A Writer’s Desk – and its Six Essentials

When uncluttered a writer’s desk is unproductive. But that’s just one way of looking at it.

This is how my desk looks now, at the time of writing this post.

View sitting in my chair.

Rather tidy. Tidier than it looks when I am genuinely at work – not just staring down at open notebooks. But the staring down is important too for it gets the idea-pot bubbling and churning.

View standing near the desk.

Another view. Still tidy.

And yet, so quiet and calm, circumscribed by the circle of light, it encloses and cocoons me, makes me comfortable and safe, and allows my imagination to soar (or burrow deep into whatever catches my fancy.)

And yes, there’s another way of looking at a tidy and uncluttered desk. It helps you to focus on that one thing that sits in its center (the notebook, for instance.) A tidy desk is sans-distractors.

And before I end this post, here’s a list of the Six Things that must be there on my desk, before I can start work.

Six Essentials of My Writing Desk

1. My macbook is my lifeline. I’m totally grateful to this awesome guy at Apple Bangalore, who got it revived for me. Even though you’ll never end up on my blog, I have to say this, “Thank you, Deepak.”
2. My notebook.  I love notebooks. I know that a lot of writers are notebook-hogs. I buy them all the time, and I’ve got a whole shelf worth of notebooks in all shapes, sizes, and covers.
3. My pen. I love pens and pencils and brushes – tools that help me craft my stories and paintings. Though I type out my stories on my laptop, I create “verbal sketches” of all my bigger stories (5K words and above,) novellas, and novels in my notebook.
4. My lamps. I’ve got two on this desk, and four elsewhere in the house. I can’t live without their circle of warmth. It comforts me like my Mom’s presence would.
5. My water bottle that keeps changing – the one that I have right now has a sticker of “Follow your Dream” (Chinese, of course, or they would know that fickle humans are always chasing more than one dream.)
6. My specs that I can work without but my optometrist is adamant that I should wear them.

I hope you enjoyed this little deviation from my usual story posts.

I’ll be back with some news on the writing front – soon 🙂

2019 & Writing.

If I were one of my characters, I’d say that 2018 was a monster from the depths of hell, but I am not, so I’ll just call it a terrible year and lock it up in my diaries.

Now about 2019…

A story is out there milling in the slush-pile of a publisher, another is lounging here in my desk-drawer, a couple are waiting to be yanked out of the dark recesses of my mind so that they find their true form. But being a writer-artist (or an artist-writer, depending on who rules the roost at the time of speaking,) makes the tussle even greater. When a story peeps out, the artist brandishes her brush and shoo-es it back in; and when the writer finally gets down to writing it, the artist seduces the writer with her colorful palette and the promises of an incredible visual treat.

The Whimsy of the Characters…

takes the writer on a ride. 

It’s easy to say, “plan your day and schedule your work,” and I’m sure every writer tries to do it, but the characters in the stories that the writer writers – they have a life of their own. They want to do their own thing. And this is why the plan, the schedule, and the characters, all get tangled up to cause a gridlock.

You see, each character in the story has a personality, and characters with strong personalities want a bigger slice of the pie, a stronger role to play. You may want to say that it’s the writer who, in the first place, created these characters, but quite like the parents who despite giving birth to and nurturing their children have little say in how their children must lead their lives, the characters too, want to lead their own lives – they want to make decisions, go on adventures, fall in love with the wrong person,

Becoming a GoodReads Author

About thirty minutes ago, I joined the GoodReads Author Program. My Author Profile is available at: https://www.goodreads.com/SRAnand, and I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with my GoodReads account 😦

So far, I’ve been following their instructions to the letter.

They got me started by making me rate some books. I did that. They kept pushing me toward the beautifully rounded and rather luscious figure of twenty by telling me that they’d be providing personal recommendations if I rated twenty books. I did that. Then they asked me to claim my books. I did that too.

Why did I do all this?

I happened to chance upon this short and sweet review of Mysterious Kemet Book I, and I suddenly felt all warm and fuzzy toward GoodReads. Thank you, dear reviewer. You made me smile.

So I climbed the bandwagon – with absolutely no inkling of the direction in which it might take me.

If you’ve been there and done that, I’d be happy for some guidance 🙂

My books, including “Mysterious Kemet: Book – I”, can be downloaded from Amazon.

 

Anxiety, Your Creative Loved Ones, and You.

Life

Life is a strange teacher. Untiring, relentless, and often merciless, it continues to heap tests upon tests on you. For the creative ones, these tests come with a continuous mulling over of every possible scenario that could result from every possible decision. This incessant churning of thoughts gives them heartburns, turns them into hysterical zombies, and gives them sleepless nights.

The Zombies

These creative professionals must use their energy to create or they’d soon find themselves out of work.

When anxiety takes over and hogs their energy, creativity slinks into a corner.

Unabated anxiety makes them neurotic and they struggle to keep their focus. Their creativity gets bundled up and thrown in a corner because

Good people of Dundee – be what you want to be!

“Good people of Dundee, your voices raise,
And to Miss Baxter give great praise;
Rejoice and sing and dance with glee,
Because she has founded a college in Bonnie Dundee” – William McGonagall

I must be brave to reprint those lines on my blog, for they were spouted by the gentleman who is considered to be the worst poet in history.

Statements with such strong absolutes make me shudder. They also make me think about how the whole self-publishing thing would work, if critics and not readers were opining and deciding whether an author’s work was sold.

Finding Time…The Eternal Quest.

Time is such a charmer, you see. A casanova of sorts. First, it binds your heart with invisible silk and encloses it in a soft embrace, lulling it into believing that it would be there for you forever – and then, one day, you wake up with your heart cold and shivering, and realize that the sweet, calming comfort is gone. And then you see time fleeing away. The pile of tasks to be completed,  you learn, had been growing undetected, and transformed into a time-guzzling monster.

I can’t seem to find time these days. I need it to write blogposts, to edit “The Price of Nofret’s Nose”, to