Bar of Adventure

That's not actually the name of the TVTropes entry. The idea is a bar or tavern or club that provides a meeting place for the various heroes, and in many cases, is the neutral grounds where they can also meet up with the bad guys.

There is entangled with it the concept of a central spot, a hub location, for loosely connected adventures. This bar might be in the borderlands of space or in a sprawling multi-cultural trading town or a big city with a violent underbelly.

Basically, this bar is not just a place to relax, it is a place where the next adventure begins.

And boy does this tie into tiki culture, because tiki has since its invention packaged exoticism and the lure of adventure right down to the very drinks.

I am working on the first chapter of The Tiki Stars. My protagonist Rick Starr had a Mai Tai in his hands...and I stopped to look it up. Because part of the game I'm playing is that Ray's bar, out on a sandy spit and across the tidal flats from the spaceport of this colony world, is not just a Bar of Adventure where crooks and drunks, smugglers and revolutionaries are known to meet, it is also the Birth of Tiki. An imaginary version that is no less re-invented than Donn Beach's colorful past.

I was also crossing it with the idea of a pilot's bar, with the typical memorabilia (pictures from the war, a prop hanging on the wall, that sort of thing). I wasn't sure if that made a good blend with the tiki decor, which historically started as, basically, all the crap Donn had lying around that he could pin on a wall.

Yeah. That Mai Tai? Aside from the contested origins of the recipe...so there's Victor Bergeron in the mix, and Sven has a word about that, of course...it also was likely based on and certainly has a relationship to the Test Pilot, the Q.B. Cooler and the PB2Y.

Yeah. Q.B. stands for "Quiet Birdmen," a fraternity of...pilots. There is very much already a connection to pilots, and specifically, W.W. II pilots, in the early days of tiki.

***

But outside of that...

I think this is a good project for me. I am still reading up (now a great -- and angry -- book on the relationship between the nuevomexicanos and Los Alamos). And getting new ideas. But the tiki book is bringing me back to very basic writing, writing on the sentence level. Stopping at every adverb (I've got a problem with those) and with every noun of world-building, asking if this detail is really necessary, and if it is confusing.

The incredibly freeing thing is that I don't feel constrained by the real world. This is a big problem for me in the Athena Fox books; I started them in reaction to the bad history of the typical "Archaeological Adventure" and that sort of infected the process to where I didn't want to alter the menu of a (real) restaurant I wasn't even giving the name of in the text.

I'm not the only one. There's a phrase I've forgotten that gets used around writing circles for when a writer goes out of their way to explain something that the audience was, actually, quite willing to just take on faith. This one is so old, it shows up in Homer. There are several bits where Odysseus goes on laboriously about why he didn't do this other thing instead.

One suspects in that case the "imagined reader" was in fact a very much there in person heckler as the story was being told (from memory) by a story-teller. And that answer to audience objections ended up getting codified in text when Homer wrote it all down.

For the tiki book, if something in the world looks like it could raise a question with the reader...I just go and change it.