The Untitled Matt Colville Project

I love writing. There are few things I love as much as sitting outside as the sun sets on a cool summer evening, having something artificially sweetened and heavily caffeinated, while I tappa-tappa-tappa on the Lappy.

The Lappy isn’t named yet. It should be. Windows annoyingly won’t let me give the Lappy a really long name like GSV The Anticipation of a New Lover’s Arrival.  And unfortunately the Internet has yet to attempt the mammoth task of cataloging the names of all the Gods and Elementals in the Eternal Champion books. And clearly I’m not going to name it something obvious like Arioch or Xiombarg. So for now it’s Lappy.

Now, the process I do not love. It’s work. It can be a lot of work. Trying to work out Why Something Happens, or Why This Doesn’t Happen. I’ve never had writer’s block, but I have had Outlining Block where I’ve stared at the outline for an hour trying to figure out why the Hero wouldn’t just shoot the guy he would obviously fucking shoot.

This is something I can talk about for, literally, hours and that’s a good indication I should under no circumstance do so.

There was a point in the development of the book where everything at home became a distraction. Because I wrote at the same computer on which I watch TV and listen to music and surf the web and play games, all of these things made writing not impossible but very inefficient. Around the time I got really serious about the book, I bought a laptop.

I bought the laptop because I wanted to be able to take it somewhere, the library or a coffee shop, and work on the book. The point here wasn’t to work on the book “undisturbed,” but rather to have a specific place and time that I would come to associate with “writing.” I still checked my email, updated Facebook, but now these were little things that gave me a break from the intense experience of getting everything on the page. It took me months to finish the outline, but once I’d done it the book came very quickly.

It was not unusual, for instance, for me to be typing away at a high rate of speed, sitting forward in the wrought iron chair outside at Starbucks, with a look of something like hunger on my face. Certain chapters, once finished, would leave me in this kind of delirium where I felt like I had just been through what the main character had been through and I’d look around with what must have seemed an incredibly self-satisfied look on my face and everyone would be staring at me.

In other words, I had become the typical douchey writer tapping away on his laptop at Starbucks.

I did most of this during the Summer and there was a combination of the beautiful Southern California sunsets and the lovely warm weather that continued well after dark which meant I could write for hours, and did. Typically starting around 6pm and finishing around 10pm.

While writing I would often lose my sense of time. Hours would fly by. My heart rate would also rise dramatically and  sometimes I’d finish a chapter in cold sweat with my hands shaking.

“Man I’m an awesome writer!” I thought. Look at the emotional reaction, I’m having! This is so intense, surely it is a result of the profound insight I have into the human experience and the plausibility and rich emotions I’ve brought to the christ I think I’m having a heart attack I wonder how much caffeine is in this Frappacino doesn’t seem to be anything listed on the cup letmelookitupontheinternet. 90milligramspersevering6servingsinaventi

!^&%#(!^@%

One Venti Mocha Frap has as much caffeine as nine cans of Coke!? Who is the target market for this!? What demo has Starbucks identified who’d love to see through time and get heart palpitations but can’t get any good peyote?

Turns out my passion for writing was really just being addicted to caffeine and the sharp spike in productivity meant I had to spend more time on the back end editing to put verbs back in. And spaces. And, you know…vowels.

Caffeine is, as you probably know, an appetite suppressant but you don’t need to suppress your appetite when your caffeine delivery device also has 600 calories and a great deal of them from cream which is to say, fat. So the book was created through a strange ritual whereby I injected a double cheeseburger’s worth of fat and a 12-pack of coke’s worth of caffeine into my body. If the book takes off and I get to write sequels, I may die.

Eventually I switched to the low-cal version which only has 300 calories and things mellowed out a bit. I got a little less Coffee Writing done, but I enjoyed the mise-en-scène a lot more. I noticed the beautiful weather and amazing sunset more. I could see the Disneyland Fireworks every night and they were awesome.

I also noticed an abundance of really very attractive ladies who typically sat around reading and sipping coffee, some of whom were roughly my age!

It’s hard to chat someone up at a place you’ve picked explicitly to concentrate on writing. I wore headphones, for instance, broadcasting “leave me alone” so loudly that any homeless people who wandered by would just ignore me when panhandling. Unfortunately it also broadcast the same thing to the members of the fairer sex.

Occasionally I would write without the headphones on and in these times it wasn’t unusual for a woman to ask “what are you working on?”

I would smile and say I was working on a book, and this would produce a few minutes’ conversation in which I tried to be charming without actually talking about what I was writing because A: who gives a shit about what I’m writing and B: I could never find a way to say “I’m writing a fantasy novel” in a manner that didn’t sound like “I’m writing a fantasy novel.” I fantasized about putting on my comedic Cockney accent and saying “It’s got Orcs innnit!” but I’m not that brave.

