Cocktails and Narratives That Start Listing Sideways

I spent part of yesterday researching cocktails, for the fantasy element of Fairy Dust, with Whisky Chaser, hinges upon a particular character who makes a particular drink. In my head that drink has been an Old Fashioned, for I have a fondness for them and it’s a nice allusion for the problem that drives one of the characters, but the Old Fashioned is not an exciting cocktail. It involves no shakers or bartending shenanigans, just the combining of ingredients that ultimately become something delicious.

So I spent an hour googling cocktail recipes, looking for something with more pizzaz. Came up with nothing, and stuck with the old fashioned for the moment. So I started figuring out where my affection for the Old Fashioned actually came from, and I think it can be traced to my friend Allan over at Type 40 (purveyors of fine pop culture artefacts and props) who drank them when I visited Melbourne at some point, and then I felt that pang you get when you have’t spoken to friends for far too long.

I also spent some quality time coveting his Call of Cthulhu investigator’s notepads, but those are outside the budget at the moment. Which, of course, sent me off pondering the problems of finances at the moment (I’m on scholarship; my partner is between jobs), and whether it was time to start considering a Patreon given the limitations on finding part-time work when you’re studying while a university is paying your bills.

All of which was a petty clear sign that I was stuck on this particular bit of the story, which involved lots of people talking to one another and explaining things that needed explaining, so I’ll need to go back and look at the earlier scenes to figure out why I feel the need to lay so much pipe in the present scene.

I wrote another 945 words yesterday, bringing the draft to 2,845 words. It’s starting to look story-shaped at this point, the individual sections leaning up against one-another and reinforcing the whole. Beats that aren’t pulling their weight become a little more obvious now, while those that are a little too strong cause the story to list in an unexpected direction. We are entering the phase where a story can collapse under its own weight, but mostly I expect it to creak dangerously while I look for the bits that are wrong and patch them up.