I do most of my writing– and most of my work– since my day job is teaching online classes--sitting at a computer in my home office. I do have a laptop, but given my preference, I like a setup that feels more substantial--a big honking PC with a couple of screens, external speakers and a full-size keyboard. By today's standards I guess that makes me a bit old-fashioned. Of course I got through college using an actual honest-to-gosh typewriter, so this still feels pretty fancy to me.
Because of some peculiarities in the design of my house, sitting at the computer means I'm facing a wall that's about a foot behind my primary monitor. I'd prefer to be facing a window, but hey, I'm not the one who designed the wiring in here. Just above the level of my head (when sitting), the wall slopes sharply inward, following the roofline. So I don't have room for, say, a poster with a kitten clinging to a branch and telling me to "hang in there."
What I do have are three pieces of paper that I've taped to the wall in my eyeline. Most of the time, of course, my gaze just kind of skims past them, since they've become a part of the scene I just take for granted. Once in a while I do take conscious notice of them, though, and hopefully they provide a bit of inspiration or encouragement that's almost as good as the kitten poster.
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| Harlan Ellison producing |
The first is a quote from Thomas Carlyle, though I got it from an essay by Harlan Ellison, the writer who made me want to be a writer. It reads:
PRODUCE! PRODUCE! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up! Up! Whatsoever thy hand findest to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; FOR THE NIGHT COMETH, WHEREIN NO MAN CAN WORK.
Cheerful, right? To put it in modern terms: get yer ass in the chair, kid, and your fingers on the keys.
Let everything happen to youBeauty and terrorJust keep goingNo feeling is final.
This went up on the wall in the opening months of the COVID pandemic, when the world seemed like a pretty dark place and a reminder that it wouldn't be that way forever had daily value. These days, of course, all I have to worry about is creeping fascism, AI, and the possibility that we're about to invade Greenland, so everything is peachy.
The final piece of paper is the simplest. It's a single word, rendered in plain font:
As for the desk itself, mostly it's cluttered with papers and mail I haven't yet dealt with--another thing I need to refine. There is, however, a small collection of rocks and shells from various trips I've taken, to remind me there's a world beyond that wall I'm facing. And there are also two Lego minifigures, there to remind me that what I should be doing is writing a crime story: Lego Shakespeare, and Lego Detective (complete with magnifying glass and red herring!).
Nice idea for a column, Joe! I'm fortunate to have quite a bit of wall space above my two-monitor office setup, and I have nine framed and two unframed things hanging there. The framed items are the original artwork for one of my EQMM and one of my AHMM stories (which I was able to buy from the artists), signed printouts of the artwork for the covers of the first two William Brittain collections I edited for Crippen & Landru, the signed photo of Arthur Conan Doyle given to Bill Brittain by his colleagues on the occasion of his retirement from teaching and passed on to me by his widow after the publication of the first of the collections, the cross-stitch of the zombified Rafael Styx my daughter made me on the publication of my translation of Bavo Dhooge's Styx, and the certificates for three of my Anthony, Agatha, and EQMM Readers Award close-but-no-cigar finishes. The two unframed items are my plaque for finishing third in the Dutch Goeken Prize competition in 2024 and a piece of Adam Elias Hines' outsider art I bought at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. This ends the guided tour of one of my four office walls. To visit the other three walls, please make an appointment....
ReplyDeleteClinging to the desk lamp next to my desk computer (an iMac with a 27" screen, which helps me cling to my beloved MS Word for Mac 2011 as long as I can) are a bevy of finger puppets, or as The Unemployed Philosophers Guild calls them, Magnetic Personalities that inspire me: Shakespeare, Poe, and Sherlock Holmes, of course; Jane Austen, Louise May Alcott, Emma Goldman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Sappho (more Magnetic women are available now than when I acquired them); Mark Twain, Freud, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw. Come to think of it, they'd make for a fine dinner party, too. I also have a hanging sign, which I hang either way or not at all as the spirit moves me. It comes from MWA-NY.org, and one side says, "DO NOT DISTURB: The writing is going well;" the other,
ReplyDelete"DO NOT DISTURB: The writing is not going well." Finally, kicking around among the papers on my desk is a card that came years ago in flowers from a friend who's not a writer but is a world-class creative in a couple of other fields. She likes to send me orchids on my birthday. The message on this one: "Dearest, glorious Liz, Happy birthday to my beautiful and brilliant friend." It reminds me that it's not about whether an editor says yes or no or whether I've written deathless prose on any given day. Oh, and visible in the distance, on the far wall of the room, are my roots and branches: a painting of my mother the lawyer in her youth (at whose knee I learned to edit and never to misspell a word or split an infinitive) and a photograph of my granddaughters, who make hope for a future worthwhile.
The trouble is, you think you have time. - Buddha
ReplyDeleteI’m a woman, I’m good at getting out bloodstains. – Anonymous