One of the most wonderful aspects about being a writer these days is that I get to meet so many wonderful writers and avid readers.  Without the modern marvel of the Internet, I would have missed out on some great new friends in my life.   Crime writer Benjamin Sobieck is a sharp, witty, and exciting crime writer.  Well… basically, he’s just an all around fun guy and he agreed to write a fun post for today. 

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Matching Your Beverage to What You’re Writing

by Benjamin Sobieck

In the early stages of my crime thriller novel, “Cleansing Eden – The Celebrity Murders,” I marinated my guts in vodka. It didn’t make paragraphs magically fall from the sky, but it did lubricate the creative engines in the early drafts. But like anything built under the influence, the end result was a bit wobbly.

I switched to coffee for the revisions. Caffeine also doesn’t make words magically appear, but it does help focus the mind for precision tooling.

I imagine this beverage schedule sounds familiar to other thriller authors. That got me thinking. Do beverages change according to genre? If they do, here’s my highly generalized list of matching drinks to genre.

Thriller – Booze then coffee, repeat.

Mystery/Crime – Booze and more booze, in that order.

Romance – Wine and sparkling water.

Erotica – Something salty.

Sci-Fi/Fantasy – Energy drinks and Mountain Dew, mixed to perfection.

Non-Fiction (journalists) – Antidepressants downed with a beer downed with coffee chased with a cigarette chased by a cop because you just did all that at once while trying to drive.

Horror – Is meth available in beverage form?

Western – Soda and chew juice because you used your soda bottle as a spitter.

Inspirational – The temptation here is to write “holy water and wine,” but I’m not up to tempting fate right now. So we’ll say “tears and lemonade.”

Humor – Vegetable juice and hot sauce to keep the spice up (not to be confused with the erotica beverage)

Incoherent Ramblings – Forget beverages, you need some sleepfpmdsaopfnads kfnewpijdfn3w9933333333333333333333

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About the author:

Benjamin Sobieck’s crime fiction has been featured in the Amazon Top 100, the national front page of Examiner.com and many “best of” lists. He is the author of the crime thriller novel, “Cleansing Eden – The Celebrity Murders,” the Maynard Soloman crime humor series and numerous short stories. His website is crimefictionbook.com.

Seven Things About Benjamin Sobieck

1) In 2010, a living donor gave me a kidney. It’s the only reason I’m up and writing today. The donor is still happy and healthy. I was lucky. Roughly 113,000 are hoping they will be, too, but 18 die every day. Please be an organ donor. Here’s information about becoming one.

2) Two-thirds of my caloric intake on any given day comes from peanut butter. Breakfast and lunch don’t happen without a jar of the good stuff. Purists like me prefer chunky.

3) I really enjoy cooking. To date, my talent doesn’t match my enthusiasm. My most recent successful culinary adventure was “duck nuggets,” made with wild duck hunted in North Dakota.

4) I work from a home office, but I still have a secretary. She handles phone calls, makes lunch and makes it easier to get things done. By that I mean, “jumps on my lap when I’m trying to dial a phone number,” “steals my lunch” and “bugs me to go outside and chase squirrels.”

5) I’m a big fan of horror movies. I used to rent old video tapes with my friends from this dump down the road. The B-horror movies were so bad. And at the same time, so good.

6) My two favorite authors are Elmore Leonard and Hunter S. Thompson.

7) I was in a garage band in high school and college. It was called Soylent Laxatives. Listen to our songs here on MySpace. (Wow, that felt weird to type. MySpace? Really?)