Describe your desk
My desk has been described as organized chaos. I am pretty much the only one who knows my filing system and therefore the only one who can find something. The desk itself was custom built for my height and because I have recurring back problems, but it was also built to fill the length of one wall, roughly sixteen feet; with three banks of deep drawers. When I moved and had to downsize, my search for a new house included space for my desk and the matching wall unit of bookshelves which is also sixteen feet by nine feet. I found a house that gave me the space I needed to set up my office again, but now I have no dining room and the desk had to be shortened by three feet *s*
Where did you grow up, and how did this influence your writing?
I was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario. My parents moved us out of the city and into the suburbs when I was six years old so I have never been one for crowded cities and busy streets. Each time the area began to expand with houses and busy traffic, I have moved further and further north out of the greater Toronto area. I currently live in a small town which fits the cliche, if you blink you miss it, but I can still go for a short walk and see horses in the fields and chickens in back yards. Writing is a solitary business and, for me, at any rate, distractions too easily pull me out of the mood to write. Living away from hustle and bustle always helped focus me, and it was not unusual for me to work sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. I recall being invited out for dinner to a friend's house...and resenting the need to leave my medieval characters halfway into a battle. But the hubby prevailed and I went. When I arrived everyone was sitting in the family room glued to the TV watching in dead silence as the cameras were following a white Bronco on the freeway. Twelve pairs of eyes stared at me in disbelief when I asked what was going on. Yeah. That's how isolated a writer can be.
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