Things that are awesome when you’re a writer:

Things that are awesome when you’re a writer:

Being excited about a library, and dreaming of having one in your own house.

Taking a shower every day (because showers are awesome, especially when you live with someone else).

Bed time (also known as: whenever you want).

Getting up in the morning, because it doesn’t suck.

Using a new word in a sentence and pretending as though you’ve known of its existence since primary school.

A stack of books on your desk is not clutter. It’s just plain awesome.

Being oblivious when you’ve accidentally used a metaphor and people pick up on your level of genius for using it.

Reading a badly worded headline from a newspaper and wondering how much it cost that moron to get a degree in journalism.

Sometimes you don’t have to do any research at all.

Becoming addicted to coffee is an occupational hazard that no one prepares you for, and you’re grateful that there’s no one watching to see how much of the stuff you actually drink.

You have a greater chance of winning in a spontaneous rhyme-off.

Words that are used incorrectly are awesomely annoying.

Knowing that the only difference between you and the unemployed is that your fantasy world is better than theirs.

If you work in a coffee shop, no one will ever leave you a million dollar tip. Nor have you ever heard of anyone giving someone else a million dollar tip. But you do hear of writers with a million dollar first-book deal.

Knowing that if someone picks their nose in real life, it’s a filthy habit. If someone does it in a book, it’s an awesome character trait.

Fortifying those pesky talents

Today, in addition to writing and making myself lunch, I built a fort. We have two sofas which are almost identical in length. I pushed them together and used some of the cushions as battlements and I can say that it was quite the success. I got to stand up in the middle and shout “HA HA! I rule this empire!” I then climbed out and adopted my pirate voice, along with pirate hook hand, and muttered “Arrrr, that be the truth.”

Fort building is an important step in to becoming a writer. It relieves boredom and creates some excitement in an otherwise “my day is spent staring at a computer in a little room surrounded by no human interaction at all.”

The workspace.

Right now, my workspace is a sofa and my lap. It’s fantastic. I get to lie back with my feet up, a coke and a banana nearby and I’m hooked up to the internet to give me a constant distraction. It is, without a doubt, the worst possible workspace in the house, but it rocks.

Strangely enough, I also have a study. I am lucky enough to have a two-bedroom castle complete with a grotto, cascading waterfall, butler and an admirable collection of flamingos. Next week I hope to upgrade by getting a helper monkey. So naturally all of the junk goes into the study, including me and the computer. That’s a much better workspace because I am freer from distractions (and from the sofa I can keep an eye on the fridge, which is doubly bad because there’s some left-over pizza in there).

The study is small, and small is good. It means that no one considers putting a sofa in there (oh how I wish there was a sofa in there), which prevents most people from lingering while I’m trying to work. But I have to step over my shoes and the pile of paper, around the laundry and the chest of drawers and around the corner to the door and make sure that I don’t stub my toes again (I have done that and I’m still amazed that I have not broken any toes with my win-for-England kick into the corner of the skirting board). I also have the blinds drawn because I live on the ground floor of my castle with a view of a carpark, and do you know how difficult it is to concentrate when there are flamingos staring in at you? I also face away from the window, so ideally no daylight will ever touch me and I can live happily paler than a Norweigan albino and his vampire mistress.

The downside is that I work in a really small room with no view and only enough electrical sockets to run a computer. There I am with the laundry next to me and I’m typing away, mostly because I don’t need much space but also because I’m not supposed to have much space. Being a writer qualifies you to live and work in something the size of a Skoda.

And you know what? This is actually an upgrade. I used to have just one room to myself, and there were long periods of time when I only left my bedroom to use the bathroom and to bring up dinner, because I was too busy watching TV shows online, writing and sleeping. Spending 20+ hours in the same room is not healthy, which goes to explain why a lot of creative people are quite imbalanced.

But given the option, I’d rather do this than work in some stupid office like Dilbert.

Pseudonym-pending

Hey there. As is true with most blogs, this one was started late at night / early one morning when I was too restless to do something productive but also too bored to do something useful.

The situation is that I am a writer, you have stumbled upon a writer’s blog, and against my better judgement I am going to spend a lot of time talking about writing. I don’t like talking about writing because I am conscious of the sheer boredom it must involve for the listener and reader. No one should care as to what I have to say because I am unpublished (that will change one day) and thus I shouldn’t know enough to talk about it. It’s like an engineering student talking about life as an engineer without any real experience doing it. I am also bored to death by most other writers talking about writing, because everyone has a different point of view and what works for one person does not work for everyone. But who cares, because I feel like sharing the joys and misery of working in a tiny room with only myself as company.

Oh, just in case anyone in the future tells me that I’ve sold out: I totally have. If anyone is willing to pay me millions of dollars so that I can sit in a quiet little room, pace around for a few hours a day and then hammer out one crapola piece of fluff after the next, then I’m your man. I promise that I will use that money to buy nice things for myself that I don’t need and once in a while I will tell someone that they can keep the change as my charitable deed.

As for the name of the blog, I’m going with pseudonym-pending, because I thought it was hysterically brilliant considering how early into the morning it is, and also because I am seriously in need of a pseudonym for when I get published. I have a list of first and last names that I like and the various combinations of those, but nothing grabs me. I’m not going with my real name because it isn’t easy to pronounce, or spell, or remember, and because I want to feel like I’m Batman. And did you know that princes and princesses can change their name when they become kings and queens?

Also tell someone in the future that I want to be knighted. And that I want my own batmobile.