Coffee Novelist

A fish story

Coffee Novelist

October 21, 2019

“Barc Shif!”

-attributed to Fishy Man

I saw it today. It happened at a chance meeting with the artist who is doing the cover art for my first novel, Tripio. I loved it of course. What I saw was a mock up for the cover of my book. My name was on the cover. It looked like a real book from a bookstore or online page. My name was on it. My name as the author of a novel.

I spent a good deal of the rest of the day going about my blue collar job. From time to time I tried to recall when I first I dreamed of being a writer. My oldest surviving effort is a cartoon entitled “Fishy Man”, a fish that resembled a carp and who changed into a superhero after saying the magic words, “Barc Shif“. The phrase was intended to be crab fish spelled backwards. It’s not. But I was nine years old and so hiring an editor has not yet occured to me.

Fishy Man never made a splash, so to speak, but the desire, wish, hope, dream of being a writer stayed with me. I can’t recall waking up one summer morning and rushing to the kitchen and saying to mom, “I’m going to write novels!”

As I got older I ditched Fishy Man for The Beats and wondered through my post college years into parenthood, stopping for four years to work at Starbucks in Chicago. During those years, I wrote novels and kept journals as time presented itself. Parenthood suddently became all the time I had for the next twenty years left but I did continue journaling. The day on the job that brought me to the chance meeting with the cover artist was a typical day in my life now as a single parent of four grown kids.

Now headed home from the work day, I wondered if not for the 20 years of raising kids, of wathcing them create every day, would have forgoettne my childhood creation of Fishy Man.?Fishy Man who was born in the moment of pure creation from it’s own sake. Fishy Man who was swimming free of intent, the desire to impress, the condition he be edited and monetized. Fishy man, who couldn’t spell, but whose superpower was to create for own sake, for the imagination for the fun of just being able to do it- no string (of hooks) attached!

I dont’ know for sure of course. I just hope the some of Fishy Man’s superpower made it into Tripio and all my other writing. I hope adulthood didn’t force me to take it all to seriously.

“May I help who’s next?”

The visit

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October 21, 2019

In Tripio, https://www.amazon.com/Tripio-novel-Starbucks-Millionaire-Novelist-ebook/dp/B07NQ1413V Jay works at a Starbucks (called the Cosmodemonic Coffee Company in the novel for reasons I just covered in a previous post) store located near Lincoln Park on the corner of Clark, Diversey and Broadway. In Tripio, for the sake of brevity and authenticity, I refer to it simply as store #204. It was already beat up and worn out when Jay arrives there as the new Lead Clerk. But the store had character. And since his co-workers were mostly aspiring to make a living at one art form or another, Jay felt he fit right in. There are several passages in the book when Jay states that he feels at home at #204. He finds comfort settling back in there for a shift after returning to the city from a trip downstate: “ I had spent too much time here not to treat #204 as a home away from home”

So, it was no shock that I had a strong desire to go back and revisit store #204. I also wanted to look again on the Days Inn that stood diagonally and across the street from #204. There were many, many nights I closed #204 and had to get back to open for a morning shift. If I closed, I locked that door after midnight. If I opened the next morning, it was at 5:30 or 6 a.m. The Days Inn stood just across the street on those nights, calling me, tempting me. A shower and bed was just minutes away. My apartment was a long bus ride up Clark. It could take close to an hour before a shower and bed there. I would then have to make the return trip on almost no sleep. All that could be fixed by a night at the Days Inn. But no money, no way.

Photo Cred: https://www.tripadvisor.co.nz/LocationPhotoDirectLink-

As summer 2017 arrived I took the opportunity to drive to Chicago and see both places. I wanted to confirm the details of #204. After all, it had been 20 plus years since the last time I left it’s doors. My trip to Chicago was also a gift for my daughter. She was headed to college in the fall and we went together as a going away present. That is why I did no research on whether #204 still existed. I was going anyway.

Not surprisingly #204 was no more. If it is true that you can’t go home again, at least you have a shot if it still standing. I could visualize where it stood in the new collection of storefronts that had taken over the whole building that housed and surrounded #204. I can’t say I was crushed or even surprised. I could still hear the thud of the filter basket hitting the bar across the dump bucket positioned on either end of the espresso bar. I could hear the grinders clicking on and the shriek of the hot steaming wand entering the cold milk. All that was still in my mind.

