December daily: Sensory detail

cesperanza gave me this rather blush-inducing prompt: Do you have any tips for us newbies? How do you come up with such original sensory details while the rest of us mortals are doing "Scully smelled like strawberries" or "sandalwood and something else that was pure Blair?" TIPS PLS!

Beginning with the ritual pshaw at Cesca being a newbie ... or needing me to teach her anything ...

In Samuel Delany's Dhalgren there's a scene where the protagonist is in a bar, and he's met up with an astronaut who has walked on the moon.

"Tell me something about it that nobody knows," he says.

The astronaut protests that the story's been told so many times that every single significant detail has been discussed with the press over and over again.

"No, no, I never said significant," the other guy says. "Look at that shelf of bottles. See how, in the last bottle, there's so little liquor that you can see the concavity in the bottom of the bottle sticking up above the liquid? That's not significant. But you wouldn't know it unless you were here."

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