Were you sober when you wrote this?

 

While promoting books, I get many questions. Some are funny: "Are you any of your characters?" The answer is no, the characters are all younger, smarter, and better looking than me.

The question that gave me pause was, "Were you sober when you wrote this book?"

Replaying that question caused so many thoughts to surface. I read that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote "Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde" while on a twenty-four-hour cocaine binge. Having read that book as a naive high school student, I wondered what crazy visions Stevenson must've had to dream up something so twisted and diabolical. As an adult I think, cocaine seemed a likely contributor.

William S. Burroughs was known for missing deadlines. It's rumored that his agent resorted to locking the author in a room and only supplying him with a bottle of booze after Burroughs passed another chapter under the door.

An upstart Nevada distillery uses a tagline: "Drink bourbon because no good story ever started after a kale salad." The reality of that ad might be balanced by a quote from Jimmy Breslin: "Don't trust a brilliant idea until it survives the hangover."

 I embrace this great quote from Ring Lardner, "No one, ever, wrote anything as well after even one drink as he would've done without it."

The answer to that original question; "I was stone cold sober". The questioner's reaction was to recoil. His unspoken follow-up question was probably, "You have thoughts like that when you're NOT drinking?"

Each of my mysteries is a collection of sometimes crazy sober thoughts, strung together by the dialogue between the fictional characters. Writing fiction allows me to release all those crazy thoughts that pop to mind, like when some idiot cuts you off in traffic.

Check my publisher's website for links to "A Bourbon to Die For" and all of my other books.

Authors — BWL Publishing