Eventually, no matter how well the Chatting Up was going, I’d chicken out and get back to work. Maybe if I go back and start working on the sequel I’ll be more brave. “IT’S GOT ORCSES INNIT! LET’S HAVE A SHAG!”

Each time I would leave the house to go write, the Dog would complain that I was leaving her at home alone with the cats and each time I felt a little more guilty until eventually I gave in and took her with me. Other people did this, and I loved seeing their dogs lying at their feet, heads on their paws. I would say “Dee Oh Gee!” and they’d do that dog thing where they’d only move their eyes and their eyebrows would arch and I would sigh and get back to work.

Cookie isn’t one of those dogs. I mean, she can be, if we go for a run around the block first and she gets tired, but getting in the car just gets her wound up and she doesn’t unwind until we get home.

As soon as we got in the car, I regretted it. She freaks out in the car, don’t know why, I think she’s just really anxious to stick her head out the window but I’ve never been 100% sure she’s not going to leap out the window and so I don’t let her do it which is a kind of torture and I feel bad just writing about it.

As soon as we got to the Starbucks I…did the opposite of regretting it. Whatever that is. I deregretted it. I reversed my previously held position. Because man the women there loved my dog. Cookie is a Yorkshire Terrier and is therefore the least threatening dog imaginable without being a Chihuahua. She looks like a little teddy bear and in fact when you look up Yorkie breeders, their ads often say “genuine teddy-bear face.” Not entirely sure the breeders grasp the meaning of “genuine” but I doubt people buy from them because of their grammar.

Cookie loved the attention and I was happy to talk to people who love my dog and everything was going great. I set up my Lappy and wrapped the leash around the chair so Cookie had a little maximum radius within which she was free to caper.

There’s no real way for me to describe the typical Starbucks woman without sounding sexist, but the reality is, they’re almost exclusively beautiful which probably has more to do with Orange County than anything else. Many of them are very young and to my eye scantily clad, but all this does is make me want to read them a story and make sure they get into a good college. The women my age are almost all tanned and fit and look like they just got back from or are about to go for a run. I suspect there’s something going on here that I do not wot of. Some kind of cultural thing. The sample seems to be skewed.

I started writing and things were going well. I didn’t have my headphones in because I wanted to hear if Cookie started misbehaving somehow. A woman fitting the above description with the addition of long black hair pulled back in a pony tail fed through the back of her baseball cap, noticed my dog, and me writing and smiled. She reached down to pet Cookie, but Cookie did something I couldn’t see and she reached back.

“Does your dog bite?” She asked.

I smiled and shrugged and said “Zat ees nowt mai dawg.”

“What?” she said, frowning.

“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. I thought you were making an Inspector Clouseau reference.”

“A who?”

I shook my head dismissively as if to suggest it was in no way important. “Indie band,” I said.

This resolved she bent down and petted the Cookie-dog.

It’s hard to describe the process as petting because I think implicit in the concept is that the petter is active and the pettee is passive. Whereas through this entire conversation Cookie has been STRAINING at her leash, bouncing up and down, making little “Urf! Urffle!” noises, her little black nose pointed at the woman across from me. It was to this the woman reacted earlier. The sheer eagerness.

I don’t know what it is about this dog. She loves everyone. Any time she sees another human of any stripe, she is desperate to lick their faces. It’s normally adorable but sometimes I think maybe she’s just insecure and desperate for approval. I have no idea where she could get that attitude from hem hem.

So the woman bends down and Cookie immediately tries to sort of hump her body over the lady’s hand. The woman laughs because this is so weird. I think she thinks my dog is attempting carnal relations with her wrist and she smiles in a kind of embarrassed manner.

“She wants you to pick her up,” I say. That’s what Cookie is trying to do, she’s trying to climb on the woman’s arm so she’ll be lifted up when the woman straightens up.

“Oh!” She said. She takes from my statement that I’m ok with this, and unhooks Cookie from her leash, lifting her up. This was, in retrospect, the critical moment that caused me to be kicked out of the Barnes & Noble a few breathless minutes later.

She’s now holding my dog at arms length and Cookie is kinda trying to swim through the air toward the woman in discreet lunges. The woman looks at me, smiling at my dog’s strange behavior.

“She wants to lick your nose.” I am, at this point, perhaps less than enthusiastic about this whole thing because I realize I’ve been reduced to a kind of Dog Translator. I just explicate everything my stupid dog is doing. I’ve become the voice of my dog’s Internal Monologue.

Now, this is not the first time this has happened to me. It’s not the fiftieth time this has happened to me. So I know what’s coming. Probably I should have warned the lady. She seemed nice.

I don’t know what it is about dogs in general or Yorkshire Terriers in particular, but when I tell someone “She just wants to lick your nose,” they always let her. It doesn’t matter how otherwise sanitary or dog-averse the person is, once Cookie’s little teddy-bear face is staring them down, they invariably lean forward and let Cookie lick their nose. It always happens.

