The photo is my prized KitKat clock. It no longer works but it is one of my many favorite things that I keep in my office to keep me happy. (I don't quite know why the numbers are reversed on the cat, but it does give it a jaunty charm.)
I must admit I love my office. We live in a city, in an 1865 brickstone and the whole third floor is my office, a hallway, a bathroom, and then Jeff's office. (We can wave to each other as we work.) My office has a brick fireplace, wide plank wood floors, a couch for me to nap when the going gets too rough, two windows that look out on our urban backyard (the size of a postage stamp, but we still have a peach tree and fresh herbs growing). I have all kinds of gadgets and gizmos here: wood finger puppets Jeff bought me on a third date, wooden monkeys, 75 snowglobes, books, a birdhouse, a bulletin board full of old photos and notes, exercise equipment, wind-up toys, rubber lizards, and these beautiful gray-blue walls. I love my Mac, love my big wide desk, love the calendar I tape up to a filing case so I can see what I forgot to do three days ago.
I'm passionately curious about other writers' offices, so if you want to describe or post a photo, I would love it. Do you work neatly and productively? Are you a big messy writer like I am? Do you need your clutter or do you like a pristine work space?
I had that same clock. The tail swished back and forth.
ReplyDeleteMy writing office mutates from perfection of neatness to hideous piles of mess, and if you know me really well you can probably figure at a glance what stage I am at in my novel in progress.
Really? Does it get more messy and then as you are finishing start to get neat again. Yes, the tail is supposed to swish on the clock, but it stops after about two days....
ReplyDeleteI like to do major cleanup and organizing between projects and then as the writing progresses and I accumulate far too mich material for the novel it piles up, plus all kinds of other things pile up out of neglect, because I am obsessed with the novel and only the novel.
ReplyDeleteWhen I am at certain stages of the writing I do take a time out to make order out of the disorder, so the neatness does cycle, but the mass of paper grows larger and larger until the novel is done, and then at a certain point zI go through and cull a great deal, and file the rest on shelves in the basement that are sort of an archive, with an area allotted for material connected to each book.
I have a home office that is lovely in many ways but I have difficulty writing there. Maybe it's the lack of heat, or the clutter, or the fact that too much is going on at home. I do my best work in a quiet carrell at my college library that has NO INTERNET ACCESS (which I think is really the key).
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