As I think it over now, perhaps not having a physical confirmation of #204 made me work harder to recreate #204 in Tripio. I had to work to rebuild it, and I did. Look for proof when you read Tripio in the scene where Jay dusts off an “order here” sign that hung unnoticed by almost every customer and most partners who had ever entered #204.

So, the trip worked, just not in the way I anticipated. One thing that did work out more to plan was that I finally got to stay at the Days Inn. Now it is called The Versey https://www.hotelversey.com/ but the ghost of the Days Inn was still there. And it was put to rest. But best of all, my daughter and I had a grand time in Chicago…

“May I help who’s next?”

Starting to write

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October 21, 2019

I saw it today. It happened at a chance meeting with the artist who is doing the cover art for my first novel, Tripio https://www.amazon.com/Tripio-novel-Starbucks-Millionaire-Novelist-ebook/dp/B07NQ1413V . I loved it of course. What I saw was a mock up for the cover of my book. My name was on the cover. It looked like a real book from a bookstore or online page. My name was on it. My name as the author of a novel.

Fishy Man never made a splash, so to speak, but the desire, wish, hope, dream of being a writer stayed with me. I can’t recall waking up one morning and telling my mom I wanted to become a writer. Nothing so easily pinpointed as that. At least, I had always kept a journal.

I first started keeping journals in 1987. I refer to them when I need to find something, often something I hadn’t shared with anyone before. I’m sure there exists somewhere, a few pages in a small notebook which pinpoints the day when my hope of becoming a writer was re-born on dry land. Until that turns up, I will use the 30 plus journals I still have as confirmation of that hope.

The journals themselves were ,and still are, way more than lined paper dream catchers. They can be source material for whatever you want them to be. For me, they were also companions for the years I lived alone in Chicago, trying to finish a novel and working at a little known coffee company called Starbucks.

“May I help who’s next?”

Events follow Energy

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October 13, 2019

At this point on the journey of Tripio, a lot has been happening. A lot of good things have taken place So much so that last night I voiced a desire to possibly move the publication date of Tripio up a month or so. I chose April 11^th because in Tripio, the child that Kati and Jay are expecting has been assigned a due date of April 11^th. I will wait and see on the final decision for a new release date of Tripio.

“Nothing in human judgment is final” attributed to FDR

A lot of positive things are happening around Tripio: the wonderful blurbs from Starbucks legends, the inspired first mock cover, the classes at the Indiana Writers Centers seemingly appearing just when I need them, my tech support moving back home at the right time to help me launch this blog. All those events listed are simply events following energy. That is, good energy following good energy.

Events following energy is a cornerstone wisdom that I have believed in since way before I started working on Tripio. I had to understand it first in order to understand myself in order to put myself into a place to be able to create Tripio. For further clarification, find and read Daniel Pond’s Chakras for Beginners.

I can’t even recall when I bought the book, or how it came to me years ago, during the time I call “early recovery”. Finding that book can rightly be called a milestone on my journey.

From this book, I found so many wisdoms that I have come to use in my day to day life. I know I would not have come to create Tripio https://www.amazon.com/Tripio-novel-Starbucks-Millionaire-Novelist-ebook/dp/B07NQ1413V without having read Chakras. It is one of the books that I can honestly say helped change my life. Or as C.S. Lewis puts it in Experiment in Criticism, “I have become what I was not before”, upon reading Chakras.

Once again, the single most powerful wisdom practice I have followed since first putting down that book has consistently been “Events follow Energy”. The events I listed above are not random actions of an outside world that happened to crash into my life. For most of my life I would have seen those, and all events in my life, as such. I would have concluded that “Life happens”. Now I understand that it doesn’t. We create our lives with our thoughts and concomitant actions. Good events follow good energy. Bad events follow bad energy. I know, I followed some of them right into rehab. I have since worked daily, even hourly, to create better daily energies. Those energies continue to bring better events. A very short list appears above.

“May I help who’s next?”

