I have always carried memories of my life as little tiny bits of material for use in my stories. Upcycling writing.

In grade 10 or 11, a group of guys in my organic chemistry class decided they wanted to smell what butanoic acid smelled like. The teacher sent them outside, of course, because it smells like rotting fish if it dressed up like death and harvested the souls of the unworthy.

The boys, being teenagers, didn’t stop to think that bringing the papertowels the acid had spilled on back into the class. The room emptied.

Just today, I had to describe how a character would artificially create ambergris if he needed a lot and he only had a little. Cy used human ear wax and butanoic acid.