This is my third time attempting to write this blog entry, on my old desktop in the office of our current apartment. Part of reclaiming my writing is reclaiming my office. First thing on my list today was to turn off the ceiling fan in the office, which required getting up on the kitchen stool, one hand braced against the semi-opened office door and having fuzzy gray dustbunny babies rain down upon me. Not something I would like to repeat in the near future, but it was a neccessary step.
Basic truth; if I’m going to get any work done in my office, it needs to be a room that I want to inhabit. It can’t be for storage. Storage took over my office in the old apartment, and climbing over boxes of books and other essentials took some of the appeal out of the process. Things had started to go in that direction here, but no time like the present to put my foot down and break the pattern. Maybe the old writer was willing to go through that. The writer I am now is not. I want and need and deserve a dedicated place where I can go, shut the door and enter into my story world. Hence the orange Post-it note that reads ‘writing cave.’
I do a lot of work in public, at the local coffee house or nearby Panera, but the desire for my own office, set up to my specifications, rose within me this week, and it’s time. As easy as that. Not that this is going to be easy, because I’m going to have to figure out what to do with the boxes that should not have made it onto the moving van. I do not serve the office; the office serves me, so what will make me want to be in this room the most and get the most done? There were nights, long nights, in the old office, when I didn’t care that it was too hot or too cold, because this was my space and there were stories that had to come out of me and onto the page, so a little discomfort was no big deal.
Here, I am comfortable. I am happy. I am healthy. I am having fun learning this new me and seeing what the new office she will inhabit will look and feel like. The best way I’ve found, at least for me, is to jump in and do. Hence this entry. My laptop, which has become my main computer, is set up in the living room, at the other end of the house. I will take it down after lunch, when I head to the coffee house, and work on the day’s scene. First, though, I’m getting myself reacquainted with working in here. The vintage burlap bulletin board is going to need some help. It took itself down a few weeks back, and that gave me the opportunity to see that the random things I had pinned to that board don’t reflect what I’m doing now as well as they could. Still figuring out what will do that trick. Maybe the board needs to go back up with new things upon it, maybe it needs to be retired and replaced with something new. I don’t know yet.
What I do know is that I am sitting now at the antique secretary desk I had coveted since childhood. I am sitting in the ergonomic chair that I bought with my own money from one of my old retail jobs. I remember how proud I was, walking out of Office Max with that cardboard box clutched awkwardly in my arms, taking it home and upstairs and figuring out how to put it together. Then sitting in it, behind the big metal desk we’d acquired through souces I do not now recall, and telling myself this was my space and I would honor it and keep it. I didn’t do that great, but y’know, those years weren’t that great, so it’s okay. I’m here now. I don’t have to keep the dust of another life if it doesn’t have anything to add to the life I am actually living. What I need to surround me are things that will feed the stories I write now. Some old, some new, some that blend the two in a new way I wouldn’t have been able to see before. Kind of exciting, that, and having a new/old place to write, that fits right in with the plan.
Typing With Wet Nails 