This left me with a half-bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.
I taste the beer. Hmm. The word "chocolate" drifts into my brain.
I did this:
Add the sugar, and mix well. Add the beer, the flour, and finally the rest of the chocolate chips, while continuing to mix.
Add the baking soda. Mix quickly, since I think the beer will start to trigger the soda immediately.
Pour the batter into a pan and bake at 350 F for 35 minutes, or the usual knife-comes-out-clean test.
I got to looking at a friend's web page last night. And I got to reading the stories that were up on it, of which there were a considerable number.Well. I'm not going to be saying who that friend was, on account of it doesn't make any difference to you, and I don't want to embarrass him. And he shouldn't be embarrassed, because it was pretty good stuff; I enjoyed it. What I was noticing, though, was that all those stories had a point.
See, when I started writing, I was all afire to write stuff that had a point. And I did that. Wrote a story for each point I had in me. Took me about a month, all told. Then, naturally, I went wondering what was next -- start over at the top of the list, then?
That wasn't sounding too good, so I started writing stories that didn't have a point. And that kept me writing for a good span. I enjoyed it, and the stories were good, even if they did tend to wash you up somewhere and then roll out with the tide.
And after that, I tried a few things else. For a span, I wrote stories that had the important bits missing. And I was writing stories that were all true -- that was a bit of laziness, true. And then stories that were all lies.
It all got a bit slow, though. Turned cold. And maybe, I was thinking, I should go on and give the whole thing up.
Yesterday, that was. Yesterday was a bit odd. I was out walking, and a holly bush went up in smoke of a sudden. Just smoke -- black smoke swirling around, going nowhere, and a bit of a hissing and crackling. Like snakeskin burning.
The hissing and cracking was a voice -- well, not a voice really, but I won't need to explain that. The high and low is, that was Lucifer. I swear to -- well, it was. And the Prince of Darkness told me I could be a heck of a writer. He could give me that.
What I needed to do, though, was write him a story. An audition, he was saying, although I never knew who I was competing against. He said, write me a story that had a point, but never got around to it; a story that was important, but everything important was left out; a story that was true, but every single thing in it was a lie.
And then I'd be a writer that people would remember.
Well, what could I do? It was Satan. I told him go to Hell, and I went on my way.