February 26, 2004
My desk and the things therein
This started out to be just a "look how cute my cat is!" entry, but then I got a good look at the picture and thought about how representative it is of my life.
In the top left is my printer, which I couldn't live without. Nestled in front of it is my "model" of the Aughisky, our ship in 7th Sea. Immediately in front of it is a resume, enveloped and stamped and ready to go out the door. (And since I took this picture yesterday, it's been mailed already.)
To the right of the printer is where I've started keeping all my writing books and materials (which cleared off the area Pooka currently occupies). The books present are my new Novel and Short Story Writer's Market, a dictionary, Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin, a book about comet and asteroids (research for a novel), Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, which taught me more about grammar than I ever learned in high school. There are also two journals, four composition books (2 with notes for The Exile's Daughter, one for False Light, and one for assorted notes), my writing "notebox" (the greenish binder), and the first draft of The Exile's Daughter (the blue binder). On top of that are my 90+ notecards on Exile.
On top of my stereo speaker you can see part of a picture of Justin and the wind up seal Dawn and Jason gave me the Christmas before Justin was born. On the computer screen you can see that I was checking my email rather than writing (no big surprise there).
Then of course, there's Pooka, taking up the most space. She's sitting there as I type this, purring and watching my fingers, wondering when I'm going to give up this nonsense and just pet her already.
Underneath you can see the mess that usually lies beneath all of my attempts at organization (although in my defense, that mess has only arrived in the past day or so and hasn't had a chance to be sorted yet), and--on the tray where my keyboard should be, if I had an ergonomic sort of body--is yet another copy of the first draft of Exile, a highly compact traveling copy that Mer printed when she did her comments.
This is where I spend a vast portion of my day, whether actually working or goofing around online. It's a good place. It makes me feel happy. Not a bad way to feel about my only real workplace for the moment.
