30,028 Words.... A Return To Jackie's Place

A fun writing session tonight, punctuated by red wine, 'guac', and unnecessary Dawson's Creek references, and by unnecessary, I mean completely necessary. This year has been a tough year for writing, with low morale seemingly all around. It was good tonight to remember that this is fun(!) and this is why we do it. Here is an excerpt copied largely from everyone else...

These thoughts haunt her, they unsettle her, and for some reason, she keeps coming back to Jackie’s Place.
Maybe it’s because Jackie’s Place always has the best music, maybe it’s because it ain’t the Hilton, or maybe it’s because she never knows what to expect at Jackie’s Place, and she likes that. The second day that she spent at her corner table, Jackie brought her a drink she hadn’t ordered. It tasted like a Shirley Temple with a generous smack of ham in a particularly dirty highball glass, but the strangest part of all was the jaunty addition of a drink parasol stirring stick fashioned with bamboo skewers and Union Jack crepe paper. No one would have even thought of arguing that they didn’t add a burst of patriotic spirit to that summer sip, least of all Grace, who was in the midst of an existential crisis of a proportion that hasn’t been seen since Dawson’s Creek went off the air, but needless to say, they didn’t exactly seem appropriate within the atmosphere of Jackie’s Place. Also, she wasn’t British, though she supposed that her icy demeanour and inability to interact emotionally with other human beings might have given him the impression that she was. Grace wondered if Jackie had fashioned the drink parasol himself; she thought of asking him, but soon thought better of it when he shuffled off angrily, probably to make more drink parasols.
Well, if there was one thing that Grace had learned from her obsessive watching and rewatching of Dawson’s Creek, it was this: you should never take advice on your heterosexual relationships from a homosexual teenaged boy, who has stolen your girlfriend, even though he is gay. That guy is not your friend. Unfortunately, she was learning, this little nugget of advice was not really practically useful to her in this particular situation, and in fact, you could learn very little about real life from a close watching Dawson’s Creek, particularly the ill-advised college years seasons. She was utterly lost.