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 1stNovember.
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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