A Room of One's Own

Post title stolen, of course, from Virginia Woolf.

Over the summer, we moved (one of those cross-town moves that seems a little silly when you rent the truck to go nine blocks but is ultimately much better than carrying your couch through cross-walks). We moved into a house that was significantly larger than the one we'd been renting, and one of the really exciting things about the move was that there was finally room for both my husband and I (notorious book-hoarders both) to have our own nerd-caves. Since July, my books had been shelved at complete random (in the order they were picked up off the floor, really), and two weeks ago, I finally organized them.

(This is mid-organization. The good news is that, at the end, all of the books had a place on a shelf)

After the fit of book-organizing, I rearranged the office itself, too, because I'd had the room since July and barely used it, and since, I've been in here, actually being productive, pretty much every day.

One of the major changes was that I pulled my desk away from the wall, turned it so my back wouldn't face the door. Somehow, that helped an awful lot. (One of my students told me that's a huge issue in Feng Shui, and hey, I use the space now, so there's probably something to it.) It still feels very strange to have a piece of furniture that's sort of in the middle of the room, but it's functional and I wasn't doing anything else with the middle of the room.

And so, the end result:

For those of you who may be library-minded, there is a system in place: the first two bookcases (on the left, above) are fiction (in alphabetical order). The bottom shelf of the middle bookcase is the tail end of fiction and the shelf of drama--dominated by Shakespeare. The bookcase in the corner has a shelf and a half of poetry, then "academic books" that I will use often (folks on writing, a few theorists and meditative folks), then there is a whole shelf of anthologies, a shelf of non-fiction, and the bottom shelf is manga and composition textbooks. Not that I think manga and textbooks really go together, but the two collections were the correct sizes to be on a shelf together. The short bookcase is two shelves of Medieval Stuff, and its bottom shelf is the heavy-hitting theory from the Ph.D. exam days. 

The final two bookcases contain reference books that I use often and literary journals, respectively. Then the desk and the curtains I finally hung! (I sewed them in July.) The wooden box on the desk is a manuscript box that my dad made for me, and atop it are my three current journals. The grey one is all-purpose, the purple one (an Ecosystem that I love) contains 2/3 of one novel, and the black one (my first Rhodia webbie) is for all of the new writing projects so that the purple can remain dedicated to its novel.

And then, most importantly, The Scoo appreciates my renovation of her office.

 This cat won't leave this chair now, though she had no interest in the room before I "fixed" it. Even when I am sitting in it, she sits across the headrest or she sits behind me.

Reading and also writing

I'm currently reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Williams (yes, I know: me and everyone else on the planet). The link goes to the book's LibraryThing page. What a cracking novel. I'm only about a third of the way through it, and I am dazzled by the number of significant and interesting narrative threads Mitchell's braiding here. The one that I am most interested in (the most human of them, perhaps) is, of course, the one the reader gets least of, but rather than feeling slighted by the choice, it's easy to recognize a) the narrative necessity of that construction b) the practicality of how that thread may weave itself through the rest of the plot with consideration to the novel's reality. And, well, it's lovely enough to want to keep that one set of interactions rare and striking and not dull itself with too much familiarity.

All that said, though, if the last 200 pages of the book want to be nothing but Jacob and Aibagawa, I would surely not complain one bit.

Segue.

I am needing, in a very significant way, to get past a wall of inaction this weekend if I don't want to call my writing goals for the month a sham and a mockery. (And, lest anyone be confused, I surely do not wish to do this.) The most prudent way to approach this, of course, would be to open up the Word document the novel is in and start typing, But I have the attention span, of late, of a sparrow. Or of my cat, The Scoo. See photo.

And so I think that I'll turn to pen and paper this morning. And, for those of you who like that sort of thing, the choice will be my True Writer Water Lilies pen filled with Levenger Cocoa ink, and the paper is the Ecosystem notebook that has been dedicated to this single project. (Seriously--Ecosystem notebooks, available at your local B&N or on the interwebs, are brilliant things. No crankiness at all with fountain pen ink, and mine, which is roughly 8" by 5", has held up to much, much rough treatment. I first discovered this gem through the Letters and Journals stationary giveaway, which I was fortunate enough to win in July.)

Anyroad, it's time to get on with it.