The Pleasures of Panera

Hmmm.  It wasn't my intention to have my heading sound like the title of a sci-fi novel.  What can I imagine for planet Panera?  A place where folks made of baguettes sail on endless rivers of onion soup?

Never mind.

I want to talk about possible havens from the solitary task of writing and bastions against its accompanying loneliness.   I may be a loner in some ways but the constant isolation of writing at home is too much for me.  So, like many of my compatriots, I've explored writing in other atmospheres.

Of course, you have the library.  That's a given.  Good place to meet readers for obvious reasons.  That's why I try to appear there dressed in one of the t-shirts I have had emblazoned with my book covers.   The result is cheap advertisement and one of the few situations where I won't be offended if I catch a man staring at my boobs.

When I write at home in my tiny office/den I feel like an aesthete stuck in a cave on a mountain top in the Himalayas.  (Gotta keep the heat down at home.  Another benefit of working in a warm public place where someone else is paying the oil bill.)  The library is warm, but it's almost as quiet as my office.  More so when you account for the fact that I almost always have the Weather Channel blaring just to hear the sound of a human voice.  And even if someone at the library should notice my shirt, a conversation about my work would be much more difficult to initiate than at a coffee shop or even a book store.

Larger book stores with cafes are another option.  Unless the cafe is small.  Then you might be asked to move if your food-consumption-to-time-writing ratio doesn't meet the management's expectations.  This happened to me once.  I wrote for an hour over tea and was just about ready to order lunch.  My appetite didn't coincide with the manager's patience.

This is why I prefer Panera's.  Unlike the library, there is food and drink if I get hungry.  Like any cafe, it smells of coffee and soup and cinnamon.  There is water there, and bathrooms for what happens after you drink it.  All the necessities of life and then some.  One of the Panera's I frequent even has a fireplace.  And they've never asked me to move.  Not even when all I ordered was a latte.  A possible negative for some - on most days it is noisier than the library or most bookstore coffee shops.  Sometimes much noisier.  This is not a deterrent for me.  Personally, I find that the white noise of others' conversations cheers me.  (Okay, except for the time the women in the table behind me were speaking about their highly personal problems LOUDLY.)

Actually, the chatter is the best part.  If I'm having a particularly lonely, isolated-writer day, I can wear my "Careful or you'll end up in my novel" tee and be assured that someone will start up a conversation with a lonely author.

Up to my ears in words

A writer's life.  Forget those visions of someone sipping a smoothie in front of their pc in their pajamas all day.  Someone still has to pay the bills, do the laundry, and call the oil company before the tank runs dry (something I forgot to do last month).  Someone has to answer e mails, the phone, and the doorbell for the UPS guy.  Someone has to call the doctor and the cable company.  Someone has to tell Verizon they screwed up on the monthly bill by charging them for 611 callbacks made to them in Mexico.  Add to that the myriad contests, agent queries, submissions, and the act of writing itself, and it's easy to see how writers' friends often wonder if they're agoraphobic. Who has time for a social life?

So, in the interests of MAYBE getting to a movie this weekend I'm going to keep this short and hunt down a market for one of my short stories.  No pajamas.  No smoothie.  Just me.  Up to my ears in words.

Getting back on track....

John Lennon once said: "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans."  And has life been happening to me lately!  In the space of about a month, all my technology went wonky - Bluetooth broken, camera doing odd things with my pictures, GPS died, computer power supply fried (with THREE hard drives failing to back up the info before this happened).  I felt like a little black cloud was following me - and it was electrically charged.

Well, now that I finally have a pc again, I find that I've lost my groove.  The Top Gear drive I was experiencing pre-crash is gone.  I used to get up and get on the pc first thing.  Breakfast was an afterthought.  I'd stay up until 3 or 4am.  I lived in a perpetual state of dehydration with dark circles under my eyes.

Now I'll  admit this tack wasn't very healthy, jangled my nerves, and tended to make me want to kick the person in front of me who had 11 items on the "10 items or less" line at Shoprite.  But my new groove - sleeping in and getting distracted by every little time-sink the internet offers - is very unproductive.

Well, I'm still getting used to Windows 8.1.  Yeah.  That's it.  It's the new OS.  I'll be back to slave driving myself and being obsessive about my characters again in no time.  Once I stop playing the free sessions of X box games.