writerly stuff

Office drama continues, but my mood is better today in spite of it, thanks to sunshine, healthy eating, an unusually nice cup of tea this morning, phone calls from my mom and my sister, and a little tax refund.

One of my new co-workers not only is friendly and hilarious and tall, but she's also published a book of short stories (she's a business analyst by day). When I told her I was working on my MFA, she promised to keep "checking on me" to see how it was coming along. She's also agreed to read my thesis later this year. Always good to have someone in the know giving you advice.

Joe-the-office-roomie is doing some freelance editing for Gateway Press in Baltimore. They're sending him a draft of a romance novel that is "racy but not porn." He's looking forward to reading it.

My first assignment in the writing workshop was to describe my writing space. The professor said of my piece: "there's no such thing as an unladylike word for a writer - use them all!" And so I give you:

I built my desk, grumbling a lot of unladylike swear words at it in the process. It’s dark wood with a drawer, a cupboard, and a hutch. I also built the matching lateral file drawer and bookcase. I swore at them, too. The cupboard is full of spiral notebooks and frilly blank journals with fancy paper – I bought the spiral notebooks; other people have given me the journals. We won’t look into the drawer – it’s a mess of paperclips, Post-It note pads, USB drives, rubberbands, stamps, batteries, and whatnot.

I’ve downsized from a PC to a laptop, but I kept the flatscreen monitor and got a docking station to connect the laptop to the monitor and to my favorite ergonomic keyboard. This makes more room for books. I’ve got the usual classics: Webster’s Dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, The Elements of Style, On Writing Well, and A Room of One’s Own. I’ve also got some “character” books: names, careers, traits, places.

There are a few pictures taped on the hutch - Snoopy atop his red dog house with a typewriter, trying to get past “dark and stormy night,” a cartoon of two kids, each in a cardboard box, trying to figure out how to “think outside the box.” My favorite is a large picture, ripped out of last year’s kitchen calendar – a woman pointing happily to an empty chair with Anne Taintor’s modern tagline – “she liked imaginary men best of all.”

The non-cooperative printer sits on top of the hutch, along with my favorite blue and white vase filled with just-starting-to-wilt flowers from a friend's garden. Next to that is a small Buddha statue I brought back from Australia – the skinny Buddha, not the fat one. He’s holding up one hand, as if to say, “Chill, Cate. Just chill.” I keep moving the seated cellist sculpture from the bookcase to the hutch and back again. It’s my next challenge after earning the MFA – learning to play the cello.

Above the hutch is a frame photograph I took in the botanical gardens in Fort Worth. I had to get down on my stomach to get a good shot of the girl-with-water jug statue surrounded by flowers, and not get the parking lot in the background.

The bookcase on the wall opposite the desk is stocked with non-fiction: biographies, health, religion, gardening, physics, art, even Think Like a Cat. Two other bookcases hold all the fiction – the books I loved reading as a kid, the ones I’m into now, and the stack I haven’t read yet.

The cats like to hang out with me while I write. Tristan, the orange tabby likes sleeping on my lap, occasionally stretching out a paw to hit the space bar. Lyra, the tuxedo cat, likes to sit on the window sill next to the desk and observe the world. There is a tree just outside my window, and Lyra often talks to the squirrels and birds in it with her staccato "eh eh eh." One brave bird climbs the outside wall to stuff food underneath the roof overhang. Neither Lyra nor I ever see this bird retrieve the food, though. There must be quite a stash up there.