Those who know me know that I love to write in coffee shops/diners. I wrote almost every word of the Buffy novel Tom and I did (Creatures of Habit) at a family restaurant in Silver Lake.

It's funny. Even after Gabrielle and I got our lovely home in the hills (which feels like a perfect writer's retreat -- one of the most important things that made me realize it was the right house for us), and even though I have a perfectly secluded, retro UglyTown office (metal desks, baby!), I still feel the need to sit at a coffee counter to work.

It all started many, many years ago when I first started college. I lived at home with my parents for the first two years, and that meant I needed to get out if I wanted to get anything done. I figured the bottomless cup of coffee would help me stay awake when translating Latin or reading Nietzsche -- both activities I remember well.

Tonight, I went back to that family restaurant that I went to when I was a teenager. I had my laptop with me, and it made me think that the last time I came here to work, I'm not sure they had even invented laptops. (I'm only half-joking here.)

Perhaps the weight of time brought with it fortune, because I cracked a rather important problem with the outline for my next novel.

I used to really love (well, hell, I STILL love) reading back a page or a chapter that I feel I really nailed. But I've come to appreciate even more that raw moment when the flow of a story breaks open. When an outline reveals itself to be not a static skeleton, but something more alive. It's a Frankenstein moment to be sure; that moment when the story you are calling and calling and calling makes its first small step toward coming home.