Excerpt: A Spectator's Chance on Earth / Wine and Blood Share the Same Color / Word Count

Word Count-

I dragged my coffee-soaked self to the local café, wondering if taking caffeine intravenously would work. It worked for other drugs so why shouldn’t it work for caffeine? It wasn’t like caffeine was really all that much different from heroin or anything like that. Well, it sort of was in the fact that caffeine wasn’t all illegal and as far as I knew caffeine was pretty safe on the not killing brain cells front.

I walked through the door with the annoying little ringing bell, the one that always insisted on disturbing the patrons of the café as they were going about their business. It was like the people that owned the café didn’t understand that some people like the novelists that frequented the shop needed quiet that was uninterrupted by a little bell ringing to work.

The thought of the times the bell had disturbed me started to irritate me but then the heated air filled with the scent of coffee hit me and I was calm again. I wasn’t exactly calm though; I was a little fidgety at the smell thinking about the coffee I was going to soon be drinking. The doctor would probably say that I had a problem but I was just an author, we got away with having problems.

I headed up to the counter and ordered my usual peppermint white chocolate mocha. That was one of my favorite things about going to the café during National Novel Writing Month. It was November so it was close enough to December for them to start doing all of the special holiday drinks. I hated the fact that they didn’t have the holiday drinks all year round. Then it could be Christmas all of the time, that would be nice. People would be so much happier if it could be the holidays all of the time. Everybody was always nicer and in a better mood around the holidays. People didn’t understand that it was possible to act like that all of the time, the holidays remind them that they should.

As I stood there waiting for my drink I surveyed the room for subjects to people watch. The most interesting people came into the café; I always enjoyed trying to figure out what exactly they were doing and why they were doing it. It was a habit, one that couldn’t be broken when I made so many frequent visits to wonderful places like the café with prime subjects for people watching.

One man immediately caught my eye as someone to watch. He was tall with dark hair, very handsome, exactly the kind of man that would make a good character. It was just a matter of trying to figure out what his story was. He seemed like the artsy type, the type that was happiest whenever doing anything creative. If I were to use him as a character though, I was going to have to figure out just what his craft was.
He didn’t seem like the artist type. They usually had paint on them somewhere and didn’t typically go to café’s for coffee. From what I could see there wasn’t a speck of paint on him and the steaming black substance in his cup was indeed coffee. He also didn’t seem like a photographer. They always had those stupid looking cameras hanging around their necks wherever they went. All of the ones that I had met seemed to think that they needed to do that so that they wouldn’t miss a shot, but I told them that it just made them look like dumbos that had forgotten to take their camera off.

I was about to consider another role for him when I heard my name being called from behind me. That showed just how often I was in that café, the staff knew me by name. As I turned around to grab my drink I wasn’t exactly sure whether it was a good or a bad thing. Oh well, at least I always knew when my drink was ready even if others ordered the same thing as me.

I headed over to the grouping of couches and sat down in the very corner of it, trying to avoid making it squeak. It was a very annoying sound so I always tried to avoid it but I always seemed to make it anyway. I cringed a bit at the sound of the squeak as I sat down that day and quickly pulled out my laptop from my bag. I couldn’t afford to spend any time not writing, not even time waiting for other participants in NaNoWriMo to get there.

The sounds of typing filled my ears and I was totally oblivious to everything else as I watched the words fill the screen. I took a moment out at the end of a conversation two of my characters were having to check on my word count and I was surprised to see that most of the couches had filled up during my writing space-out with many writers varying from those that went for the pen and paper and those who had the top of the line laptops. I was the most surprised though, to see the man I had noticed before sitting right across from me.