Abstemious

Can't sleep, might as well get this out of the way early.

They don’t mean to get you drunk. Or, that’s what they always say.

“I really shouldn’t.”

“Oh come on, one drink won’t hurt!”

But one drink is never quite just one drink: it simply smoothes the way for another, and another after that, and on and on until you’re dancing on the table with your tie around your forehead and going home from the bar with a stranger with more acne than personality. And you wake up the next morning, just barely, and immediately regret the previous night.

Next time, you remember, and warn them: “I really shouldn’t.”

They smile.

I have several craft posts to put up, but I'll likely put them in a new blog I'm sharing with Paula (because she is awesome and makes many lovely things). I'll link or cross-post as appropriate. Gardening today, so perhaps pictures of the planted garden?

Also, I'm back to thinking about interchangeable multi-part stories. My best idea so far is the story of a murder, or a suicide, in which a different order will give you a different (but unambiguous) ending. The difficult part is arranging it so that every part is interchangeable, and internally consistent, but that the ordering of some of them alters the plot. Still not quite sure how I'm going to do it.

I guess the other thing to consider is that even in the Borges story, it doesn't always have to make sense. It's possible, and acceptable, if most orientations are askew. So long, I guess, as it's not always, and totally, unintelligible. And as long as there are at least two configurations that give sensible, and most importantly different, results.

It would, after all, be incredibly easy and straightforward to write a series of short stories linked together by a theme for which specific order is secondary to the theme. Or a series of episodic short stories whose very episodic nature means that order is irrelevant. But in those situations no matter what order you use you get the same "result": the same point. There's something cool to me about the idea of writing one story that is really two stories.