In this week’s Write on Wednesday, my friend Becca asks:
So, how about you? Do you ever feel the need to jump start your writing? What drains the energy from your “writing mind”? What do you do when your creative battery dies?

Muses are fickle, and the energy that powers them is equally so. Sometimes, I find excuses not to write, but most of the time the urge is ripped from me by something mundane. I don’t write well when I’m stressed over money, so it’s really a good thing that the whole “starving artist” thing has gone out of style. (The whole black and beret look has, as well, but I don’t care. I like black, and berets work for me.) Other than that, when I’m tired, when I’m hot, when I’m hungry or thirsty before I face the keyboard (as opposed to becoming so during a session, because I’m so absorbed), all those things make me throw up my hands in despair, or they would, if I had the energy to do so.

Most of the time, I can jump-start myself. I’ll re-read part of a favorite novel, watch a few episodes of The West Wing, Gilmore Girls, or anything Whedonesque, run through the entire soundtrack of a musical (lately I’ve been alternating Legally Blonde, Rent, and Hairspray, and I’m at the point where I can sing and ride the stationery bike (simultaneously) for the entire first act of the first of those, which, let me tell you, is not easy. (But I love to belt, even though too much belting is really unhealthy.)

When music, books, and other people’s snappy, fast-paced dialogue doesn’t work, I think about cooking, because food and words are completely intertwined in my world. Usually I’ll bake. Tonight, I made enchiladas, which I’d never made before. (I sort of made them up as I went along. They were good. I used grilled chicken that had been marinated in lime juice, garlic salt, and vodka (we were out of tequila).)

When food doesn’t work, which happens when it’s been sunny and hot for too many days in a row, I call on external help. Specifically, there is a collection of friends, who know who they are, who always manage to leave me abuzz with energy and ideas, even if all we talk about is how tired we both are, or what movies we saw the previous weekend.

And if nothing works? Well, sometimes I do have to listen to my body, and sleep even when I know I SHOULD be writing, or finish work before I write something fun, and usually after a few days I’m back in the groove.

Alternatively, I move furniture around…

It’s no secret that I’ve been having an issue with my office. When we first moved here, and I was still doing loans, the calming tranquility of walls the color of green tea appealed to me. I had lots of power outlets for my nifty business machines. It was good.

But over the last couple years, really since quitting BigFinancialCompany, I’ve not been able to find the ‘zone’ in my office. It’s not that I dislike the colors, or anything, I’m just not at home there. This is demonstrated that the beautiful calendar my mother gave me at Christmas, from an artist local to La Paz, BCS, Mexico, was still on MARCH as of yesterday.

It was further brought home when my friend Deb walked up there with me for a house tour on Saturday, and said, “Well, no wonder you can’t write here. This doesn’t feel like you.”

We walked down the hall to the room we’d designated the Library, but that we’ve never quite used enough, even though it’s the kind of room that beckons. (Does that make sense?) I don’t know if it’s the geography of the house, the fact that it has huge windows overlooking the side street, or what, but whenever we walk into that room, we tend to find a reason to stay. It helps, I think, that our old denim couch is up there. Further proof of the power of this room: when we moved the denim set upstairs, we had no problem getting the love seat into Fuzzy’s office, but he and his friend D could not manage to wrangle the couch into the library. They measured and found out it was four inches larger than the door, in every angle.

They were, in fact, about to tell me there was no way the couch would fit into that room when suddenly, miraculously, it just did.

I should have seen it as a sign, I guess.

So anyway, Deb and I sat on the couch up there, and she said, “This is where you need to write,” which is true. I love that room. We’d chosen our original offices based on having spaces of roughly equal size, but the reality is, I work from home. I need more space. I need big surfaces spread before me like blank paper. And I need bold colors.

Fuzzy and I talked about it, and he agreed we’d make it happen. Before bed on Friday, he’d made me a diagram with visio even printed cut-outs of all the furniture pieces, so that we could figure out how this could work.

It helps, I think, that I’ve needed to replace my desk for a while. The keyboard tray broke in shipping four years ago, and we’d used spit and twine to make it work, but several months ago it broke completely, crashing down on my foot. (MDF + Bare Feet = OWOWOWOWOWOW!) In retrospect, that was probably a sign as well. The desk is no longer made, the fittings for any tray can only be attached to the struts, and no tray we could find was the right size. The desk is taller than most, and too tall to use a laptop on top of for any length of time.