“Ooaaugh!” she yelled, shocked, and covered up her face with her hands. She didn’t exactly drop Cookie, just let her fall into her lap. The woman shook her head once, violently, and made a kind of “shnrdrappt” sound with her nose as she blinked furiously and her eyes began to water.

Cookie spun around in the woman’s lap with her tongue lolling out, this look on her face like “Success! Where’s the next victim!?”

I know what she did. She did what she always does. I feel a little guilty because I wasn’t more specific when I said “she wants to lick your nose.”

She stuck her tongue up the woman’s nose. I can’t be certain, but I’d wager it was all the way up her nose. She doesn’t just stick it up there either, she worms it up there, slithering it up the nasal cavity until it feels like she’s tickling your brain.

Before you ask, the answer is; I have no idea. She’s always done this. Probably she did it to me when she was a puppy and enjoyed my squealing reaction and learned a bad lesson. It’s like she’s planting a flag when she does it. She only does it once, and then she’s done with you and wants to do it to someone else. Ah, youth.

The woman is laughing/crying and says something to the women seated next to her, her friend, “I don’t believe what that dog just did!!”

As she turns around to describe what happened, Cookie jumps off her lap and was now free and off her leash on the patio outside Barnes & Noble.

Cooke has always seen the leash as a kind of game. The rules are, I win if I keep her on it. She wins if she gets off it.

In this instance, she had clearly won and the reward was getting me to chase after her as she rocketed away. It’s amazing how fast those little legs can go.

Laptop forgotten, I immediately went after her. I’m in pretty good shape, but she outnumbers me in the leg department to the tune of 2. After about a minute I give up because, sure I could have kept running, but to what end?

She runs around the building once, staying mostly on the sidewalk and for this I am grateful. Eventually I wrapped back around to where we started and I thought she’d be Nose Spelunking with the other people on the patio but I instantly realized this was not the case when I saw a number of people inside the Barnes & Noble in various states of alarm and amusement.

She’s inside the book store.

Ok, well the good news is, I have her cornered and it’s not likely she’ll get back out. A little out of breath and trying not to show it, I calmly enter.

If you have a dog you probably can imagine what she was doing. She didn’t attack anyone or anything like that, she immediately began sniffing the floor intently, her long brown-haired body moving fluidly close to the ground like a Hippie Roomba.

She was smelling for other dogs, presumably, and this involves about a dozen rapid-fire *snifs* and then, since at this point her lungs are full, a rapid exhelation. Like this.

*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*snif*PFHEW

Then repeat. It gives the impression of a very snooty dog because that big exhalation at the end sounds like a “Well, I never!” A kind of doggie indignation.

Pan the camera over to me and you see a guy who owns a dog desperately trying to own his dog without seeming like he owns that dog.

“Cookie!” I whisper. No good. She knows I’m there, she knows I know what she’s doing. She disnae care.

“Cookie come here!”

“PFHEW,” which is Dog for “Shan’t!”

It seems clear to me, in retrospect, that other people have brought their dogs in here and the guy who eventually asked me to leave had let OTHER people bring THEIR dogs in because eventually Cookie found the scent of another dog, and did what dogs do when that happens.

“Oh god,” I said. Now, I am a good doggy-daddy and so came prepared with two folded paper towels and two ziplock bags for just this emergency. But for some reason the people at the Barnes & Noble did not appreciate my foresight or her Genuine Teddy-bear Face because they reacted in a very alarmed manner as though dog pee was some kind of liquid Manhattan Project.

At this point, everyone in the store is watching including the people upstairs bending over the railing. Cookie having done her thing, she walks over to me and sits down proudly and waits to be picked up, which I do and, scolding her, almost run into the dude standing behind me.

“Sir I’m going to have to ask you and your dog to leave.”

I was a little taken aback by this for a couple of reasons. First, I was leaving anyway. Second, I’ve never had anyone talk to me like that before, I thought people only said things like that in the movies.

I resisted the urge to say “What dog?” It was the perfect moment for it and I could have deadpanned the shit out of it and Cookie was licking my face which would have made it extra perfect, but my heart wasn’t in it. The pee was the last straw and took the fight out of me.

I exited Stage Right and was happy to see my laptop was still outside and the pretty victim of Nasal Assault was gone, saving me some embarrassment.

I don’t go to that Starbucks anymore, I go to the one across the street from that one. They have free Wi-Fi and pumpkin scones.

I don’t take Cookie either. I’ve considered just taking a picture of her with the caption “MY DOG” to see if it gets the same response. Or I could take her and put a sign up on the table next to the Lappy reading “BEWARE OF TONGUE.”

I think that might send the wrong message though.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 1:40 am and is filed under Idle Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.