A Room of One's Own...

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. "
Virginia Woolf

I'm not sure that's true today. I'm not sure if it was ever true. Mrs Gaskell, I understand, wrote on the corner of the dining room table - something I've done myself on many occasions. My first "office" was a very moveable space that shifted in response to the needs of the family.

That all changed when we built a writing cottage the bottom of the garden in Wales. But I shared that, too, with the best beloved and his cameras and his computers.

In our new home in Wiltshire, the top floor has two lovely rooms. One for him and one for me. Mine is beginning to shape up into a proper writing space. I now have a big table for my computer, a small table for the dictionary I can't lift. The cupboard I brought with me, that holds my stationery. And now it has bookshelves.

The best beloved excelled himself yesterday, with drill and saw and screwdriver and I now have 48' of space on which to place all those copies of my books that had been living in boxes for weeks. All my research and reference books.

There's space for the iPod thingie that the BB gave me (and the iPod when we find it!) And my Ritas are no longer being used as doorstops but are sitting front and centre, looking very shiny after a polish.

The bottom shelf is for ringbinders. The boring ones, full of tax records, receipts, business stuff. And the exciting ones filled with possibilities. Photographs, newspaper and magazines articles, stories that are waiting for me to have time to give them their day. Files stuffed with ideas.  (I'd take pictures, but the camera is two flights down!)

A room of one's own may not be essential, but it is a delight.