I guess I’m lucky to have a room of my own, in which I can shut out the everyday and set off on some 
wonderful adventure to who knows where…
It’s a great space in a spare bedroom and it’s mine! Until the house fills up with family or friends, of course, and then I have to tidy all my notes off the bed and desist from sneaking in to check out how the promotions and the book sales are going; for there are few things in life I adore more than my BIG screen!
My daily ritual for writing is a bit ‘all over the place’ just now – perhaps something to do with the time of year – but perhaps more to do with still trying to find a sustainable working ratio between promoting Siege of the Northland whilst writing Book 2 Winter Warrior. But this is the week to reinstate the discipline and hopefully get those opening scenes (currently whirring around in my head) committed to words on the screen.
When I am doing basic admin tasks I generally have the door of my room ajar – which means ‘can be interrupted/will accept offers of tea/happy to discuss what’s for dinner.’ However closed door means ‘do not knock or (even worse) enter unless the house is on fire or a sinkhole has swallowed my car!’
I’m not well practised in meditation but I can only think that it is possibly akin to where you go as a writer when you enter ‘the zone.’ It is a place where time does standstill, you’ve gone into the story, you are literally somewhere else and the words are flowing and then… the door opens and you turn to deliver ‘The Look.’ It’s pretty scary stuff and quite honestly I wouldn’t like to be on the receiving end. However, it is quick and effective. Obviously there is no fire and no sinkhole.
When Virginia Woolf wrote her essay A Room of One’s Own in 1929 she was considering how/why women remained as ‘outsiders’ in the economic, political and cultural life of Britain; using the relationship between women and fiction as a vehicle to explore this wider suppression.
When I pulled my copy of this book off the bookshelf, I was delighted to find I still had all the little post-its in place from when I was first introduced to this text. Wanted to leave you with just one little gem among so many.
‘I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else.’ Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own
Reading Corner
My review of Gillespie and I by Jane Harris is available to view on Goodreads here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2164719069?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1
I am currently listening to Winter Pilgrims by Toby Clements. Good opening, very descriptive – reminds me of Bernard Cornwell – will review in due course.
Currently on my bedside table is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. I had hoped to re-read this book by RLS’s day on 13th November; which, obviously, I have failed to do but am thoroughly enjoying being re-acquainted with Jim, Long John and Squire Trewlaney.
