I don't have all of this saved on file so the first few days will get posted, but after that I'm afraid the file is lose
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Thursday 1st
November.
It had
been a really long time since Tasha had last been to the bakery on the corner
of North Street and Western Park Lane and as she stepped through the doors she
was taken back in time to that last visit. The smell was the same as it had
been on the day of her graduation, when she had dragged her family into her
favourite place to come when she needed to get away and relax, only to find
they had already found the place for themselves and ordered a cake.
Crumbs
Bakery was more of a cake shop than a traditional bakery. It only rarely
actually sold bread, the first couple of hours of its day being the only times,
and instead concentrated on pastries and cakes. Its stock varied from day to
day, depending on who was working and what they fancied working on, but the
display cases were never empty and the cakes could vary from little cupcakes
and fondant fancies, right up to seven or eight tiered monster wedding cakes
that had been decorated specifically for the person who had ordered it.
It
also had a section of its downstairs cordoned off for the part that Tasha
tended to hone in on. Crumbs had its own cafe section where someone could, if
they so desired, sit and eat their purchases and chat with friends or other
customers. It was not normally very busy as most people did not actually
realise that the cafe part was even there. Nor that Crumbs sold drinks across
the counter. Not many but a big enough range for a cheap enough price that
during Tasha’s students days, Crumbs had become one of her major hangouts.
Now,
two years after graduation from a course that at the time had seemed like the
ideal way to get into her preferred industry at the time but had not been that
attractive to employers against the hundreds of other courses that were similar
amongst universities in the same country, she was stepping into Crumbs for the
first time in a really long time.
It was
ideal for what she wanted for the coming month. Quiet, peaceful, most of the
time anyway, and somewhere where no one would ever think to look for her. It
was perfect. It helped that it had food and drink readily available for anyone
that had money in their pocket so she didn’t even have to think about moving
and disturbing her writing spree.
It was
selfish she knew. Her friends just wanted to spend time with her. Her parents
just wanted to check she was okay and work would want to know if she could
possibly cover anyone else’s shifts in a tight situation but it was the same
every year.
She
would settle down to get herself lost in writing her novel for NaNoWriMo and
everyone would get confused as to why she was spending so much time doing
something that complicated for fun. Her
obsessiveness over her word count and her knack for finding seconds to add
extra words to her novel on her laptop would cause them to grow concerned for
her sanity by the end of November and it just was not fair.
She
did not ask for time to herself normally, she did not get pulled into many
things like this and one month a year to settle in and bury herself in doing
something she enjoyed should not be too much to ask for. After all once the
fifty-thousand words had been written she would emerge from her cocoon of
writing fixation regenerated and blissed out by the fact she had managed such a
monumental task.
This
was why, this year, she had sought out the peace and quiet that was Crumbs. The
cafe in the bakery would provide somewhere away from the hectic busy schedule
that was life and allow her to get lost in her novel in a place where no one
would pay attention to her beyond perhaps considering her the ‘laptop girl in
the corner.’
Her
eyes scanned the tables as she queued up to order a cake and a drink from the
ladies behind the counter, making sure that there was somewhere for her to sit
before she wasted precious writing time. She should not have worried. There
were plenty around. The busy season had yet to start and while Crumbs was in
high demand for its speciality one of a kind cake creations that could feed
anywhere between one and five hundred guests and the pastries it sold flew out
the door, taken by those who did not have time to hunker down and spend time actually
savouring the food they had just purchased.
The
table that caught her eye was tucked up in the corner by the front window. It was
out of the way and would not cause any problems if she was there for a rather
long time. It was also perfect for when she had those moments that she knew was
inevitable, where her muse fled and refused to provide her with any more
details, at which point she would be able to watch the world go past and try
and encourage her mind to come up with new things. She had her notes on her
planned story but it was inevitable that at some point the dreaded writer’s
block would strike and then the number of words she could churn out in an hour
would slow to a crawl.
The
table she wanted had a good view of the ‘outer’ bakery, where the counters and
the cafe were, had a decent view of the outside world through the window
display of cakes and was still secluded
enough that she could basically curl up in a corner and write to her heart’s
content without disturbing anyone or becoming a nuisance.
The
lady who served her when she got to the head of the line recognised her. Morgan
was the oldest sibling of the Jones family, who had owned the bakery for about
seventy years, and had been the one to serve her most often when Tasha had
decided she needed to retreat from the loud, obnoxious housemates that she
seemed to have acquired. She had, after had a ten thousand word dissertation to
write and while she liked rock music, having it blasting through her bedroom
walls every night was counterproductive to any work getting done on it.
“So
what is it you’re here to write this time?” Morgan asked with a chuckle,
remembering how Tasha had been prone to curling up in the corner and getting
lost in her reference books and laptop screen, tapping away at her keyboard for
hours on end.
