Notes toward a new book

[from your friends at Southern Comfort; yes, I own this]

Since my publisher has generously demanded a new book by the fall, I've been scribbling ideas in a WASTE BOOK and have gotten pretty much nowhere.

The easy thing to do would be to do some small thing that puts in print the cocktail recipes I've invented, and perhaps do some work on creating a slightly larger number of those.  But I feel a responsibility to the reader to do something more than those little pamphlets that the booze companies used to put out in the middle part of the last century for the newly middle class suburbanites. (See photo.) Plus, he wants 100 pages.

What I'd like to do is provide a little history of the cocktail revival, i.e., from those sad days of the Cosmo and frozen margarita till today's glorious revolution of real drinks, then lead the reader from their basic gin and tonic to a few more complex sippables.

But how to do that?

At the moment I am deep into the ABORTIVE ATTEMPT phase, just scribbling down random ideas and hoping one of them clicks. In the best Lichtenbergian tradition of TASK AVOIDANCE, of course, most of those notes are about the design of the book, not about the content or its organization.

However, I have written the first sentence of the introduction:

"This is the most expensive book you will ever buy."

That will make it fly off the shelves, right?