I’m writing.
At least, I think I am. I’ve applied my ass to the chair, I’m hitting the keys.
Yep. I’m writing. It’s been a while, and I was uncertain of the symptoms.
I’ve been sick – really sick and then low-grade sick – since Valentine’s Day. After two years and 11 months of dodging it, COVID caught up with our household. Fortunately, we both had relatively mild cases by COVID standards.
But sickness never comes at a convenient time, and so I was in the midst of moving my desk from the front room, where I posted up “temporarily” during the 20200 lockdowns, to a dedicated office I built for myself in a former storeroom in our carport. Right now I am functionally in both places, and thriving in neither. But yesterday I drew a line in the sand and said that today was the day I sat down in the chaos and started writing again.
And here it is, 6:30 AM, and I’m sitting at my desk, surrounded by various bits of debris, discarded cardboard boxes, and office implements that I am unsure where they will belong. I have soft, classical music playing on the small cheap stereo I rescued from the thrift store, and the window is open, and I hear the birds waking up outside. My chickens are playing in their coop, not 20 feet away, and they are fussing at each other as the sun comes up.
And I’m writing.
I have a timer on my desk, just under the monitor of my computer, that shows how much longer I have left to go on this session – right now it’s 24 minutes, the remaining time in red, and as I type the red diminishes with the passage of time. This is sort of an ADHD hack, a way of making something that is invisible to my brain, like time, visible, and thus real.
These are the sort of things I need to do if I’m going to be writing.
The office isn’t complete yet. It’s a narrow room, a former storeroom at the back of our carport that I began turning into dedicated office space over the winter. It’s a bit under six feet wide and 17 feet long, with six feet of the eastern wall devoted to windows that look over our back yard. It’s honestly one of the better views in our house, yet another sign that when this house was built it was built from a plan in a catalog and was divorced from the actual site. There is much I love about this house, but it’s lack of views and vistas is not one of them.
It is not a house built for writing.
As I said, it’s a narrow room, this new office of mine, and it has 10 foot tall ceilings, which emphasizes the narrowness all the more. A friend last night said it looked like a shipping container. The door to the room is in the middle of the long wall without windows, and my desk is to the right as you walk in the door. Immediately in front of you is a waist-high counter with cabinets underneath, where I have hidden my printer on a pullout shelf.
If you turn left as you enter, you face a blank wall and a space 5 and a half feet wide by 5 feet deep, which will eventually hold a bookcase along one wall and a chair for reading, because reading is an essential thing if you intend to be writing.
And I’m writing. In the debris, in an unfinished room, amidst the chaos, but I’m writing.