Mixology

This week at the bar, we're all throwing in our own ingredients in the hopes of serving up one fantastic concoction. We're playing a little game of Writing Round Robin. The rules are essentially as follows:

1. An "inspirational" sentence gets the party started.

2. Barmaid #1 reads inspirational sentence, and writes 5 sentences to follow it in story progression.

3. Barmaid #2 reads only the last sentence of Barmaid #1's paragraph and springboards off that with 5 more lines of the story.

4. Barmaid #3 reads only the last sentence of Barmaid #2's, and adds 5 more lines. And so on.

Don't worry, we've engaged in some very high-tech confidentiality mumb-jumbo to ensure that each Barmaid only has knowledge of the last sentence before adding her piece of the puzzle.

We are either about to make Smartini history with one bad ass, hysterical short story or confuse the hell out of all our readers and have your head spinning like Pen after the Green Party.

Without further ado, here is our kick-off sentence:

When Debbie decided that Salt ‘n’ Pepper Beard was the most attractive pirate on the ship, she realized that choosing him was due to the advice of Sylvia, her new Life Coach, to be realistic about her own age and to open herself up to romance where it lay, unlike the troublesome past where she would have wished that only the younger pirates take advantage of her.

(Sentence courtesy of Jim Guigli who was a contestant in the 2006 Bulwer-Lytton Literary Parody Contest - which seeks to find the worst deliberately bad opening sentence to a novel - in other words, he meant for it to be awful and awesome all at once.)