What I see in the cover part 2

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October 10, 2019

Today I reached a milestone on the journey of Tripio. I had my last meeting with the artist who did the cover art. His field of specialty is fashion and design but circumstance created the interest and opportunity for him to take on creating the cover art for a book. It was all meant to be. I had never written a book before and he had never created a design for a book cover before. I can only hope the book is a good as the cover.

I will give you three guesses as to where the artist and I met for me to pay and for us to sign the copyright transfer. Need help? There was one exactly halfway between his house and mine. Still need help? Tripio takes place primarily at one of these places, although at the time of Tripio, there were about 10,000 fewer of these places to choose from.

From Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository

Well, you’ll get it eventually. For now I look at the cover and see the story behind it. I see the work that went into it. I see the very first cover draft I came up with. I see long the before that, to the writing of the book itself. And I see the requesting of the blurbs and the photo shoot for the back cover headshot. I see my original journals that begat Tripio. I see learning how to use Dropbox for the editing. I see myself with printed pages on my porch this past summer Sunday evenings, looking over what I had written that weekend. I see four am start times. I see that this list is getting tedious for you, so I will stop.

My point is this anyhow. I see a lot of good times. I see good times in my Mind Garden. I see good productive days and weeks getting both me and Tripio https://www.amazon.com/Tripio-novel-Starbucks-Millionaire-Novelist-ebook/dp/B07NQ1413V to this point. And that is what I feel best about when I look at the cover…even though you can’t see it.

“May I help who’s next?”

Something to think about

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October 3, 2019

Yesterday I took an hour drive to have breakfast with my oldest son. We were joined by his significant other, my daughter and my sister. After the mid-morning food, I undertook three more hours in the car to get back home which included a stop for coffee at a Starbucks. For some, that time driving amounts to the time they spend commuting every week to work and back. On a short week. In any case it seems like a good deal of driving just to have breakfast.

I wanted to see my oldest son at some point over the long holiday weekend and this proved to be the simplest way. For me, it was an easy decision and time well spent. We had good food, a good time and good talk, costing me four hours in the car. I wonder if Howard Schultz would spend four hours in a car to visit a 25 year old Starbucks location?

No easy answer to that question or proposition is there? In fact, it could be dismissed as clearly unanswerable and simply odd. But that is the kind of question I hope all of you who read Tripio put to yourself in some form or fashion. To fully grasp where I am going with this you will have to read Tripio. Because, in Tripio Jay is asking himself to measure the value of a family, compared to the value of a growing company, compared to the value of work of creative imagination. By some measures, he can’t do it. But, please read Tripio and see for yourself what happens.

I have come to the conclusion that I wrote Tripio in part to forgive Jay for not being able to see the future, for not being wise enough to know what his future would bring. None of us know that. But, I am not alone in being way, way too hard on myself.

Twenty five years later, after seeing way more of that future that Jay found so murky, I have mellowed a great deal. I have forgiven Jay for not being Nostradamus. I am content and blessed that his future found me. To understand this more fully please buy and read….

https://www.amazon.com/Tripio-novel-Starbucks-Millionaire-Novelist-ebook/dp/B07NQ1413V

And, to answer the question above, I would drive four hours again today if that is what it took to see my oldest son. In fact, I could make it in less than four hours if I didn’t stop at a Starbucks along the way.

May I help who’s next?”

Picasso horse

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September 30, 2019

Computers are useless-all they can give you are answers.

–Pablo Picasso

In Tripio, Jay is suddenly transferred from his nearby Starbucks to a location in suburban Chicago. He has no car so must rise at four a.m. to make the two train commute. He has to first take the El downtown and then walk several blocks to catch the Metra train heading west. That walk takes him through Jackson Square, crossing under the watchful eye of the “Picasso horse” statue. At this point in Tripio, Jay feels his life is no longer under his control. His dream of living the solitary life of a writer in a shack in Costa Rica is gone, unattainable. This sudden transfer to the suburbs has shaken Jay at a time when he was already mentally quite fragile. The city and square are nearly empty at five am. Jay’s only regular companion is the Picasso horse, who he now believes is alive and watching him as he crosses in front of it.

