Working from home

Writers, even part time writers such as myself, are used to working from home.  I've a sneaking suspicion that even the most successful of authors are unlikely to have an office away from their home for the purpose of writing.  Sure, a few will have dedicated rooms in their homes that they use, possibly, exclusively for the purpose of producing prose, but I reckon most of us don't.

I'm very fortunate in that I actually do have a dedicated home office room complete with a custom built oak desk and bureau - we had them built by an artisan woodworker twenty years ago or more when I was studying with the Open University and, partly because it is a timeless design and the builder was such a good craftsman, it's still as good as new.  Perhaps the odd bit of distressing here and there, but that's the beauty of this type of furniture.  The room's not used exclusively for writing - far from it - we have a wall mounted TV and a leather recliner sofa in the room as well, and during the late autumn to early spring we both use it as our TV room in the evenings.  Most of my work, all year round, is actually crafted on my knee regardless of which room I'm spending time in.

In fact my second novel, The Journeymen, was written in large part on a Palm PDA - remember them? -with a folding keyboard.  It was very portable and until it let me down on a transatlantic flight in 2003 it had become my go-to resource.  I guess that failure was my personal wake up call - I'd written a large part of the battle scene in the Journeymen on board the facility on the comet between the J-Men and the Sons of Arlgon and the battery failed, taking several thousand words with it.  I dragged a foolscap pad out of my bag and scribbled down what I'd just spent a large part of the flight typing.

However, like a lot of you guys, I've been working from home - mainly by email - as a result of the Coronavirus crisis.  The desk has really come into its own.  I've resisted the temptation to sit on the sofa and put my feet up for the slightly irrational feeling that it wouldn't feel like work if I did that, even though the end result would be the same.  And maybe that's one of things about writing, why I can choose to write on my knee, on an aircraft, on a bus or wherever.  Because writing doesn't feel like a job.

And because we can access all our work resources via VPN and can chat using WhatsApp it feels like I'm still in the office.  I just don't have to face students four or five times a day, and I'm not complaining about that.  I'm sure the lockdown is going to result in a lot of issues for many people, most need some form of physical social interaction and at the time of writing this lockdown looks like a long haul but I've been practising (anti) social distancing most of my life, so I should be OK.  I may even find time to complete my tenth novel.  Even if I don't, I reckon my Kindle will take a hammering this summer - when I'm not working from home, naturally.

If you're looking to stock up on reading matter to weather the lockdown - it looks like practically everywhere on the planet is going through lockdown at the moment, then at the time of writing - 24 March - Digital Life Form is free to download.  It looks like that offer is good until about 8 a.m. Friday morning, UK time.  Be my guest.

If you're entitled through subscription to download Kindle Unlimited books for free then you can choose any of my titles, to keep you occupied when working from home loses its appeal.  Otherwise I like to think they're reasonably priced.  Links to them all below are to the Amazon US site - I'm sure you'll be redirected to your regional website if you are outside the US.

Hotel California
Assassin
The Journeymen
Journeymen II: Day of Reckoning
Project : Evil
Digital Life Form
The Last Simple
Skin
Parallel Lives