These are strange days around here. Fall has come, and I am on page 50 of the novel I am writing, the one that is due next spring. I have discovered lately that it behaves better when I take it out in public to write on it.

I suspect that all novels have their own personalities, and my last one preferred to speak to me on the screened porch just off my kitchen. I sat at the glass table, with my papers spread out all around me, and when I was staring into space waiting for the next scene to appear, I could monitor the neighborhood squirrels’ games in our dogwood trees. (Do you know that squirrels never, ever fall, no matter how far they jump?)

But as I said, it is fall now in Connecticut, and that means that people are outside with their leaf blowers, so the whole area sounds like a convention of dental drills. When I write outside there now, my characters have an unusual amount of tooth pain, which is hard for them because they have all kinds of other, more important issues they have to resolve in this novel and they don’t need dentistry to make their lives even harder.

So this new novel and I had to take to the road to see where we worked together best, and so far it seems that we have to be at the Starbucks.

I’m not proud of this, you understand. I would much rather stay home and be productive–but how anyone can be productive in the same house with a dog, an internet connection, and a bathtub is more than I can understand. At any given moment, one of the three is always beckoning. Come on, you’ll be so much more productive if you just take a nice, hot bath and think over the next scene. Just pet the dog, and check your email, and then get in the tub.

Not that Starbucks is always terrifically wonderful as a writing studio. Somedays its chief advantage is that it doesn’t own a bathtub.You might think that its drawback would be that people in there are talking too much–you know, meeting friends for coffee, the way the place was designed for. But in fact, most people there are working. It’s become an office building, and if there is any talking going on, it’s usually people on their cell phones pleading for more time from their editors.

The other day I worked for a while, listening to the soft jazz from XM radio, and typing while sipping my venti iced tea (when you use Starbucks for an office, it seems only fair to use their funny little code words–it makes them so happy, like you’ve joined their club), but my characters seemed grouchy with their lot in life. One of them wanted his name changed from Denny to Trace. (What kind of name is THAT?) Another, who I’d killed off in the first chapter, thought he was entitled to a reappearance in another character’s thoughts, but he didn’t want to be just a memory, he wanted to be an actual ghost. The jazz turned to hiphop. People started fidgeting.

After a while, one of the Starbucks regular customers got up from his laptop and walked around, talking to everyone who was typing, and declared out loud that there were no less than six books being written there at the time: three novels, a book on art history, an investment book, and a collection of essays. Some other people were writing magazine articles, and one woman was working on a thesis.

I began to see what the problem was. There were too many tense people trying to write at one time while drinking tallgrandeventi drinks with too much latte soy mocha in them. The air had gotten over-caffeinated. No wonder Denny wanted to become Trace. He’d lost his mind.

I packed up and came back home to the squirrels. Luckily it’s going to rain for the next three days, so the dental drill/leaf blowers will be silent. Denny-who-might-be-Trace-after-all might get to keep his real teeth. I shall sit on the couch with the dog and pretend I never heard of the internet thing and the bathtub thing, and tomorrow, with any luck, I will drink my own iced tea and coax this novel to page 53.