Writers’ bedrooms

How quickly I’ve become accustomed to my new writing space!

We moved about a month ago (so perhaps it’s no longer “new”) and I set up my desk in our bedroom in a little alcove facing two windows and a big leafy tree.  It’s much lighter and loftier than the view from my old writing space (in which my desk faced a wall next to a window, but the window had bars on it and looked out at the grey trunk of a tree — not its green canopy).  (I used to call our old place “the asylum” — because of the bars on the windows, although the bars were, of course, meant to keep unwanted people out and not us — however crazy — in.)

I spend much more time here — at my desk, doodling around with various projects, watching the light change on the leaves outside — than I ever did there.  It’s become a hatchery again (and not an asylum!).

One of my doodling-arounds led me to this gorgeous spread in Apartment Therapy — “Literary Style: 15 Writers’ Bedrooms.”  It’s a slideshow of writers’ bedrooms and claims that

nowhere is the essence of the artist more present than in the bedroom. It’s here that one can intuit much about a writer’s process. Is it a hermit’s lair? A sanctuary? A work space? Is it the place where they do all of their best work, or the place that allows them to leave that work behind?

For this writer, the answer is all of the above!

Here are a few of my favorite writers’ bedrooms:

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Declutter calendar (and a kicker from Thoreau)

Recently I’ve been doing a major clutter-clearing (see Spring Cleaning and Housecleaning with E.B. White for the full scoop).

We’re moving, and I don’t want to waste time, energy, money or back-muscles by transporting things I don’t really want or need.  Clearing all this clutter has been incredibly liberating, and I’ve been thinking about ways to keep it up — to maintain a streamlined house that’s full of things I love and use (and not junk that accumulates dust, neglect and general bad feelings).

Then I discovered this via Pinterest: a decluttering calendar!

You can find it — and download it — by clicking here.

The calendar breaks down cleaning and decluttering tasks into tiny increments —

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Cabin envy

In the middle of spring cleaning, packing for our upcoming move and my husband having two wisdom teeth pulled (surprise!), I snatched a couple of hours to have tea with a friend.  She’s recently moved from Brooklyn to a little cabin in the Virginia woods and was thinking about starting a blog about it.  But she’s a very thoughtful writer and wanted her blog to be, well, honest.

She had read a lot of “life-envy” blogs (I think that was her term for them) and didn’t want to fall into the trap of posting beautifully crafted images of her cabin life while, say, spiraling off into unhappiness or sneaking off to a wireless hotspot in the nearest town so she could watch Game of Thrones on her iPhone because she can’t freaking stand the silence of the woods.  (All these examples are my own invention, by the way — she’s not unhappy or — as far as I know — addicted to Sean Bean.)

(Just a little reminder that before there was Ned Stark there was Richard Sharpe to take you over the hills and far away …)

The next day the Sunday New York Times landed with a thump outside our door and provided my husband some distraction as he was eating pudding and lounging on pain-killers.  When I finally got my hands on the magazine, I discovered this article:

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Spring cleaning

So much for drawing room evenings — at least for a little while.  Right now it’s all about stuff — getting rid of unwanted stuff, packing the stuff we want to keep, and trying to figure out where the kept stuff is going to go in our new place.  (See Housecleaning with E.B. White for more about our upcoming move, and how I’m trying to prepare for it.)

Years ago a friend loaned me this book, which I just rediscovered while purging my library:

  Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui

It’s a little hokey in spots, but

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