Does this mean that Jay knows his dream of living as a writer is dead? And can only be wishfully reanimated by the Picasso horse? Does is mean that Jay is losing his marbles just a little as the fear of parenthood shakes him to the core? Does the horse now represent Starbucks as a growing beast watching Jay’s every move? How the hell do I know? I just wrote Tripio. It’s up to you ,the reader, to decide that.

I started this post because I came across the above quote with the intent of tying it to Tripio via the Picasso Horse . I have done that, but lucky for you I am not finished. Here goes the bonus content… I wonder all the time about cell phones. What is so interesting about them? What it is in them that wasn’t there before? Why are the so enticing that many of us risk are lives to look at one while we drive?

Why am I asking so many questions? Because that is where the answers are, not in the devices at all. There are only answers and ultimately, and answers are boring, as Picasso is saying above. If the question in your mind is worth pursuing at all it must roll around and occupy your mind for hours or even days. So put down that phone and think, especially if you are driving, but not before hitting the link to buy Tripio on Amazon- https://www.amazon.com/Tripio-novel-Starbucks-Millionaire-Novelist-ebook/dp/B07NQ1413V

May I help who’s next?

Coffee and writing

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September 29, 2019

It is not yet seven a.m. on Sunday morning. And I have been up for close to ninety minutes. This is my schedule. I have come to the conclusion that sleeping in is overrated. This is my day off and one hears a lot about how others relish the chance to “sleep in” on their off days. I can’t, even if I try, I can’t. So, I get up and make coffee. Or, I simply warm up the leftovers from the day before and get to work. I always, always, always have a cup of coffee near me when I write.

vpjayant [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D

This brings me to Stephen Fry. I read once that when he was working on a screenplay for Peter Jackson he could not get going on it to save his skin. It took him awhile to understand the reason but it struck him that at the time he was working on the screenplay he was trying to give up smoking. Smoking energized his mind while at the same time the smoking ritual calmed and rewarded him as he wrote. I feel almost exactly the same about my cups of coffee. This morning, I am wondering if I could have written Tripio without coffee?

One indisputable answer is no. No coffee, no Starbucks. No Starbucks, no Tripio. Starbucks did not invent coffee. I drank plenty of coffee before Starbucks was available. In Tripio, Jay refers to a coffee house where he was working before he moved to Chicago. And even after Jay is working at Starbucks, he often goes to a favorite coffee house that “sat on an alley under the El tracks”. I come by my love of coffee honestly. Hey, I loved coffee before it was trendy and pricey.

The point here, however, isn’t how cool I am. I was thinking as I started this post that it could be a bad thing that I believe I have to have a cup of coffee within arm’s reach anytime I write. At times, I know that I will not drink the contents of the mug but that I have to have it close regardless. If I were feeling somehow inadequate about myself for not being able to write without coffee near, I arrived at the conclusion to stop it. One reason is that I am in good company with Stephen Fry. The second is that I would have never responded to the Starbucks want ad if I hadn’t already loved coffee. For proof I refer again to Tripio and Jay thinking to himself “about the only real qualification I have is that I’m a coffee lover.”

And I am not alone! The spectacular growth of Starbucks confirms this. If you are reading this blog with a cup of coffee nearby, then drink up! If you are doing so at your local coffee house or Starbucks then that’s even better. If you have come across this post on National Coffee Day 2019, that may prove that coffee is as much a part of your life as it was Jay’s. How cool is that?

“May I help who’s next?”

What to do with Tripio?

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September 28, 2019

There it sits a few feet away. In book form. A book. My book. What to do with it? The box actually arrived three days ago. I knew what was in the box and opened it with a kitchen knife. My first thought was that Tripio is bigger and thicker than I thought, than I expected. It didn’t “feel” like 333 pages when I was writing it. Wait, wait! On second thought, I did plan every word, comma and space. Because I wanted the final printed, for sale edition to end up being 333 pages. Threes. Tripio. Three storylines. What I genius I am!

Of course the above is nonsense. Except maybe the part about me being a genius. Actually, if I were that smart, I would have done something brilliant with my five proof copies of Tripio. Yet, after I took one out of the box and looked it over with a smile, I let them sit in that box, on the table across from where I now write this post.

