I woke up this morning, and I couldn’t get out of bed. It was so cold. We don’t keep the house overly warm. It’s expensive and inefficient.
My toes were cold. I hate having them under the covers, I suppose that’s the main reason.
My office is crazy. It overlooks a food forest, a garden full of flowers and edible stuff, all of which is buried under snow just now. I have three monitors and two different hubs to allow different machines to hook up to laptops. An ergonomic keyboard and a trackball mouse. A four-foot whiteboard, and shelves full of books, a blue rug that looks like the ocean and a desk chair made by a mattress company.
That’s where I do most of my writing, but I remember hacking out a story on an airplane once. And on the beach. In multiple coffee shops. Hotel rooms around the world. I swear I’ve composed stories in the shower, even though I haven’t necessarily written them there. The only thing I ask is that I don’t want people looking over my shoulder at what I’m writing. Otherwise, location is ambivalent to me.
But I couldn’t get out of bed this morning. It’s so cold, and it’s not even February. February is dark and terrible, the bleakest month before the sweet restitution of March; but March is far away, and I’m cold. So I stayed in bed, and opened my laptop. That way, I stayed warm. I am warm.
I wrote a story in bed. Haven’t even had a coffee yet. I won’t say it’s a conventional story, even for me. I’d like to say that I don’t know where it came from, but that’s silly, it obviously came from me. And it’s done, a few thousand words colliding under the covers. I need a coffee. But to get one, I have to get out of bed. Who wrote that story for me? I wonder why we’re here. I wonder why humanity. And Earth. And I have this deep conviction that our purpose is to figure that out. I have my way of answering that question, and it’s to write, even if it’s in bed on a Sunday morning, a few words tap-dancing in a tornado, a warm spot in pre-February chill, no coffee in hand. Not yet, anyway.
Where I write has evolved over time. When I started, our only computer was a desktop in the office. So, I wrote there for a few months, but I didn’t like withdrawing from my kids’ lives, so I eventually got a laptop and then spent the next few years writing on the laptop wherever the kids were. Distractions are good for me — they help me focus.
But then something changed, I think it had a lot to do with my attitude about certain things — I started needing more privacy, more quiet. Like, if the TV is on, particularly if it is something I don’t want to watch (which is all too frequent — see “attitude”), then I need isolation from that noise and disruption. So, I put my ear buds in and listen to music, remove myself from the TV or whatever else it is that disrupts. But … I write on the sofa, at the kitchen table, in my new “office” upstairs, in the backyard, at breweries and cafes. I can write anywhere if I really want to.
Distractions help you focus… that’s interesting. I get that, too. I can’t fully focus on writing unless I have other urgent things (like work) going on. I don’t know which is the drug, the writing or the other stuff. I think I can write anywhere as well, but sometimes I need quiet and other times I don’t. I never know which will be the case.
When I was in law school, I tried to study in the library once or twice. The silence drove me crazy so I studied in the student center instead where everything was happening. It’s just the way I am.
Nothing worse than being cold, especially in bed! How smart of you to have access to your laptop without leaving your bed! I’d have to traipse across the cold floor (I keep my house cool, too – mind you, the past few days I have had a nice fire roaring in the slow-burning stove which has added a slight warmth to the floors) to get said laptop which is on a side table next to my comfy chair (where I do almost all my writing)…
I keep my devices close. My other devices even closer. They are always trying to get away from me, but I don’t allow it.
I see that! I only have my cell and my kindle handy…
I hope your cuppa is especially enjoyable on this cold morning in not yet February.
I can’t get enough of the stuff, Matticus. It’s fuel.
Would you believe that I gave it up for a couple months just to prove I could. I didn’t need it. Didn’t have to have it to function. And then it got cold here and, since I’d proved my point, I’m back to it. Because warm and delicious and wonderful and why not.
For sure. It’s a great goodness of life. Like poetry and bed sheets, no?
Getting out of bed has become an issue in more ways than one. The cold is one of them. I can count on one hand the number of times we have put the heat on in the past 20 years. However, this past couple of weeks I have spent more time crawling into bed to get warm than anything else. We finally put the heat on. I may thaw out soon.
My best “writing” always happened while driving. I could get an idea, flesh it out and fine tune it all while driving to work in the morning. Of course by the time I got to work it would disappear before I could put pen to paper, so to speak. I invested in a little voice activated recorder and when the creativity hit I was ready. It worked right up until I started working from home. Now I am under the covers.
March is around the corner, Michelle. Warmth and the thaw. I hope the cold leaves you alone, and you get those ideas out there.