“Have
you ever heard of NaNoWriMo?” Tasha replied, as she pointed to the cupcake she
was interesting in devouring. When Morgan shook her head, Tasha chuckled
slightly, “Its short for National Novel Writing Month. Over November the
challenge is to write a fifty-thousand word novel. Kicked off at midnight and
finishes just before midnight on the first of December. Anything written before
or after those dates doesn’t count unfortunately.”
“It’s
a charity thing?” Morgan asked, confused as to why anyone would sit and stress
themselves out all month willingly, as she pulled the cupcake in question out
of the counter.
“No,
well it can be. I mean they ask for donations to run the site and things and
any excess money they make goes to fund creative writing projects for kids and
stuff like that. I mean some people get sponsored to do it, but this year I’m
just trying to do it for a bit of fun.” Tasha replied, pausing in her chatter
with the lady to watch Morgan lay into one of her younger sisters for screwing
up her coffee order.
“Sorry
about that,” Morgan sighed once a white coffee was sat on the work surface next
to Tasha’s cake, “Right, so you’re trying to write a novel? For no reason? Oh
and that’s three pounds and thirty pence please.”
“For
fun.” Tasha corrected as she fished around in her purse for the correct change,
“That and I wanted an excuse to come and spend lots of time here. It always
leaves me hungry when I work here. I think it’s the smell from the ovens.”
“Ha.” Morgan
sniggered, accepting the change Tasha dropped into her hand, “If you spent as
much time here and we did you’d soon get sick of the smell.”
“It’s
possible?” Tasha asked, pretending to be shocked though she had heard stories
of people who worked on chocolate lines in the Cadbury factories who had been
allowed to take as much chocolate as they had wanted as it went past them and
had soon gotten sick of the confectionary.
“Believe
me, after working with cakes for so long, it takes some pretty spectacular
cakes to get you to want to eat them.” Morgan sighed, “That everything?”
“Yeah,
I’ll get out your way.” Tasha chuckled, collecting her items and making her way
over to the table in the corner. By the time she had settled down at the table
and pulled her laptop out of her backpack, Morgan had already moved through two
more customers. Tasha could not help but be amused by the professionalism of
the woman, who seemed to be able to have a perfectly friendly conversation with
the customer she was serving at the time but did not allow it to continue over
to the next person she served. Instead each customer got a new conversation
dependant on items purchased or whether she had served them before. Morgan
seemed to have a good memory for things her customers had mentioned in the
past. It was probably necessary for when she was taking orders for the bakers
out back.
Her
laptop was slow to boot up, a problem she had been noticing more and more
recently, which gave her the time she needed to take a sip of her coffee, the
caffeine helping her to wake up a bit since she had gotten up much earlier then
she normally would to try and get a buffer written in case she over slept after
a night in work. The slowness of her computer did allow her to appreciate the
aromas coming out of the kitchen a little more though as the smell permeated
the air around her. Tasha’s stomach
grumbled slightly as the smell of cake wafted through the small, enclosed space
and she attacked her cupcake voraciously as she opened up a brand new document
to write down what was in her mind.
The
story flowed quickly and easily, the characters seeming to play their roles
willingly and enthusiastically as she played through what needed to happen in
her mind. This was only the start of the month however, she reminded herself as
she took advantage of the cafe’s free internet to update her word count on the
NaNoWriMo website and look pleased as her predicted date of finished went down
to November the twenty-ninth. There was a long way to go before the end of the
month and the grand total of fifty-thousand. Hitting the day’s word total of
one thousand, six hundred and sixty seven was a good start, it meant you were
on target to finish on time.
That,
in Tasha’s opinion was not good enough.
Being
on target to finish on time was good, but it did not take into account any
problems that might arise. Nor did it allow for any mess ups or over sleeping
or, indeed any time that work absorbed the time that had been put aside for
writing. As such, while she had free time she was damn well going to make sure
she got ahead. She had, after all, blown the last couple of NaNo’s by not
making sure she had a buffer against the inevitable overtime or emergency that
would always pop up when she was least expecting it.
By the
time she was happy with her word count for the day, the bakery was beginning to
close its doors, at least to the general public. She could hear someone out
bellowing about ‘not being able to get this cake finished by tomorrow’ if they
did not stay well into the night. The cafe, however, was closing and most of
the staff, most of which were members of the Jones family, were soon heading home
which meant, unfortunately, that Tasha had to give up her peace and quiet. Just
knowing, however that tomorrow there would, hopefully, be a table waiting for
her made the process of updating her count, shutting down her laptop and
exiting the warm, delicious smelling bakery, into the harsh cold winds of the
November evening, that much easier.
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