Legal intoxicants and how they might influence your writing. Or not.

[tenyari]

As soon as we left the EU the upper-class twits of the year that run things started to allow shit to be dumped in rivers and seas so God knows how long till we’ve got the same food problems as the US.

You'll have to do as one of my younger in-laws with children does. She screens every last food item that gets into their house and has a crazy list of 'what's OK' that gets rechecked often.

She's not insane... she's just making sure her kids don't eat High Fructose Corn Syrup anywhere they can find some option that uses sugar. And the lengths she has to go to for this start to look crazy. Curiously enough some of the 'cheap mass made brands' have NOT made the switch, so her list isn't just "organic hippie stuff" - some of which DOES use bad ingredients... Her list is rather just "Mom at the gates of Mordor, list in hand, making sure no orcs get through".

I don't know if Corn Syrup will ever take off elsewhere though. For a variety of reasons the USA grows insane amounts of corn. As such, Corn Syrup is a by product we'd just be throwing away if people hadn't figured out they could essentially print money with it...

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I don't know if Corn Syrup will ever take off elsewhere though. For a variety of reasons the USA grows insane amounts of corn. As such, Corn Syrup is a by product we'd just be throwing away if people hadn't figured out they could essentially print money with it...

Yeah, most of our sugar comes from sugar beet grown in East Anglia (Tate & Lyle is a huge sugar manufacturer - Tate used his fortune to build libraries in every town and also create the Tate Gallery). Some sugar cane from the Caribbean. So not much HFCS in UK products.

But when there was a push against salt "reduce or we'll regulate", it was very successful, companies lowered it a bit every few months so 2 years later there was way less. Didn't work for sugar. So eventually the sugar tax came in.

Government thought products would go less sweet with less sugar, or charge more. Instead, almost all went for sweetener versions only. Which has put lots of people off drinking the products because they taste terrible.

 

[Athalia]

I swear this thread has come up before.

Me, I don't use any drugs when I'm actually in the writing/editing phase. I tried it and didn't get good results.

But when I'm in the ideation state of a story, it's a different thing. A few of my experiences with pot and psilocybin have crept into my stories, either while being under the influence while I'm masturbating or remembering an erotic experience I had while under their spell.

Alcohol doesn't do it at all for me erotically, although I enjoy a drink or two just the same.

 

[SirBurnInside]

I'm one of those boring people who don't drink or take drugs so it's never been an issue for me.

Thinking back to when I did last get drunk long ago, what I remember of it anyway, if I did partake I couldn't even imagine how bad my writing would be when reading it back sober!

 

[AWhoopsieDaisy]

Personally no drug will ever compete with the insanity my ADHD ass writes when Im off of my medication.

 

[HordHolm]

I only drink socially so if I'm drinking I'm with my friends sitting around a table. I think they might be a little peeved if I pulled out my Macbook and started writing (they'd probably be too polite to say anything, though). It wouldn't matter though, as the product would be a steaming pile of dung.

 

[SeraphNocturne]

I have to write sober. I've tried writing not sober... and let's just say it was catastrophic. Anything more than a glass of wine and my focus goes right out the window.

Since most legal intoxicants just tend to amplify whatever you're feeling back when I partook, I'd abandon whatever writing project I was working on to... take care of other needs, so to speak. The only success I ever really felt is with prescription Adderall, but the national shortage lately has made it a fucking nightmare, so I'm raw-dogging it these days and I feel like it takes me five times longer to make any serious progress on stories.

 

[nice90sguy]

I swear this thread has come up before.

Many times. I've posted one with a similar title (but without the constraint about legality).

Caffeine only for me, in the form of 2-Pint mugs of strong Assam tea.

 

[Rainblow]

I used to diss Hemingway and Bukowski for imbibing when writing until I started having one or two shots of whisky before 'putting pen to paper'. Now I just diss Bukowski; straight or sober the dude's a hack.

 

[AlexBailey]

One time I got way too high in MJ I wrote a snail-mail letter to an out of town girlfriend. The next morning I couldn’t find the letter anywhere but I remembered what I had wanted to say, so I rewrote it and put it in the mail. (Email wasn’t a thing yet.)

Years later after we were married my wife showed me the small bundle of letters and cards I’d sent and she kept, among them were two almost identical letters, one basically paraphrasing the other.

I had remembered the content but forgotten that I had sealed it in an envelope, addressed it, stamped it, probably walked down the street to the mailbox and sent the first one.

Poor girl had been excited to get two letters from me, only to find the second one a weird recap.

 

[onehitwanda]

One time I got way too high in MJ I wrote a snail-mail letter to an out of town girlfriend. The next morning I couldn’t find the letter anywhere but I remembered what I had wanted to say, so I rewrote it and put it in the mail. (Email wasn’t a thing yet.)

Years later after we were married my wife showed me the small bundle of letters and cards I’d sent and she kept, among them were two almost identical letters, one basically paraphrasing the other.

I had remembered the content but forgotten that I had sealed it in an envelope, addressed it, stamped it, probably walked down the street to the mailbox and sent the first one.

Poor girl had been excited to get two letters from me, only to find the second one a weird recap.

You loved her twice as much as she thought! How's that a disappointment

 

[AlexBailey]

While hanging out at a house party, a friend and I had been hiding out in his bedroom where the only light in the room was a red bulb.

We were playing guitars and writing songs for most of the night while my friend wrote the music and lyrics in the empty pages of an old journal.

The next morning we wanted to share the songs with the rest of our newly formed band, but when he opened the journal it was a mess of black ink written over pages that were already filled with red ink - he’d previously filled the pages using a red pen but it was invisible under the red light.

It inspired another friend to make art that would look very different under different colored lighting.

 

[djrip]

While hanging out at a house party, a friend and I had been hiding out in his bedroom where the only light in the room was a red bulb.

We were playing guitars and writing songs for most of the night while my friend wrote the music and lyrics in the empty pages of an old journal.

The next morning we wanted to share the songs with the rest of our newly formed band, but when he opened the journal it was a mess of black ink written over pages that were already filled with red ink - he’d previously filled the pages using a red pen but it was invisible under the red light.

It inspired another friend to make art that would look very different under different colored lighting.

Just put it back under the red light again!

Like how if you study when you're high, you've got to get high again to remember it for the test.

 

[AlexBailey]

Just put it back under the red light again!

Like how if you study when you're high, you've got to get high again to remember it for the test.

Right? That’s what we did to read the songs but we couldn’t figure out how to isolate the writings in red. Fortunately my friend said it was just a bunch of random thoughts and bad poetry - much the same as the songs.