A New Look

My blog is shifting from Post-Apocalyptic to Cocktail, for a while at least.  The David Priest Project is starting to roll.  I'll get back to Cathartes Aura Part Three in a couple of months, but first I need to get out "Inside the Skull of David Priest".

After some free-writing, I've decided to write in first-person prose.  I'm trying to find a nice free stream-of-consciousness rhythm.  It's tough to strike a balance between a character who is describing thoughts and events to the reader and a guy who just plain talks to himself.  Also tricky to write about a guy who, on the surface, shares a lot of your experience and work ethic yet on the inside is quite differently motivated.  I'll reveal that bit-by-bit.

For a long time, I've found it easiest to make up places, people, and situations and write about fantasy.  This is still a fictitious story in a made up town with characters I created, but it will cut personally into the mad hospitality business in which I've grown up.

For most of the last 20 years, I've been employed as a busser, waiter, caterer, bartender, and manager.  Currently I'm a hotel bartender at a great place.  I pay my mortgage and feed my family slinging drinks, serving food, making people comfortable, and being the classiest wise-ass I can be.  I have worked with a wonderful array of hard working professionals, losers, students working part-time, medicated mentals, addicts, and genuinely lovable people.

If you don't know much about the inside of the business, I hope you learn something.  Minimum wage plus tips can be good money.  That server probably makes more dough than her manager.  Titles can be a demotion.  There are numerous ways to short-pour a drink, multiple strategies for cutting someone off, and copious opportunities to skim the company.  Spitting in food is not as much fun as you might think.

Soon I'll be dropping bits of text.  As of this moment, it's all just too raw.  I'm laying out characters and setting.  Much of the stuff I've written so far looks like this: "Where you been?" asks (that dude from the kitchen) while stirring his Gibson.

I wanted to put at least a scene on the blog today, but all I have is a lengthy description and some new wallpaper.