Home Office

The Home Office. When you're discussing a corporate office the home office is where the head honchos hang out. It's where the big decisions are made. That's true of the writer's office too.

Whether the writer's office is in the bedroom or the dining table or a shed in the back yard, it's truly the home office--the place where things get done.

My office is in the living room area. We don't need a living room. We have visitors possibly twice a year. Maybe. We did need an office space so I could write so there you have it! The couches reside in a spare bedroom and Anny holds forth in the Home Office.

It's a space slapped together with a couple of tables, a couple of really short bookcases, and a comfortable chair. The main components--computer, twenty two inch monitor, keyboard, and printer--and two bright sun lamps are the important things. Aside from the two small bookcases in front of my desk, there are also five large bookcases (stuffed) near at hand just in case I need to look something up.
This is the view from my desk. That black thing on the right is an air purifier. The book underneath it is two feet long and sixteen inches wide (a book about castles with the most gorgeous pictures) and that seems to be the only place I could stash it.

The bookshelves are all double stacked (that means that there are two rows of books for every shelf). And there are a couple more bookcases in the other room. It's a good thing that I gave half of my books away when we moved here--twenty boxes.

Though I'm a newbie (going into my second year), I've been a writer for a very long time. This is my first office. Most of the time I pounded on a typewriter --remember those?--in the bedroom or at the kitchen table with four children and their assorted friends pounding in and out and the television blaring.

Later we bought a Commodore computer with a dot matrix printer but there were still kids--teenagers--still slamming doors and playing their music and reading over my shoulder. And still later we bought a Dell computer, and the children changed to grandchildren but my writing was always done in the midst of family chaos.

Then we moved here with no children or grandchildren. Ahhhh! After thirty years of writing, I finally have an office. And some days it's too quiet in the Home Office.

anny