Firstly, my apologies for not blogging much lately, I've been working on my story. On that note, I replaced the two scenes I deleted so Lourdes stil exists but in a pretty different form, and there is another recipe, for Puchero. You will see them when my final story comes out, and hopefully you will notice them. The rest of the scenes have been rearranged a bit for continuity, and Monica's birth is no longer the result of sangria.
In any case, here's my metaphor.
You go grocery shopping because you want to make something (I use cooking metaphors a ton, can you tell?) and you're dabbling through different recipes. Maybe it's your best friend's 18th birthday or... yeah I don't know why you would be cooking a feast, but I also don't know why you need an excuse to spend all day cooking. Well, maybe you're going up to Kayla's cabin for the week and you aren't quite sure what you're going to make and perhaps you've forgotten that Austin is allergic to everything and Kayla's vegetarian and Erin thinks rice is gross, so you buy noodles and tomatoes and bell peppers and flour and salmon and steak and money is not an issue and time is also not an issue and so you just buy ridiculous amounts of delectible ingredients just in case. And then you get up there and you set up meals and you realize you have all these extra ingredients, these literary devices that you would have loved to use in your story but that don't fit. So you try to put coconut in your chocolate cake and people eat it and they tell you "erm... this would be really good if you hadn't randomly put coconut in it," or you try to add an alcoholic father and people read it and they're like "erm... that was super random and unexpected and didn't contribute to the story" and you want to tell them THAT IS THE BEST COCONUT EVER I HAD TO FIND A USE FOR IT or I WANTED TO WRITE A STORY ABOUT DAMAGED RELATIONSHIPS WITH FATHERS but... your story has turned into something completely different and it just doesn't fit. So then you end up with these leftovers, and here is where the Kayla's cabin example starts to fail because we are all underage and at our 5 year reunion Derek and Alisia will probably still be underage, but my grandmother once bought a bottle of wine and she saved it for a perfect occasion. "It's wine," she said, "it'll just get better with age, wine doesn't go bad" but she kept waiting and waiting for the perfect occasion and when she finally opened it a decade or two later, it had turned to vinegar and nobody would touch it. My mother says granny should have just opened it earlier, found a time to use it at home, maybe brought it to a bridge party or something, but I always feel awkward eating good food alone. If you're not going to use it, don't buy it. I have a notes page on onenote for my story and on it are quite a few quotes and anecdotes that my story was supposed to use, some that I included in the first draft and some that I didn't, but that just didn't seem to fit. When I started writing I smushed some of them in there, crammed them into the awkward transitions in my story in hopes that they would distract the reader from the awkwardness (they didn't), and some I never managed to put in. Don't buy something you're not going to use.
P.S. Nathan, I do NOT find deleting to be like eating my children. How dreadful. Get your butt off my blog. Just kidding, you can comment. But really. Was that necessary?
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