Most writers start their careers working at home. Besides being cheap, a home office has a lot to recommend it. You’re never far from the refrigerator, the cookie jar, or the television set. You can hide your writer’s block behind distracting little household chores and you can shlump about all day in slippers and ‘scrubs’. If you’ve spent too many days moving from the refrigerator to the cookie jar that’s about all that fits anyway.
The major disadvantage of working at home is that you are never out of the office. Twenty-four hours a day you could be working. You can’t say, “By golly, if I were at the office I’d re-write that character sketch,” because you are at the office, it’s just down the hall from you. Hence, your worry pendulum swings relentlessly back and forth between work, guilt at not working, and anxiety about unfinished assignments. This is not relaxing. Rats.
That’s the reason many writers are driven to find an office someplace else: anything to get out of the house. That’s what I’ve done, and it seems to me lots of foothills people have done the same thing. Unfortunately they have all chosen my office space, but I try to treat this as just another opportunity to get to know my neighbors.
From my office window I watch SUVs and luxury cars as ponderous as elephants, gingerly swap parking places; angling in and out of the lot. My motorcycle is there, because I’m working today. Writing this, as a matter of fact. It’s quite likely that the guy with the white K100 BMW will swoop down from Tierra Serenas, leave his helmet on the bike, and pop in to meet a friend. A Harley rider is an occasional visitor, too. A real rider and not just a weekend warrior, judging from the mileage on his odometer.
(Bike people tend to sneak a peek at the other guy’s odometer the way dogs sniff rumps.)
Friends and intimates criticize me for my office choice. I am deaf to the criticism, which most often (and annoyingly) takes the form that I spend too much for a cup of coffee. But that’s absurd. I’m not buying coffee at all, I’m renting office space.
Starbucks rents me the space. I get a table, a chair, and an executive washroom. If I beat the guy writing the novel to the corner table by the electric outlet, I get power for my laptop. Best of all the management throws in a cup of whatever is in the big urn behind the counter to say thanks for the business. Two bucks, change in the tip box. A deal.
We’re a varied group in my office complex. I see the two backgammon players are here today. The game is usually preceded by a discussion of what I assume are business documents, but now the papers have been stuffed into their purses, which are on the ground beside them, a cigarette is going and the game is on.
The novel writer is not here, but the distinguished older gentleman is. That’s the way I think of him, The Distinguished Older Gentleman. Always elegantly, if informally, dressed, razor-sharp crease in his slacks, polished shoes, shirt collar open but under a blue blazer with four gold buttons on each sleeve. Bent over papers, making a careful note or two with a pen and clearly thoughtful, he makes a fellow proud to be seen working here.
We do try to be reasonably discreet in our commercial activities so as not to disturb the folks in the library… the man reading the biography of Churchill, the woman deep in a book of anatomical drawings, or the teacher tutoring a student for her SATs.
One day a young guy my grandpa would have called ‘a traveling man’ set up a complete office. He spread out over a table for four with cell phone, laptop, sample book, PDA, and calling list. Starbucks must have been very glad to see him because they gave him a super sized coffee-flavored beverage, a drink with a name six words long that ended in ‘latte’
Depending on the time of day we’ll see people who think this is just a place to buy coffee and visit, and that’s nice, too. It keeps you in touch with the community, rather like strolling around a busy village square: Three women planning a gathering…geezers reading the newspapers… young people in hip huggers and flip-flops…pretty much a fair sampling of who we are up here.
Now all I need is a time clock and a place to display my business cards. Need to write a proposal? The writer is in, but his coffee is cold.
American-based news services are only now catching up with the coverage of the Egyptian rising provided by Al Jazeera.
