This Writer's 2nd Office

That’s another thing about working at home, especially if that work is of the creative type. Looking at the same four walls 24/7 can get boring. You feel stale. The Inspiration Inn is festooned with dusty cobwebs.

My favorite solution is to head for a neighborhood coffee shop. For the first few books, it was Starbuck’s. The change in scenery and aroma of fresh ground coffee reset my brain cells and the words started flowing once again.

The problem with Starbuck’s is that their teensy tables allow very little space for papers and notebooks. Thank goodness, help arrived a couple of years ago in the form of Kaldi’s Coffee Shop just a few blocks south of here.

Like my previous hang out, Kaldi’s has great coffee. But it’s also offers delicious food, wi-fi connections which brings in a lot of laptop workers, and roomy tables, both booth and free-standing. I’ve found my second home office.

Scott Ginsberg, author of Hello, My Name is Scott, wrote an article while sitting in the produce section of a local health food store. Yesterday, I read that some woman wrote her first novel in the bathroom stall during breaks at work. Just think of all the potential “offices.” I can imagine how my writing style might vary according to location – Missouri Botanical Garden, Steak n Shake, the church library, or Chucky Cheese. Each place certainly puts me in a distinctly different mood!

The moral of this almost-story is that when a writer feels stale, she can make friends with a particular local hangout or experiment with the potential mental energy of a wide range of settings. Any of which are less boring than those same, dear 4 walls of home.