Starbucks Staycation

One of the interesting side effects of traveling for work is that it has numbed my desire to travel outside of a fifty mile radius of my home (though, of course, how I define my home is something completely fluid and different each day). Hence, my staycation for the past two weeks. My time is almost up, but thus far, it has been incredibly relaxing and productive outside the context of work.

My daily schedule, which I could definitely get used to, involved waking up around eight, going to Starbucks, getting a hot chocolate or green tea, and then writing until noon. Once noon came around, it was time to go get lunch, either a sandwich or hamburger. Then, go to a bookstore coffee shop, and write for at least two hours. Rinse and repeat. If I got bored, people watch or play with the iPhone. There was a fair amount of people watching. At one point, I saw a moderately attractive blonde sitting in front of a series of textbooks and yellow-highlighted handwritten notes, talking on a phone, and decided to play the Sherlock Holmes game.

It started out that she was listening on her phone and saying nothing, while sitting in front of the books. At first, I had it narrowed down to studying for the bar exam or for medical school. It was definitely some sort of school, because she carried a bit of extra poundage on her frame, not so much as to be considered obese, but just enough to have been in a sorority in college, and have been put under extra stress. Part of me wanted to go with nursing school, but I didn't want to unfairly pigeonhole a moderately attractive blonde studying.

It turned out that the book she was studying was "Maternal-Child Nursing." I need to listen to my instincts more.

She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail. I don't know what that meant. A bandaid on her left heel, which means that she was wearing tight, potentially uncomfortable shoes, which means that she liked to look good, even to the detriment of her feet. Her toenails were painted bright red, and she had a toe ring on the second toe of her right foot, which backed it up. However, she was wearing comfortable clothing while studying, which meant she didn't have to look good all the time. When distracted, she would either touch the area between her breasts, pull at her bra cup, or bite her nails obsessively. Either she was studying intently, or flirting with the seventy-year old man two tables opposite. I am going to go with A. She covered her mouth at certain points in her constant phone conversations (bored out of her mind), which meant that she was saying something she did not want anyone to hear. I think it was at that point that she realized that I was staring, and was telling her friend, so I went back to the writing.

For the first day, it was almost entirely sitting and thinking and watching. I decided to set the next story six months after the end of the last one, and it has taken me a while to work out what happened in the interim. Over the past couple of weeks, the events have changed and been added onto, and a sickening amount of legality started working its way into the backstory, both for logic's sake, and for comedic relief.

I had always wondered what Starbucks looked like in mid-morning, once everyone had gone to work. At least for the summer time, the main groups that frequented were, in order from most common to least common: the elderly, mothers with young children and/or babies, driver's education classes that had let out, businessmen and businesswomen getting mid-day coffee, businessmen and businesswomen having meetings, duos working on their religious faith (mentor/mentee relationship), and on two occasions that I noticed, dates. And those were kind of sweet, they seemed to be having a good time, and they were on a date in the middle of a weekday.

On the individuals side, there were fewer patterns to notice, not to mention that they would come in, grab their coffee, and leave. The only patterns I could discern would be that anyone grabbing four or more coffees was young and looked a little stressed. One man cam in almost as often as I did, clad in a filthy t-shirt, stained and torn jeans, and a surprisingly well kept blazer. His salt-and-pepper beard and wild look made me wonder if he was mentally stable. I did take note of one individual wearing cowboy boots with his suit. Perhaps because the heels were low and his suit well-cut, he managed to pull it off without looking flamboyant.

While waiting in line for my hot chocolate or tea, I also heard the ridiculous orders people would throw out. The conclusions I could draw: those that said "small" instead of "tall" were making an active effort to not buy in to Starbucks, becoming semi-pretentious in the process (me). The longer and more difficult your order, the more likely you were also playing with your smartphone, had clean, well-groomed nails, and tended not to get it. If you held up the line because you had multiple orders, we didn't care. Once you tried apologizing, that just made all of us want to smack you.

There's a strong possibility that, whether intentionally or unintentionally, these people have in some form made their way into my writing. At least for me, character building is a matter of keeping a list of personality archetypes and personality traits/quirks in my head, then mashing them together in new patterns to come up with people. Generally, I fail at this remix, mostly because the people remain very familiar if you know the person on which I based them. Not to mention that for my writing during this staycation, I tended to use characters from the prior novel that I had already fleshed out. The one new character that I did create, now that I think about it, really had very little to do with any person that I had seen. It is one of those people that wants to be funny, tries their damnedest to be funny, and is only funny to themselves. They're the kind of person that wake up in the middle of the night, not to come up with the perfect retort, but because they just got the joke told five minutes before that retort was necessary.

Nowadays, when I write in a coffee shop or book store, I have a medium-sized Moleskine notebook and my pen. I used to take my laptop, but it became a ridiculous hassle to set up, and I could not go to the bathroom without risking losing my laptop to some quick-footed thief. Plus, I became "that tool." When I write, it forces me to go slower, because I do not write as fast as I type, and I have some more time to think. Plus, random notes and diagrams and lists are easier to insert.

And, what exactly is it that I have written? The beginning to book 2, six months out from the end of book 1, our protagonist now a glorified babysitter, a brutal murder by drowning drawing him back to the fold. A lot of plotting out what might happen over the arc of this novel, and that has already changed, but it was good to get a basic idea of what I wanted to happen, even if I do not get there.

But more important, the writing passed quickly. These two weeks have come and gone just like that. For a while, work was getting me down. I stepped away from it, refocused and remembered what was actually important, and it really helped. This writing thing is still not an easy thing, and it will never get easy, but at least I am starting to get there.