Don't worry.... several of us here at Cafe Aphra & Friends are in the same position.  Today I successfully avoided working on my novel by starting on my next assignment in the online flash fiction writing course I am doing, courtesy of Fish Publishing (which I would warmly recommend). One of the tasks in today's section on dialogue was the following: A husband has crashed his wife’s car and has to tell her but is avoiding coming out with it directly. The wife didn’t insure the car and at some point has to come clean about that too. Build a dialogue that has no lines of summary, no attribution, no description of tone, no characterizing of voice or words; just two voices.  Because you have no attribution - no he said or she said - you must portray those silences and pauses through punctuation. With only their exchanges you must deliver who they are, what...

And so November begins.... A range of writers, a range of writing targets, and a huge sense of anticipation.  Linda Dawn will be free-writing for five minutes a day through November. Linda Dawn, we would love to know where this writing takes you - poetry? memoir? fiction? reflections on your day? I imagine you at your desk today, picking up your pen and watching the words spiral across the page. Did you write this morning or will you find the space in the evening, after night has fallen across your city?  Sara, Heather, and another member of our cafe have each committed to working on their ongoing writing projects for at least an hour a day. They're driving hard - thirty hours across the month. A whole load of writing! I'm fortunate enough to know both Sara's and Heather's writing - it's beautiful, thought-provoking stuff with powerful characters and a strong sense of place. Heather has the most accessible witch I have ever met and I almost wept with ...

My brother-in-law is a runner: a proper runner. He looks like a runner, thinks like a runner, and doesn't make a sound as he glides along the tarmac training for his next marathon. He tells me that he uses target-setting software to motivate him and maintain his commitment to training. In contrast to my brother-in-law, I'm not a "runner". I have old running shoes which look brand new due to lack of use and my physique is (ahem) not that of a "runner" - when I thunder jog down our street it seems as though the neighboring houses quiver upon their foundations. In fairness, the world's greatest optimist would refuse a bet upon me ever completing a marathon. But, I've started using the same target-setting software and I like it. I've set my own running targets for the next month. Small, achievable targets, which might not seem like very much to a "runner", but which give me a real sense of achievement. I won't be running in any races...