The author desk I have for you today is in a slightly different format, and you will soon see why because it’s not just the format that’s a little different.
The latest addition to our workspace stable is S.C. Ransom, author of Small Blue Thing, Perfectly Reflected and Scattering Like Light (which I am hoping to review for you sometime soon). Sue has recently been nominated for UK’s Teen of Queen and if you would like to show your support you can find all of the info here: http://www.queenofteen.co.uk
And now, I’ll hand you over to Sue so she can tell you about her workspace….
I share my home office with the three other members of my family, so there is little of my stuff in evidence; in fact, most of the time the desk is hidden under great towers of paper and textbooks. The window looks out of the front of the house so I can see who is coming, and it proves endlessly distracting to see who is walking past. At this time of year there are birds nesting in the ivy outside as well, so keeping an eye on them takes up far too much time.
What’s vital to me is my tiny Sony Vaio laptop which goes with me everywhere. The rest of the family think that it’s too small to use, but I’ve got used to the miniature keyboard and screen, and I love it. The only other things I need to be able to work are my notebook and my coffee cup. I am entirely fuelled by coffee, and it’s a disaster of epic proportions if we run out. In the picture below you can see my notebook where I’ve been working on the plotting of a new trilogy, so it’s covered in sticky notes. I love sticky notes and have whole stacks of them in different colours for plotting and editing.
So I have a lovely office and desk, but actually I do almost none of my writing here. This is the desk for doing the day job (I’m a headhunter most of the time) and for doing admin: paying bills, answering emails, writing letters to the school, and all the dull things like that. I do sometimes do my editing here, particularly if I’ve been working on a marked-up copy, so I can lay the stuff out, but it’s not my creative space.
Where I sit and think, and have all of my best ideas, is on the 07.11 South West Trains service from Shepperton to London Waterloo. My writing desk is my lap, and the silence that a British commuter train offers is ideal for me. I can sit and get totally absorbed in my story, not noticing the overcrowding, the delays, or anything that is happening outside the window. Actually, without the train I would never have written a book in the first place. I started commuting into London in 2004, and found the time on the train great for reading. I revisited lots of old favourites, then spent a small fortune buying new books. Eventually I started reading some of my daughters’ books, keen to know what she enjoyed so that I could recommend more to her. They were all very readable and it made me wonder just how hard it would be to write a book where someone like her was the main character; someone who knew the places she knew, who went to the same school. I decided to give it a go, and the commuting time, time I had previously spent reading, was the obvious time to do it.
At the time, my laptop was huge – far to heavy to lug across London every day, but I had recently got myself the new BlackBerry Storm (this was just before iPhones came out), and I found that, with a bit of practice, I could write 300 words per journey, up to 600 words per day, and very soon I had a book – Small Blue Thing, which was 90,000 words in total.
After I got a contract for three books from the newly formed independent publisher Nosy Crow I upgraded from the phone to the handbag-sized laptop and once I stated using all my fingers on the keyboard, not just my thumbs, my word count went up to about 1,000 per return trip. So that is all I need – somewhere quiet to sit, and my laptop or phone, and as long as I don’t get distracted by Twitter, I can write anywhere.
I devour books, vampires and supernatural creatures are my genre of choice but over the past couple of years, I have broadened my horizons considerably. In a nutshell – I love to write! I love interacting with a diverse range of artists to bring you interviews. Perhaps we were perfect before – I LOVE WORDS!