Where Shit Gone Get Done

I’ve prepared a piece for From Mind to Mind Books on Work Area Inspiration.

Work Area Inspiration with Richard Parry @TactualRain #Thriller #Action #AmReading http://t.co/vXSEld4uwx pic.twitter.com/eKtD0cscx7

— Lisa Weaver (@FromMindtoMind) April 29, 2014

Colour theory. There you go: guest post done.

…

Okay, apparently I need to do a little better than that. The thing about my work area is that I want to make sure that it doesn’t jar with my delicate eyeballs. My home office desk is this sheet of tempered glass, and I’ve got the various technology pieces in step with this: the MacBook is grey like the desk, and the mouse, monitor, and keyboard are black. Even the mouse mat is black.
Maybe it’s not colour theory. Maybe it’s OCD.

I use this basic premise for anywhere I write — it’s a pretty good determiner of whether I’ll get good writing done. I sometimes like to lean back, take a rest from the keyboard, and let my eyes wander. If I’m in some for-kids McCafe, that’ll be like stabbing myself in the brain with crayons. If I’m somewhere else — nice hotel bar, maybe, with blues and greens around — then I can relax into it.

Some of my writerly-friends have photos of their kids around, paintings up, that kind of thing. Great! That’s a neat approach too, but for me the inspiration comes from within: the work area is all about creating a blank canvas for those ideas to generate from.

It doesn’t stop with the visuals though. I make sure I’ve got a comfortable chair, because nothing screws with my character’s dialogue like having a spring sticking up into my gluteus. I also carry tunes with me, everywhere, and a good set of noise suppressing headphones: it lets me tune out the tiny distractions that fill the air around us, all the time.

If I had an unlimited budget? I’d get a nice writer’s cabin on the edge of a lake somewhere. Pleasing visual backdrop? Check. Nice surrounds? Check. Comfortable chair? I can ship one in. Tunes? Check.

Pretty sure that the local bears or badgers or whatever wouldn’t like me listening to Tadpole at a billion decibels though.