Dealing with Aggressive Drunks (and, to some extent, everyone else) Part 1of a Series

One of the less-than-wholly-awesome upshots of alcohol’s disinhibiting effect is that it makes people who are angry on the inside angry on the outside, too, and one of the lesser joys of the mixological craft is that you’re going to have to deal with those people face-to-face. I’ll give you an example. This happened to me last night.

A fellow came in and sat at the bar near the end of the dinner rush. The other bartender (a woman) got him water and a menu. She ID’d him, as I’ve taught her to (see here for why). I was in the main well filling server orders when she came up to me. She told me he vibed a little weird to her, and showed me what he’d given us for ID, which, while it had his picture and date of birth on it, was not one of the six forms of ID that Washington state liquor law says we can accept (it was, in fact, issued by the Department of Corrections, for what that’s worth). I told her to follow her intuition and refuse him service, on the grounds we can’t accept his ID, and she did, quite graciously, I later gathered. From what she said, he was gracious in turn, and declined a seat in the dining room, where we would serve him food but not alcohol.

On his way out he stopped by my well, fixed me with a rage-filled let’s-fight glare, and exchanged the following words with me (as close to verbatim as I can remember, and not edited for content): Continue reading “Dealing with Aggressive Drunks (and, to some extent, everyone else) Part 1of a Series” →

Why I ID You (even if I know you’re of age)

I’ve been helping to train up some people at the bar lately, and in the course of my discursions on the subject have gotten to thinking about why I do some of the things I do behind the bar. One of those things is I ID any- and everyone I have even the slightest question or hesitation about, usually right at the very beginning of our interaction, as I’m saying hello and dropping off water and/or menus. I do this for a couple of reasons.

First, though I work in a nice place now, I haven’t always, and sometimes even nice places get customers who are or are going to be trouble for whatever reason. It’s certainly much rarer, but it happens. People who are trouble have to be dealt with carefully, and are much more easily handled before you’ve served them any (or, as is often the case, more) alcohol. They also have a higher incidence of not having valid ID, which is a great (and impersonal) reason to tell them to leave, which like as not you’ll have to do anyway. It’s also, for what it’s worth, illegal to serve them, at least in the state where I work. Sometimes you’ll get a regular person with expired or no ID, and then you make a judgement call. In Seattle it’s not unheard of for the Liquor Board to do sting operations, so I tend to skew conservative on those calls, but it’s up to each individual bartender to decide whether letting a particular individual stay will have a positive or negative impact on everyone else’s good time. Continue reading “Why I ID You (even if I know you’re of age)” →

“Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?”

Not that people ask me this much, but they might someday, if I ever manage to submit something publishable to the right editor. And I’ve got a story I’m revising that’s kicking my arse right now, so any excuse to not work on that is deeply welcome. At least here I’m still quote-unquote writing.

So where do my ideas come from? A few have obvious inspirations (I have a draft of a story detailing the thoughts of a man falling to his death after reading a story in which some nameless red-shirt fell to his death, for instance). For the most part they just seem to pop into my head from out of nowhere, usually at really inconvenient times and only very occasionally when I’m actually at the keyboard writering away at something. There are some people (Steven Pressfield, for instance) who believe such inspiration to be divine, a whisper from eternity. Others, like Kate Wilhelm and Damon Knight, place its source in their own subconscious, in an entity they name the Silent Partner and Fred, respectively, an entity who can be communicated with, but never spoken to, as such, and who can be trained, or at least encouraged, to focus and produce.

Myself I likely fall more into the latter camp, though I’m open to the notions of the former, as well. I see mine as Continue reading ““Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?”” →

Agent Contest

I’ve decided to enter Writer’s Digest’s Dear Lucky Agent Contest, which is currently accepting YA and Science Fiction novels. I’ll be submitting the first two hundred words of my novel The Redemption of Lee Victorius, formerly known as The Victorius Revolution, for those of you who keeping score at home.

A gritty, almost impressionistic near-future noir, the book is, among other things, an exploration of a trope that I’ve always found particularly fascinating, the bad man who does bad things in the service of good. Despite the gravity of its themes (race, class, the nature of power and the uses of violence), it was a lot of fun to write. It started as a Clarion Write-a-thon project, and I gave myself permission to really cut loose in terms of the prose composition.

I hope Victoria Marini likes it.

Works of Art Are Never Finished…

Only abandoned.

Here’s me, about nine months ago, talking about a work-in-progress called Cowboys and Indians.

I think it needs one more going over, and maybe the final section needs a little tweaking, but I think this one is almost ready to go out into the world, and I’m really happy about that.

It may not surprise you to know that I turned out to be wrong, and that Cowboys and Indians has been significantly revised at least twice in the intervening months. Continue reading “Works of Art Are Never Finished…” →