One beer and a train ride

Happy 5th of July

Regular readers here know I do most of my novel writing on my phone on the subway, which is admirable for its tenacity/delusion and also incredibly inefficient.

I had one lone train writing session on this first week of my kids’ summer break, but it was on the Amtrak instead of the subway, cruising to meet my family who'd started their July 4th fun while I had to get a few more badge-ins at the office.

Dreamily, the writing was done on a laptop with a full sized keyboard at one of the four-seater tables where you face two other passengers and mercifully, those passengers were not salespeople talking about SAS the whole trip as I so often hear on these rides, and neither was the guy next to me. He was in sales but had the good sense to not strike up a conversation until ten minutes before his stop.

Typing on a regular keyboard and not having to perform Olympic-level thumb gymnastics to use proper quotation marks was a joy. Not having to reload my google doc every third time service cut out between stations was a revelation. Knowing I could keep writing for more than twenty minutes was…not as bad as I feared. My body has grown accustomed to tiny bursts of writing and I find myself distracted when I write past an average one. I did have to fight that, but with the keyboard and lack of chatter about solution-based selling, I'd written so much bad dialog without overthinking any of it that I was already well on a roll.

About the beer.

Before my husband and I moved to New York we’d do this train ride for work often enough that our standard cafe car fare on the ride home was a pretzel cup and one Dogfish Head 90-minute IPA. I traded the pretzels for peanut M&Ms this time, but the tradition otherwise held and is always a little nostalgic.

It feels like I've been working on this novel for a total of forever, but doing so wasn't even a thought in my mind in those early Amtrack days. So even if it will still take me forever to finish, sensing that progress was nice.

Week 124: Chugga Chugga toot toot

Some everyday: No

Words: ~400

See you next week.