Those couple of days later it is occuring to me that I think I was afraid I wouldn’t like Tripio anymore. Tripio arriving as a real book was like your best friend from high school or college dropping by after not seeing you in twenty years. Would you still like him or her? Would he or she like you? I wanted to retrieve the journals I kept while writing Tripio and find the entries that I wrote in which I was excited about the creation of Tripio. I wanted to find the passage I wrote when I knew Tripio was great and I was doing all I could to write a unique and wonderful book. I did not. I simply went about my work week. I let some friends a family know that the proof copies were in my possession and that was about it.

I think that it felt odd to have Tripio back in the house because I had been practicing giving it away. I have made it an intention during my morning yoga to release attachments and expectations to and for Tripio. It is no longer mine. It did not feel comfortable to have it to myself again in my house. Like the old friend whose jokes no longer makes you laugh. What do you do? After a couple days the answer came.

I decided to take my old friend Tripio out in public where we could relax together and get reacquainted. This was yesterday, the third day after getting the proof copies. And my off day. I packed Tripio in my bag and we headed off to Coat Check coffee https://www.coatcheckcoffee.com/.

It made sense. It was a way of coming full circle. Remember that Tripio was actually born over 25 years ago in Chicago’s coffee houses and early Starbucks locations.

So, in the spacious and calm environs of Coat Check, my dear old companion and I got reacquainted. The coffee of the day was an Ethiopian, always a favorite varietal of mine. This felt right. As the barista called out the occasional drink order in the background I read the first chapter and felt relieved that I still liked my dear old friend. Relieved and needing to relieve myself, I got up to use the facilities. Upon returning to my table, I saw my thicker than expected copy awaiting me, looking content and relaxed on that table next to my mug of coffee, as if it had known this would happen.

“May I help who’s next?”

What is old is new in the New Yorker

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September 26, 2019

I have recently given myself credit for creating a new word: Starbattical. Do you like it? I define it as long retreat or break from Starbucks. I came up with it to describe the 20 some years I was either too busy, too poor or using my time to raise a raise a family to take much notice of Starbucks.

With the writing and publishing of my “Starbucks novel” Tripio, I have come off my Starbattcial. Odd how things come full circle. In the early nineties when I traveled home from Chicago to seed the land with bags of Starbucks coffee I was asked about a company no had ever heard of. These days I am being asked about a company every has heard of.

I am also being sent articles on Starbucks by family and friends once again. In the ninteles the articles were more likely to bear the headline something similar to “Starbucks to open stores in my city.” Now I get them like the one I received about Starbucks in the New Yorker.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/04/save-our-starbucks

If you read the article you know it concerns Starbucks closing one of its own stores. In the aforementioned novel, Tripio, the protagonist Jay has been working at a Starbucks in Chicago for a couple years. Starbucks was certainly not closing its own stores in those days. It was opening stores and attracting lots of attention while doing it, as the excerpt from Tripio shows…

The reason she was here was that she represented a coffee company just getting started on the Atlantic Coast. Was I interested? Cosmodemonic had bought a good-sized competitor in Boston not long ago, so I knew there was competition out there. My ego was happy to be talking to her. But I was an owner here at my store. This was my store. Here in my city. And it struck me that Kati would figure in all these decisions now. That was it. The source of my distraction most of the night. Only I hadn’t realized it. A big change was coming in my life. So, I turned the competitor down. Looking back, I don’t think she sought me out personally. I have a feeling she was canvassing the nearby, if not all, Cosmodemonics to see who was interested. I did put her business card in my bag, however.

The Starbucks location Jay worked at in Tripio was one of the busier locations in the city, especially on weekends. So much so that Jay finds himself wishing that “ they hurried up and opened more stores so these people could go somewhere else.” Jay had other things to think of in Tripio. He hadn’t realized that the IPO of Starbucks stock he was about to take part in was happening in part to generate revenue to open more and more Starbucks. And a quarter century later, they haven’t stopped.

An exception to that last observation is the location discussed in the above article. The loyal customers would seem to provide a good enough base to do a good coffee house business, if not quite up to Starbucks standards. Hmmm, makes me wonder if that card is somewhere in my bag after all these years.

“May I help who’s next?”