Writing Murder At The Second Cup

I live in a hovel on a street called Murder Row. That's not the name on the street signs, but then, the street signs are so riddled with bullet holes the real name has been obscured since god-knows-when.

The last time a predator tried to pick up a young girl on Murder Row, the girl got into his car ... and the driver was never seen again.

The music on Murder Row is loud. The neighbors always sound pissed off and their volume control is set permanently to YELL. Once, an old woman complained about the noise. She was never seen again.

I live on Murder Row, but I write at The Second Cup Coffee Shop. Here I am writing at The Second Cup …

It's in the downtown core of the city. It’s where I am right now as I write this. It’s Easter Sunday and my daughter Cassie (who appears as Cassie Mae Hayes in my last novel, The War Bug) was supposed to be here working, but she changed shifts with one of the other girls and went home to her mother’s before I got here.

That’s OK. I have her bag of Easter chocolate. Do you hear that, Cass, Dad has your chocolate.

Anyway, I went through an interesting episode about sixty pages into Murder by Burger – some call it Writer’s Block, some call it Burnt Out, some call it Having A Tough Fucking Day. It was weird. Every time I sat in front of my computer, fingers to the keys, or at my desk, pencil in hand, or running through the woods, digital recorder poised to dictate … nothing came.

I turned my writing toward other things: a book on marketing for writers, media releases and promotional stuff for my other novels, blogs and web sites – anything but the novel, or any kind of fiction, for that matter.

After a frustrating year of this, J. Richard Jacobs emailed me about writing some short stories for an anthology he had in mind. He was looking for something a little out in left field, something weird. This appealed to me and I said yes.

I quickly outlined a few stories, but I couldn’t write them. The words wouldn’t come. I tried writing mindlessly (advice I give to my writing students), I tried writing the last sentence first, I tried writing from the middle outward. Nothing worked. The words floated around in the wellsprings of my creativity, and sank.

Then, my daughter started working at The Second Cup Coffee Shop. It was her first job, and she loved it. The Second Cup is kind of a cool place. The clientele is one of the most eclectic of any coffee shop I’ve ever seen, a mixture of college and high school students, business people, government workers, and the occasional writer. In the winter, the homeless sometimes stop in to sit at a table and warm up before heading back out into the streets in search of pop cans and bottles.

The first time she worked the late shift, I went to pick her up an hour early. I brought along one of the stories I was working on for the Twisted Tails anthology, It was called Falling Apart and it was about a man who was literally falling apart – ears, nose, fingers, feet were all falling off. I started working on the story with pen and paper, writing furiously without really thinking about what I was writing, without correcting spelling or revising clumsy sentences. By the time she was ready to leave, I”d written two pages.

I put them into my computer when I got home, and even went a line or two further. I printed out the script and took it into The Second Cup the next night … and got three more pages. Over the next year, I wrote three more short stories, two novellas, two prose poems, the beginnings of half a dozen more short stories and the rest of Murder by Burger – right up to the last few pages this way.

If all goes well, I’ll finish the first draft of Murder by Burger tomorrow night, right here at The Second Cup Coffee Shop.

(BTW, the picture was taken by Cassie.)