I have a terrible confession to make

Exactly!

There was this brief period of my life, post-college, where I thought about going back to school for a literature PhD. But I thought, am I really willing to dedicate my life's work to, say, gender dynamics in South African sonnets from the 16th century?

 

Exactly. Yes. Johnson is just the main character.

 

One of my favorite parent pictures is Little Whitman on the couch, reading "Passage of Power" at age 6, I believe. He read some JFK biography for kids, asked about LBJ, and I told him about Caro's project and, as luck would have it ...

 

I feel like such a nerd that I'm getting the same way about Caro finishing that final LBJ installment the way most nerds feel about George R.R. Martin and that next Game of Thrones book.

"You're 82, man! This thing could be over at any second! I need to know if everything turns out okay for LBJ!"

 

Caro has it in his will that no one is to finish the book for him. So if he doesn't get it done, it's not getting done.

It's not just Caro. Basically anyone who has ever worked on these books is hanging on—not to their jobs, but to life itself—just to see this through.

 

Someone was at my table at the coffee shop yesterday, and the barista made fun of me for being put out by it. I genuinely was.

 

I bounce around between four different local coffee shops, depending on what I'm doing before and after and expected crowd size at each at that time of day. I should probably put a spreadsheet together.

 

I'm going to go for a four-hour shift at the coffee shop today, and I don't give a goddamn who here in town thinks I'm a weirdo.

I'm so ashamed of the whole thing. I hate myself.

 

Typefitter: Excuse me, I was, uh, sitting there.

Coffee Shop Patron: Oh, there was no one here when we came in.

Norm: No, I mean yesterday. And, really, since the first Trudeau administration.

 

There's an old woman sitting at my table and I've been making the throat-slash gesture at her for 20 minutes with no luck.

 

This is a great thread. I used to work a ton at the local Panera, but then I quit drinking soda and I don't drink coffee and there's only so long you can sit there eating sugary pastries before you want to drink all the fucking soda in the world. I find I work best when surrounded by white noise, so I usually don't mind writing at home, though there are times when the outright chaos of a hyper five-year-old makes that difficult. If I ever had a longer-term project like Typefitter's, I'd probably either hit the Panera or force myself into a schedule of early morning/late night writing, when the child is at school or asleep.

 

You'll be relieved to know I got my table when I paid a kid $10 to choke out the old lady.

I am actually, weirdly, enjoying having a little routine in my life. I work on the book from noon until three every weekday. Totally manageable. Get my 500 words in, or more if I'm on a jag, and feel like I can do other stuff without guilt the rest of the day.

I'm 1,000 words, or two days, ahead of pace. Tomorrow I'll hit 10,000 words. Which is nothing in the scheme of things. But it feels good.