I was pretty sure we would have to wait to replace my desk til after my conference, but we went looking at desks so I could find some I liked and begin a budget plan, and then we walked into Staples, and they had this corner desk that I liked. I liked it so much that I walked away from the blue glass and steel desk I’d been eyeing, sat down in the pink typing chair near it, and said, “I like this.”

I looked at the price, and it said $99. I thought, “Oh, that’s probably just for this section,” as most such desks are sold in parts - one price for the desk, another for the return or hutch - but no, that was for the whole thing. And it got better - it was on sale for $89, and then there was $10 off on the website, and then I had a coupon for another $10.

We went home to think about it. Because I wanted to make sure. And because it was bigger than we’d planned, but Fuzzy moved the couch into it’s new position, and used empty boxes to show me how the space would work. “You won’t be able to get three people on the sofa,” he said.

When the hell do I NEED three people on the couch in my writing room?

I went online to check the dimensions again, and found out that the desk came in CHERRY as well as the maple we’d seen. Now, while my original desk was beach-glass-green and powder-coated steel, the supports for the desk were warm copper cherry, and my cabinet and rolling file are also copper cherry. This was a lighter cherry, but much closer in tone than maple. I called the store, and Connie said she didn’t have it in cherry, but she’d find out who did, then sent us to Cedar Hill. The Arlington store is about six miles from our house in one direction. Cedar Hill is about eight in another direction - we go there often - not too bad.

I managed to convince the sales person to give me the Internet-only discount, and we got my new desk for $69.

I came home and had to finish a project, and Fuzzy went upstairs and built it for me. (I bribed him with a cheeseburger, but still). He had a work issue come up, and at one point he was under the desk tightening screws and talking to a client, “I’m not the best person to help with this, and I’m sort of under a piece of furniture right now…”

Today, he’ll drop an ethernet port into the room for my desktop machine, though that has a wifi card in it as well, so it’s not urgent or anything. And I’ll start moving stuff over.

After all this, you’re probably wondering why the title of this is “Welcome to the Word Lounge.” It’s because I told Fuzzy he was not allowed to refer to my new space as an office. “I don’t want it tainted by BUSINESS,” I said. “It’s a creative space.”

“Okay,” he said, “It’s your ABODE OF WRITEYNESS.”

“Possibly,” I said, laughing, the way one does at four AM. “Or, I might call it, the Word Lounge.”

Pictures will be taken when everything’s all set up.

I’ve always enjoyed reading travel guides, and over the past few days, I’ve had a lot of time to explore online versions of Frommer’s and Fodor’s among others, but when I think of travel books, really, my brain first goes to a series of mystery novels written by the man who invented Paddington Bear.

The novels, written by Michael Bond, are a series of gastronomic mysteries featuring restaurant critic Monsieur Pamplemousse and his faithful bloodhound Pommes Frites.

These are comic mysteries, and always involve mishaps that occur while Mssr. P. is on a mission, trying a new restaurant to see if it deserves to be included, or have it’s stockpots (their rating system) increased, in Le Guide.

Somehow, in my travels, I’ve never seen anything as absurd as a man being koshed on the head by his own baguette, or being locked in a pay toilet.

I have, however, often paused to observe young lovers, arguing couples, and parents with children, and been as amused watching those interactions, than I ever was with the fictional detective and his pooch.

I don’t know what the best anti wrinkle cream might be, but judging from the Tony’s tonight, Patti LuPone does. That woman has not aged in decades; if anything, she looks younger.

Liza Minelli, on the other hand, still scares me.

Watching the Tony’s is always a bit weird for me. There was a time in the mid-nineties when I watched them to see if any of my former classmates were winning anything (they often did), but before and since, I’ve watched them because the beginning of a musical’s overture is still a dose of magic for me. I like movies, but I LOVE theatre.

The problem is, now I want to write a musical instead of finishing my book.

Note to self: ONE project at a time.

I’ve spent the weekend in a sort of “radio silence” mode - the mental equivalent of a colon cleanse - writing and sleeping and listening to short stories on NPR (yesterday) and breaking during meals to watch things like the Tony Award Nomination Concert tonight.

