Reclaiming Space

 

      My study has become a dumping ground - the scapegoat place used by a lazy tidier. ‘It can go in my study,’ I’ve said, when we have accumulated a large pile of cardboard boxes that would neatly contain all four of my novels, should anyone ever order them all at the same time. The same refrain has served well when there’s an uncontrolled mass of not-yet-quite-sorted post - mostly from charities in need of great funds. For some of them I might like to make a donation, at some undefined point in the future. And it has become home to the detritus when my latest project has ground to an apathetic halt, be it writing, or sewing, calligraphy or crochet.

 This has been the pattern for many months, more than a year in fact, with the only respite being when I swept things roughly to one side to push words out of my cluttered brain for Nanowrimo. Then December came and the neglect resumed with the freshly deposited muddle becoming rather more festive.

 Things came to a head when I stumbled in with a pile of stuff that I hadn’t sorted and I walked straight into a spider’s web.

 ‘Enough is enough,’ I announced to my many-legged lodgers, ‘this is my writing room.’

 Which is when I realised I’d been writing in odd places - I hadn’t produced a great deal but there were welcome talks for our online church service, written with the iPad on my lap in the dining room, ready to be recorded and sometimes rewritten in the sitting room. Similarly, prayers for our service were also creations on the move. I seemed to have taken to writing my personal prayer journal in the bedroom, poems in the kitchen and blogs anywhere but often finished off in the hall on our larger, older computer, to avoid the problem of moving pictures around on a touch screen.

 But there, in my study, under mounds of papers was my forlorn, waiting, writing table!

 Maybe it fell into disuse because the study used to be used for my private practice as a psychologist. Perhaps the room needed a fallow season for nature to thrive (spiders) and the soil refreshed (did I mention the dust?) I had ideas about redecorating and buying new curtains but that hasn’t happened, yet. Funnily enough, I was looking at wildflower patterns for curtains.

 I’ve started sorting, though. I have begun a clear out with a bag for recycling, a shredder for the confidential papers, a large bag for other rubbish. I can see the table I use as a desk. Originally bare wood, it is now polished, the old ink stains mellowed. It shines softly as it sits and waits for me.

 I know the little room, overlooking the garden, could be my sanctuary where I would write best. After all, it is already the birthplace of eight published books and two further drafts. Yet here I am preparing this, on my iPad, on my lap, in the dining room.

 

Right - time to relocate - here I come, Writing Room. 

Move over spiders!

Annie Try is the pen-name of Angela Hobday. Her fiction books include the Dr Mike Lewis stories, Trying to Fly, Out of Silence and Red Cabbage Blue. Mike is a Clinical Psychologist who has clients who are caught up in extraordinary adventures. This series is published by Instant Apostle.