So I haven’t slept tonight, and that’s
Sep. 7th, 2015 08:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1QjGO9i:
So I haven’t slept tonight, and that’s really annoying, and I’m too unsettled to do any real writing, so instead I dug up that damn missing scene.
And yeah, I never used it; I wrote it during the drafting process when I wasn’t sure how long Ora Pro Nobis was going to be or where I was going to go with it at the end. (And it ended up suffering, like all my attempts at writing fic for a challenge thing, from being really absurdly truncated at the end.)
I wound up discarding the entire angle. But the image was good, or has somewhere within it the seeds of something poignant. Rigas Melnais Balsams, or Black Balsam, is sort of in the Jagermeister family, approximately similar to Fernet Branca; an intensely bitter herbal “digestive aid” type liqueur. It’s the sort of thing my dude’s grandfather drank. Traditionally, it is diluted with vodka– it is very high-proof and very bitter. Two parts vodka to one part Balsams is the accepted dilution. During the Soviet era, it was widely held that spiking terrible Soviet champagne with a liberal helping of Balsams made it just about drinkable, or made you incapable of caring, and either was acceptable.
So here, have a salvaged scrap from a derelict storyline. Maybe I can rework it and use it; probably not, though, so here it sits for now.
So I haven’t slept tonight, and that’s really annoying, and I’m too unsettled to do any real writing, so instead I dug up that damn missing scene.
And yeah, I never used it; I wrote it during the drafting process when I wasn’t sure how long Ora Pro Nobis was going to be or where I was going to go with it at the end. (And it ended up suffering, like all my attempts at writing fic for a challenge thing, from being really absurdly truncated at the end.)
I wound up discarding the entire angle. But the image was good, or has somewhere within it the seeds of something poignant. Rigas Melnais Balsams, or Black Balsam, is sort of in the Jagermeister family, approximately similar to Fernet Branca; an intensely bitter herbal “digestive aid” type liqueur. It’s the sort of thing my dude’s grandfather drank. Traditionally, it is diluted with vodka– it is very high-proof and very bitter. Two parts vodka to one part Balsams is the accepted dilution. During the Soviet era, it was widely held that spiking terrible Soviet champagne with a liberal helping of Balsams made it just about drinkable, or made you incapable of caring, and either was acceptable.
So here, have a salvaged scrap from a derelict storyline. Maybe I can rework it and use it; probably not, though, so here it sits for now.
