originally posted at After Midnight’s blog

I had a deadline for April 1, 2009.  The follow-up to Fragile was to be turned in.  Except about mid-February, the book was still fighting me.  I had this idea for the story and about 1/3 of the way through it, I realized the hero needed a different heroine.  Now the one I was giving him…he wanted her.  But she wasn’t right for him.  I started getting these glimpses of this other heroine…now she was right for him.  But I ignored it.

And what happens?  The story bogged down.  The heroine just wasn’t working for the hero, no matter how much he thought he wanted her.  So I trash the story in January and start rewriting.  From the original story, there is exactly one line that is the same in the finished version.  One.

That’s a lot of rewriting, yes?  I had 2 words.  I needed 90,000.  By mid-February, I had…oh, maybe 50k.  I also had edits coming in left and right, and a vacation coming up (the week before my deadline-what was I thinking?).  And the damn story just wouldn’t come.  Even though the new heroine was working for my hero, and for me, the story wasn’t coming.

About two weeks before my vacation, I decided one morning that I wasn’t going to keep writing at home.  For some reason, I decided to go to Panera Bread and write there.  Write, munch on a bagle, write.  And it worked.  There were no distractions-other than other bagle munchers and the lure of wireless internet access.  But there was no laundry.  There was no TV. No toys laying around that I had to pick up.  No mailbox.  No list of errands glaring at me from the corner of my eye.

It was just me, the laptop, the bagle…and the story.  I spent about four or five days writing at Panera Bread and I got the story up from 74k to 95k.

I don’t have a depressing workspace.  I have nice pretty blue walls, I have my iPod close by, I have a big windows, an office full of books, both the kind I read for pleasure and the kind I use for research.  And normally, I can work at home just fine (usually).

For some reason, though, this story needed a change of pace.  And now I’m hungry for another bagle…damn it.