Office update: writing side, pictures

Hm, I thought it might be fun to post work-in-progress pics every day—I’m having so much fun setting up the office, and later this week we’ll start stripping the paint from the downstairs office, and I know I want to document that as we go.

Here’s what the writing side of the office looks like right now:

Items of note, from left to right:

• On the desk, proof copies of Written on the Coast (fantasy collection) and Give In (BDSM erotica collection), which arrived today! Can’t wait to dive into them and clean up the final errors so I can put these lovely books on sale!
• Next to those, my desktop labyrinth, a Yule gift from Morgana and Brian. I’ve been wanting one for ages, and it’ll be a perfect meditative tool when I need to focus. (Hey, focus, one of my words for the year!)
• On the bulletin board, the top sheet is my production schedule (broken out by weeks) and the bottom is the list of erotica stories published through Soul’s Road Press, noting which ones I have to re-do the covers for and which ones need to be uploaded to Kobo.
• Llyfr (“book” in Welsh), my laptop, with my current WIP on screen in Scrivener.
• New 27-inch monitor for book design (not yet hooked up)!
• Pre-Raphaelite “Soul of the Rose” mousepad. (By comparison, on the home side of the room, I use a Torchwood mousepad.)

Meanwhile, I hung this Goddess picture over my writing chair today, and re-hung another one piece of art with the same gold cord. Above that (only half-visible) is a fishing globe I bought during my very first Oregon Writers Network workshop almost 13 years ago.

I want to buy a small (ideally antique) round wooden table for between the chair and the door, for my cuppa tea when I’m working.

Ideally I’d like to move the yearbooks and photo albums at the top of the bookshelf somewhere else, but that’s the only place they currently fit. The bottom two and a half shelves are children’s and YA books; not sure what’s going to go on the remaining shelf and a half. Maybe mysteries, because I don’t actually have many of those.

That’s it for today!

This is why I should not be allowed on the Internet

As I’ve mentioned, this month (since we’re home the entire month) our big project is to swap offices. My sweet little study downstairs, full of fiction books and an original built-in desk, just isn’t big enough when I add the publishing portion of my job into the mix. Upstairs, half of the large office was Ken’s office and half was our home office—which was really my home office, since I deal with the bills and paperwork and whatnot.

The project is going well so far. Ken’s completely cleaned out of the upstairs office (with things he doesn’t need immediately, and all the history and travel books, packed up and stored in the sewing room), and I’ve moved the home office stuff to his former side and moved all my writing stuff to the former home office side. I haven’t moved all the fiction books up yet because the shelves upstairs have open sides, which are fine for big books, but paperbacks fall through. Ken’s going to get some thin plywood, cut it up, and stain it. I’ve gone through most of the fiction and weeded out a fair amount, which will make it easier to fit everything in upstairs.

writing books, ego shelves, and magazines to be moved

Then we’ll tackle the downstairs office: strip the wood and stain it, paint the walls a dark red called Luscious, and hang the medieval-tapestry Roman blinds I found at a charity shop for $7 each (there were three, and Morgana grabbed the third). It’ll be the study I always wanted…but I’m glad we’re getting it done. It’ll really change the energy of the first floor and inspire us to work on more!

Meanwhile, I’m slowly arranging things upstairs. It’s slow because I want to get things right the first time, and I want to find a mix between efficiency and a good workspace, and the details and things I love to make the space inspiring and beautiful. Unfortunately, we don’t have the time/energy/money to have taken everything out (the desk is an enormous U-shaped one), stripped wood, painted, etc. And as much as I love this wallpaper, it wouldn’t work as a border above the picture rail (the sizing and half drop simply don’t fit). So I have to be creative with the rest of the décor.

It doesn’t help that I’ve been going through the archives of the Catty-Corner Cottage blog…. The woman decorates almost exactly how I’d like to, but she’s so utterly and immensely artistic that I don’t know if I could ever do a fraction of what she does. It’s inspiring, yes, but also frustrating!

What’s been happening is this: Ken will come upstairs to find me sitting in one of the two office chairs (because the comfy writing chair will have been taken over by a cat*), staring around the room. Thinking. Plotting. Pondering. Dreaming.

Just now, I found myself staring at the big filing cabinet. The house files are in the top two drawers, and they’ll be moving over to the smaller two-drawer filing cabinet next to me, so I can take over the full four-drawer cabinet for writing stuff (the two bottom drawers are bursting at the seams). It’s simply an ugly grey filing cabinet. Atop it are boxes of manuscript files, atop those are my bodhrán and a mask of my face, and in front of the boxes are a water dispenser and pretty metal tree tea light holder from which is dangling an Amy Brown faerie my friend Thomasina gave me for Yule. The bodhrán will probably have to move, because I don’t think it’ll say in place when open and close the filing cabinet. But anyway. My point sit that it’s an ugly grey filing cabinet, and I’m sitting here thinking, Hey, maybe I can spray paint it! But what color?** And then maybe I could stencil it! Or take all those magnets I’ve collected and finally cover them with something pretty, and…***

And when, exactly, am I suppose to be getting writing done?  ;-)

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*Although right now Grimoire has crawled into my writing office chair and fallen asleep, which is probably good because I need to write, so I can just grab my laptop and move over to the comfy chair once I finish this.

**The bulletin board that’s part of the desk next to it is a teal color, but I don’t want that as the primary color in here. So it’ll have to be something that doesn’t clash. Maybe the plummy purple from the comfy writing chair? Do they make spray paint in plummy purple? This is why I should not be allowed on the Internet!!!

***And get prettier handles for it, natch.