crostini al pomodoro (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Once a month, our writing group uses half of our meeting time (we meet for approximately 90 minutes every other week) to explore the pomodoro technique together.  We write for 20 minutes, then discuss the experience before setting the timer and going again.  To give you a glimpse of how this works, I decided to reproduce here, in its unadulterated entirety, my latest result.

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Jeff just set the timer for a 20 minute shared pomodoro and we are off! We have posted about the benefit of using a timed period to accomplish tasks before, but recently our writing group has embarked on using part of our meeting time to all do a couple of pomodoros together.  Some spend their time on a work in progress, a few use it to riff on something new, and me, well I am taking this one to hammer out this blog post.  I think, we are all pretty good about limiting our distractions when we are writing at home, but writing here at the coffee shop is another beast.  Last time we did it I just couldn’t concentrate enough to make sense of what I was working on so I actually riffed about the distraction itself (the coffee shop was crowded that day and it felt like the table next to us was right on top of us).  Today, at least we have a table out of the way.

It is interesting to be amongst writers writing, to hear the different rhythms of how we work.  Most of us are  touch typists, so we tend to type in flurries and then pause to move on.  We mostly avoid eye contact while working through it, but I am hyper-aware of the surroundings and find it difficult to get too focused.

This is a very loud coffee shop though, it always is.  But they have great coffee and actually a decent vibe overall.  When we lost our last meeting place (the bookstore decided that the coffee cafe just wasn’t working out), we happened on this place very quickly.  I even come here on the off weeks sometimes because they make great frozen coffee drinks and I can spend an hour to an hour and a half just working through something.

They also play a very varied musical selection here, jumping genres at a single bound.  A great Psychedelic Furs song just played and there could be a Tom Petty song around the corner. That all fades to the background when we are in the discussion part of our meetings, but often comes to the forefront when not engaged in conversation.

This post has begun to meander, partly because I didn’t come today with a defined writing goal, but I did bring my writing equipment: iPad, bluetooth keyboard, brain.  I have ideas swirling, but have had issue getting them to coalesce of late.  And that, my friends is what twenty minutes of riffing looks like.

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As often occurs with writing off the cuff, there are some nuggets in the middle section that, if I was producing a polished piece, I could pull out and build around.  However, since I had pretty much reached a conclusion of sorts, feeling like I wanted to stretch out for the second period that week, and inspired by another member’s poetry work, I next embarked on kicking out some haiku infused with the flavor of the place in which it was written.

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A coffee shop’s sounds
espresso tap, blender whirrs
conversation bits

A coffee shop hour
few regulars sit and work
others come and go

Conversation, crossword
many computers in use
coffee shop Sunday

How can that guy nap?
I would find it way too hard
Couch must be comfy

When this was a bank
probably not this busy
on Sunday morning

This is space transformed
Once a bank, now there’s coffee
The vault’s for study

Waxing poetic
while others drink their coffee
They’re none the wiser

Amidst the chaos
of this coffee shop today
I write poetry

This place is eXtreme
no really that is the name
not hyperbole