First you get the power . . .

Yesterday was not the productive extravaganza of writing I intended it to be. First and foremost, I am a curmudgeon, and as such had a hard time finding someplace to work that satisfied me on all levels. The levels in question are:

Free wifi, reliably. Wifi is nice, but not if you want me to buy credits and pay for it, tyvm BN cafe. Wifi that is free and spotty is worse than pay-per-hour. It can spell disaster.

Good food. If your establishment has free wifi, that's great. But if your burgers are dry, overcooked, without lettuce, tomato, or onion, and on a tasteless white bun, next to obviously-from-the-freezer fries, you fail.

OUTLETS EVERYWHERE. Seriously. This is the big one. If I'm going to set up camp and buy coffees, teas, snacks, and sandwiches for five hours straight, I want to plug in. My battery is good, but it's not that good, and one outlet for every twenty customers just ain't gonna cut it. Especially when that weird lady who had been standing on the corner singing to a photograph is at one of the tables blessed with power. She had a scone, by the way, and whatever she was drinking out of the blue plastic jumbo take-out cup she came in with. She did not use the outlet. Many glared in her general direction. I chose to seek outlets elsewhere.

So I finally settled, much too late, at Brewberry's, mainly because I was cranky and wanted ice cream. NOTE: Brewberry's is not selling ice cream until the spring. Super.

But they do have great coffee, and I did finally get about 2000 words down, which I realized after writing it had been very "tell, not show," so I rewrote all of it this morning. And here we are.

Sam just fell asleep for a nap, a little ahead of schedule, so back at it. I've still got more than three weeks left of January, and probably about 20k words to write, and I still have hope that this YA MS the first will be done before I leave for SCBWI in NYC on January 28.