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Say any coffee shop or library in Berkshire County where I live is a popular reading space like again. We have four kids running in the House is now not possible if they know Daddy's in the house then there will be other requests to build a robot or do something else which I would love to do but like I said the self discipline thing two factors in here. My son's like Daddy build me a robot like oh OK I'll build your robot instead I can stop reading for a while. So yeah I'd. I work in offices for a long time and I actually like to have a little bit of noise around me it's difficult for me to write in absolute silence which I think is maybe a little weird but so if I'm in a coffee shop as long as there isn't a discussion about like dental surgery going on next to me I can tune things out really easily and I can work for hours at a time. That kind of space. I have to admit I'm a sucker for dental surgery discussions do it actually right in the waiting room of a dentist's office. I know you know my wife and I are both writers and we have just two kids. It feels like a lot. And thanks to Brian and Mike just too just their little. And so we have the you know we have this little house. It's like a little shoe box house

and it has a little upstairs built for those. And that's you can have to bend to get into the attic space sickly the attic space so that's that's where we are right. We each have a little office and I do think that rather than the space that you write in physically like everybody's got their own process is kind of a process question. And the only advice I always have on that is like whatever gets your ass into the chair and keeps it there do that. And think about when you wrote the best thing that you wrote a thing you're proudest of you think really reached the deepest. And think about the emotional and physical circumstances that in which that piece was composed and try to replicate them which sounds kind of weird and cheesy Aimee Bender said it on this panel is like that's kind of new agey but then I thought about I was like she's right and I try to replicate some of those circumstances. It's what led me to the dental office and it actually was pretty effective.

The novacaine the laughing gas. I have for almost all of my writing life out of necessity written in fairly noisy places. Back when I was first started teaching I was stealing time and woodwork. If I was in my office my students would find me in there and and so I would work in the cafeteria. Wolf a hamburger turned my chair to the wall and and work for 45 minutes until my next class came along and it became part of my process and I've and I've always done that working in coffee shops and places like that even when the time came that I had a quiet place to work. By that time it had become part of my process and I've worked that way until about a year ago and I've had and I it took me a long time to realize what was going on. But I've had to come to terms with it when in fact I just kept waiting for it to go away. I started working at home now simply because of cell phones and cell phones.

Never mind a dentist's office or discussions of oral surgery. For me being in a and in a noisy coffee shop is perfectly fine everybody talking is perfectly fine you put one person with a cell phone and I am lost I am a lost human being and I'm discovering that that everything that's worked for me for the last 25 or 30 years as a writer suddenly doesn't work anymore and it's forced me. And in a way that I it's and it's it's it's been very very difficult but I've had to I've had to move my work space back into back home and I've had to adjust all of all of my rituals because I think what we're talking about when you say whatever gets you whatever whatever it is that works and replicate that it's ritual and ritual is not to become too you know mystical about this it's a it's a way of calling the muse you just you just you're looking for a way of golf or golf or or

or a hitter or or any in baseball you want written you're looking or you're always looking for repetitions. You want you want the unconscious part of whatever it is that you're doing to kick in. So you don't have to think about it. And so you're always looking for various ways to repeat repeat repeat repeat and so when you sit down you're not even thinking about it anymore you just already you're just already in motion. But that's for me what my repeat repeat repeat repeat which worked for 25 years suddenly I find is not working anymore and so I'm having to to relearn my golf swing or something I guess now and.