Last weekend, I spent some time in a hotel room.

I  do a recap blog for a popular TV show that happened to have a two hour special on Sunday, and I don’t have cable TV. I cut the cord well over a year ago, and other than the fact that I can’t see the only show I really want to watch, we’ve been fine without it.

I have a lovely neighbor who lets me borrow a TV on Sunday nights, but with it being a two hour show, I didn’t want to be squatting in her house until ten o’clock on a school night.

Couple that with some tight deadlines on a couple of writing projects, and the fact that I write better when I’m away from home and all its distractions, and I realized I might just have a solution.

One of the perks of my day job is I book a lot of travel and hotel rooms and therefore get reward points. I decided to cash some in for a free hotel room at a chain hotel right here in town, take advantage of the cable TV, and get some writing done.

Oh, did I ever – 5300 words to be precise! And I got the double-episode recap done and all by 1:15 in the blessed a.m. Then I looked around the room at the still-made beds and realized I really wanted to just go home. The kids were going to be coming back from their father’s house at 6am, and I knew if I crawled into bed now I really wouldn’t want to crawl back out of it at 5:45 just to beat them home. I also wanted to toss in a load of laundry before I hit the sack.

And what the heck – it was a free room. It wasn’t like I was wasting money. So I headed down to the desk to check out, and the clerk pulled up my info, and he gave me a really odd look.

“You’ve only been here since four o’clock,” he said, puzzled.

“Yeah, I know.” I started digging through my purse for my keys, then realized I threw them in my laptop bag and pulled that up to the counter to root there instead.

“And you’re local?”

“Yeah, right here in town,” I said with a smile.

I found the keys, wished him goodnight and walked out the doors to my car.

Where I suddenly realized how that must’ve looked.

What did he think I was doing? Meeting my married/politician/disgraced clergyman lover? Amateur laptop webcam porn?

I wanted to run back in and go “It’s okay! I’m a writer! Honest!” But I had a feeling that would just make me look like I was protesting too much.

So I lifted my chin, and left my stained and sullied past behind me. I went home and did laundry, and fell asleep with a book in my hand and a cat on my chest.

The secret lives of writers.