Munday – Writing Spaces

I live in a log cabin in the woods and I think I have the best of all possible worlds in that on those days that I actually do get to be home and write, it is a very comfortable space. My office is actually one half of the loft that overlooks the great room of the cabin. The other half is the master bedroom and bath. This is the place that I do most of my writing, but it isn’t so much the space as it is the tools used within that space.

My desktop sits on an industrial sized drafting table that I have had since I was pregnant with my son, who is now in college (that dates me a bit!) Here I have printer, fax, etc. from back in the day when I actually was working from home in the dot-bomb era and writing articles and getting paid for them on the side. The economy has changed and my writing space has a whole lot more shelving than it once did. My biggest vice is books, mostly history and reference books. Most of the house is pretty much floor to ceiling space for books wherever we can put a bookshelf. I use the laptop mainly in the bedroom. I don’t like to write in there because I’m always getting out of bed to get that one book that I seem to need but left in the other room or downstairs!

In the summertime, taking the laptop out onto the porch or the deck is great, and then I have a table to spread out on and deck chairs to sprawl in. If I do this in the morning, the songbirds are just waking up and it can get very loud. If it is in the evening, I have to be out there and working before the owls decided to get overly amorous or I cannot get a thing done! If I am on the road for either work or my Temple, the laptop goes with me as well. Along with this I will have a notebook and my fountain pen with me at all times. And I will readily confess that I am pretty freakish about my fountain pens. I once couldn’t sleep for days when I thought I had lost one of my favourites. And during an orange alert, I even once almost came to blows with airport security at Chicago O’Hare over my fine-nibbed Waterman pen. During that time Homeland (In)Security were just taking anything that could imagine that could possibly have been used as a hijacking weapon. Nevermind that even McGiver couldn’t have successfully pulled it off. Lucky for everyone in the vicinity, including me, he thought better of it and let me keep the pen. I also use a voice activated recorder when I am driving and I need to get down ideas and of course cannot be wrestling with writing implements.

For me, the space that I write in is more of an accessory than a necessity. I can write pretty much anywhere, because when you have that need to get it out on paper, there really is nothing that can stop you.