_{The Coffee Shop}

Noname sat at a coffee shop patio table, shivering. Damn it's cold. Why does it have to be so cold? It was the wind. It would have been much warmer had the wind not blown so hard. This time of year, it was normal, so he accepted it.

The Standard Coffee Shop was like a thousand other coffee shops in LaLaLand. People standing in line, workers behind the counter running madly to keep up with the growing crowd, filthy bagel crumbs and dirty napkins littering the counter top. The place smelled like the inside of a coffee cup that had been sitting in the sun all day. When Noname purchased his large cup of coffee he thought about leaving. This place is a dump, he thought. Instead he took his coffee and found an empty table outside on the patio.

Noname needed to work. He was by nature lazy, but a writer must work no matter how much he wanted to be somewhere else. Words had to hit the page consistently no matter what, day in and day out, or the bills would remain unpaid. He had no choice; he had to write at least five hundred words or feel like more of failure than he already felt. Writing kept him sane. 

His novel had no title. In fact, it had no setting or plotting or even a good character. Not yet. Noname's favorite professor, Dr. Asswipe Numbnuts, taught him to begin a story with either a strong character or an interesting setting. From these starting points, a plot would emerge like a string of vines growing on a brick wall. Dr. Numbnuts knew how to write, Noname was sure. The professor was popular among his students and was respected for having written fifty-four novels over a span of thirty years. Dr. Numbnuts was tall, lanky, had huge hands and liked to play the banjo. Yes. The banjo. When Noname visited the professor's home recently he had seen an expensive looking banjo in the corner of the living room. Ivory frets decorated the finger board, walnut being shined to a high brilliance. The well-worn drum head showed grease and dirt from the constant strumming of the professor's right hand as he finger-picked the five strings that were tightly stretched along the length of the instrument. For a banjo, it was beautiful. Was it possible for a banjo to be beautiful?

Five hundred words. Noname was stuck. He stared at the computer screen waiting for something, maybe a word to magically type itself into the manuscript from an unseen hand. He drank some coffee. It was getting cold now, too. I'll start with a setting, he thought. I'm at a coffee shop, so why not write about the coffee shop? I need to write five hundred words. That's all for today. Just five hundred words.

Noname began to write, forcing his hands to hover above the keyboard. He waited. Soon his fingers began to tap the keys and words began to fill the page. Suddenly he glimpsed downward toward the word count on his manuscript. Five hundred and twenty seven words.