I’ve got TiVo set to record the Tony’s as I’m feeling very tired just now, and want to rest. They are the only award show I have any interest in. Live performance has some magic that no other medium can provide. It doesn’t matter if it’s a fully produced Broadway musical or a mother reading a book to her child and doing all the voices but the spoken word connects us.

Madeleine L’Engle reminded us that even the Judao-Christian view of God is bound in Story, but I don’t have the energy for philosophical discourse just now.

Words written and spoken, stories told, songs sung, dreams taking flight.
This is my world right now.

Becca, who I count among those “friends as yet unmet in person” is hosting a summer writing roundtable called “Write on Wednesday.” Today is Saturday, but she assures me it’s not a problem, and her first question has been tumbling around my head for a few days.

She asks: “Why in the world do you come to the page?”

At first my answer was flippant and terse: Because I have to.

But it’s a question that deserves more than a four-word answer.

I write to explore, to create, to still the buzzing of ideas in my head, to give other ideas new life. I write because sometimes a conversation overheard on line in the grocery store or in a cafe is just enough to spark a story. I can’t follow a stranger home to observe the next part of their life, but I can imagine what might follow.

Did the mother of the five teenagers like whatever chocolate they chose at Tom Thumb while their harried father gave advice, at nine PM on the Thursday before Mother’s Day? Did the kids get stuff THEY wanted after all? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do know that there was something about this poor man surrounded by gangly young people trying to make sure his wife had a present from every child without blowing their budget that touched me. He had a story, and I wanted to know more.

Or what about the poet I used to chat with when I was 19 and working at a bookstore/cafe in San Jose? He let me read some of his work, asked me advice on word choice and comma placement, and never guessed that almost twenty years later I’d be thinking of him in his ratty fisherman’s sweater and jeans, scribbling in what I now know was a Moleskine notebook, and sipping slowly on latte after latte, as I worked on my novel. I don’t remember his name, but I remember the angular script he used, and the soft grey of the pencil strokes on the unruled paper.

In one of my favorite books ever, Outside Lies Magic, the author, John Stilgoe, mentions that if you’re riding a bike along-side a picket fence, and manage to find just the right speed, the fence becomes essentially invisible. The rational part of me knows that it’s just an optical illusion, that the fence is as solid as ever, and that the right speed simply synchronizes our active vision with the gaps between the slats, so we’re never looking at solid boards.

The more fanciful part of me - the observer, the writer - that part of me accepts that sometimes you can find magic in ordinary things.

For me, those things are words.

I write so I can see - and share - what’s behind the invisible picket fence.

This is a solicitation.

Writers, by and large, do not have cushy offices or corporate benefits like paid vacations or medical benefits. While I’m fortunate enough to be married to a man who is supportive of my aspirations (and gives me access to his employee health plan), taking a week off to attend a writers conference/workshop in San Francisco means I don’t work for a week, and that impacts my income.

I’ve got generous parents who gifted me with the price of the conference itself, because they believe in my talent and my dream, but San Francisco is not an inexpensive city, and I’m a little bit stressed about expenses, because I still have to offset airfare, hotel bills, and food while I’m there.

That’s why I’m asking you, my friends and readers, to help out, by donating to The Fiction Fund. This isn’t a charity. Your donation is not tax deductible. I had to do a lot of soul-searching to even ask, but if you don’t ask, you don’t get.

Here’s how it works:
- I’ve got a PayPal “donation” button in my sidebar.
- If you donate anything between $1 and $5, I’ll write a 100-word “verbal snapshot” or “distilled moment” based on a keyword you provide (keep it clean, please). At the bottom of the post there will be a line reading, “This post inspired by YourName.”
- If you donate more than $5, the attribution line at the bottom of your post will include a link to your website or blog.
- If you’d prefer to be an anonymous donor, that’s fine with me.

Posts will appear at:
Itinerant Imagination dot Com

Please don’t:
- tell me this is tacky
- offer criticism that isn’t constructive

Please do:
- Offer supportive notes, even if you can’t contribute cash.
- Tell me your favorite places in San Francisco
- Wish me lots of luck. My goal is not to come home without an agent.