She had been told that she spent too much time and money in coffee shops. By her mother mostly. An hour in the morning, maybe two? Was that really too much? "And it's not like I have any other vices," she'd respond. "No car, no debt, I rarely drink alcohol, and, thank God, no children."
Cafes were her offices, really. To rent an office space would be hundreds of dollars each month, but to "rent" a table once a day, to allow herself a space to write; that came out to just two or three dollars each day. Cafes were where she wrote.
"Balance and Swing," was the title of her latest novel. On her computer were thirteen unfinished novels, twenty-five short stories, and three nearly-polished screenplays. She had yet to fully complete any one of her writing projects, but she was in no hurry. She was nowhere near thirty yet, and her mother hadn't been published until she was forty years old.
People knew Erika as a writer, which made her smile. "What do you do?" she would be asked at potlucks and conferences. "I write," she said. "Oh, what do you write?" was usually the next question. Conscious of the intrigue, she would smile and tell them, "Words. All kinds of them." The query, she figured, was not, "How do you make your money?" It was, "What do you do?" She wished that more people would identify what they do...she didn't often care that someone worked in a restaurant or a telemarketing company. She wanted to know what they did.
But she had learned some time ago that probing too deeply was not a good idea. She liked to believe that everybody in the world had some creative outlet, that every person she passed on a highway was headed home to paint a picture, to play a cello, to work on some private equation that would solve questions of the universe. In the mind of Erika, mankind spent most of its free time productively. Even at the cafes, she would eyeball all of the other young people with their computers and imagine that every screen was full of multi-syllable words or epic photography.
She had also learned not to look at those people's screens when she walked past to the restroom. Most of the time they were staring at endless torrents of Facebook updates. Her imagination was populated by a far more ambitious bunch of people than the real world.
That's where Erika spent her morning and, often, her evenings. Writing. It would pay off someday. She would either change the world or get rich. Preferably both. As it happened, it was in the cafe nearest to her house that she wrote something that would change the world. It was misty outside and the city streets were full of puddles left over from a wet evening. She watched a white and blue TriMet bus splash through the intersection outside and looked at her computer. She looked at the tall brick buildings and the towers across the river. She thought about food and farms and soil and cities and wished she were living in a small town, the more rural the better.
"What must happen next," she wrote, "is this. We need to clear out of the cities. We need open spaces. All of these people want to farm and feed the world, but can't find the land to do it from. We need to repopulate Kansas."
With that line she finished the letter to her old friend, Avery Mason, and packed it up into an envelope to mail.
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