coffee and writing

I love the new ibook (not macbook, ibook). Silent. Pretty. Runs for over four hours without a recharge. Finds and connects to wifi effortlessly. I can even talk to people using skype without a headset, courtesy of the microphone built into the screen. Genius.

I used to love the Offshore cafe in the West End, but it's got too noisy. Music blaring, blaring all the time. I really need to get out of the house sometimes to write - sitting at home, it feels like the walls are closing in, so I go out. Offshore used to be quiet, comfortable, not at all noisy, at least during the summer. But it does have wifi.

I tried a place called Bibliocafe earlier today, right across the road. It's very, very nice - but no wifi: that's the killer. Otherwise, it's the perfect environment, assuming you're not unlucky and a gaggle of student girls come in and start screeching and generally bugging the hell out of me and everyone else trying to read/write/stare out the window. So now I have to spread my net a little wider. I've even been considering noise-cancelling headphones, that use a feedback mechanism to block out ambient noise, since I do tend to listen to Soma FM a lot when I'm writing.

On Bill King's recommendation, I've been getting a little more deeply into a piece of mac-only writing software called Scrivener, which comes with some very impressive recommendations on the sidebar of their webpage at www.literatureandlatte.com (See? There's the coffee connection again). I'm not one normally for splashing out on writing software, but this is only about twenty quid and I think it might actually be worth it.