Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!
Where Writers Write is a weekly series that will feature a different author every Wednesday as they showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where some of TNBBC's favorite authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happens.
This is David Maine. David is the author of Fallen; The Preservationist; The Book of Samson (three fantastic fictional accounts of biblical events); Monster, 1959 (a campy rompy nod towards the good ole 50's sci-fi/horror movies); The Gamble of the Godless (a straight to ebook fantasy novel); and the upcoming An Age of Madness, which will be released in September by Red Hen Press.
David and I met quite a few years back, and we always find fun and creative ways to work together - including this blog tour I developed and hosted for him back in August of 2011 where David throws in his two cents on the whole "indie" thing.
Today, I get to show off David's writing space! Folks, this is where the Maine Madness happens....
Where David Maine Writes
My writing
space these days is fairly modest. I used to have a whole room to use as a
studio, and I hope to have that again one day soon. But life in Hawaii has been
pretty cramped, and this 6 x 10 partition of my bedroom has been pretty much
what I’ve had to work with for the past couple of years.
Ultimately,
my needs are fairly simple: a comfortable chair to slouch in with a notebook;
some sort of platform for my laptop; some shelves for a few inspiring books; a
desk to accommodate the clutter. Bonus points are awarded for windows that look
out on something green and an overall sense of solitude and calm. (Which is, by
far, the most difficult of these elements to find.)
A couple
things that accompany me into this space. Coffee sits on the table beside me
from mid-morning to late afternoon. Music is there, especially in the
afternoons, and generally of the space-out trance-inducing variety—Tinariwen,
Mazzy Star, Speck Mountain, low-key reggae like the Nazarenes, African kora
music and so forth. Nothing too raucous or attention-grabbing, and definitely
no hip-hop. (Listening to other people’s words makes it difficult to
concentrate on my own.) And I like to keep copies of my books nearby, mainly as
a reminder that this whole write-something-that’s-worth-reading enterprise
isn’t as crazy as it often feels.
I’ve been
fortunate to live in many different places, in varying degrees of financial
comfort. Whether the accompanying spaces have been large or small, private or
shared, I think the important thing is for me to make peace with the
surrounding environment so that I can then forget about it. After all, writing
is about creating other worlds and living in them, so I try not to get too
terribly caught up in the nuts and bolts of what surrounds me.
Check back next week to see where J.A. Tyler is inspired to write.
After visiting Hemingway House in Key West and seeing the private cottage away from the main house where Papa wrote, I always wondered if my own writing space was up to par (enough space, enough separation from distractions, etc. etc.)
ReplyDeleteThank you for clearing that up for me and confirming one of my own suspicions; a writer can write anywhere if he's serious about writing.
Well, I hope that's true. I mean, there's something to be said for minimizing distractions, but I think most of us are pretty limited in our ability to seclude ourselves in isolated cottages (!). For me, the best way to fight external distractions is to make the internal ones as interesting as possible.
DeleteAnd anyway, I always wondered whether I'd be intimidated by a picture-perfect "artist space" like the one you describe, or like Yaddo, or like the lighthouse I sometimes fantasize about living in. I mean, would the expectations that I be hugely prolific result in my freezing up entirely? Maybe. Maybe not, but then again, maybe.