Story: Coffee & Cigarettes: A Love Story

Coffee and Cigarettes: A Love Story
By Varian Milagro


“There’s something strange going on at my work,” Brooke Paulson said to her sister, Ashley, as they sat across from each other at a downtown restaurant.

“What is it this time?” Ashley asked as she rolled her eyes. Her sister tended to see conspiracy everywhere.

“I think the coffee is making people smoke,” Brooke replied.

“I should have known that you didn’t invite me to lunch just to visit.”

Ashley loved her sister, really she did, but her sister tended to annoy the hell out of her. Besides the paranoia, there was the job itself. While Ashley had worked tirelessly to graduate at the head of her high school class and holding down a part time job to save money for college, Brooke had played video games and earned a 2.0 GPA in middle school. When Ashley graduated Magnum Cum Laude from her university, Brooke had barely earned her high school diploma, having spent all her time on Facebook and twitter. Once out of college, Ashley couldn’t find a job to save her life, while Brooke fell ass backward into a job as the Social Media liaison for a large accounting firm. So, while her sister has her own apartment and makes 50k a year while playing on Facebook and Twitter, Ashley is struggling to finish her masters while working as an intern and freelancing on the side.

“I’m serious. We started getting a new brand of coffee a couple months ago and, like a week later, people start smoking.”

“You know that correlation does not equal causation. Perhaps they were closet smokers or they just didn’t smoke at work.”

I finished a story!

I finished a story! Yeah!!

In my last post I stated that I was going to take part in National Novel Writing Month. Well, that lasted three days. I really did not want to write another novel length story this year. I have two that have not been posted and I did not want to add a third to the pile. I switched to made a half-hearted attempt at starting a TG version of my story "The Birth of Bethany" and I may continue it at some point, but I really wanted to post a story. It had been over four months since I last posted a story online and I was getting itchy.

Writing goal - progress

Well, I didn't do that well on my writing goal for October. I was able to revise one story and submit it for comments and I nearly finished another, but I did not tackle the third. I struggled with motivation in the later part of October. I love the farm story and look forward to receiving comments on it. And I look forward to taking another pass at the salon story, but the story "Coffee and Cigarettes: A Love Story" has been a bitch to write. I like parts of it, but many times I ask myself "Why, the flip, am I writing this story" and I don't have a good answer. I think I may need to put it aside and work on a story I feel compelled to write, but at the same time I think that if I give up on the story it will be that much easier to give up on the next one.