Struggles with my office

Space. It's the final frontier.

Those of you who followed me before my move to Substack know that, until recently, I had an amazing office. It was a studio apartment built above our oversized two-car garage. It was also a guesthouse, as we (luckily) have a lot of guests visiting us out here on the mountaintop. But most of the time it was my office, and honestly, I loved it so much I could’ve lived there. My husband suspected that I wanted to.

But seven months ago we moved to a new house in the same neighborhood. We needed a bigger house, mainly for entertaining. Entertaining is a serious thing here. And the cabin had been built as a weekend getaway. It didn’t adapt well to full-time living.

The new house is lovely but the main drawback is that I’m having a hard time adjusting to my new office. Shouldn’t be a problem, I know. I was the one who bragged that I could write anywhere, after all. When I took up writing in mid-life, I had a crazy demanding full-time job. I had to be able to write on the subway, in the wee hours, whatever. We were starting out as a married couple and our house, while adequate, was small. I had a cramped corner in the spare bedroom (which we didn’t need as we never had overnight guests, but didn’t even consider converting it to an office. I didn’t think my scribbling didn’t merit it.)

Now, I’m a full-time writer with a (near) full-time office. It’s spacious but has to double up as an exercise room, and there’s a giant elliptical taking up nearly a third of the space. (I thought about putting the machine in the guest room, but was afraid our guests might think we were trying to give them a hint.)

The problem is partly mental. When most people think of a writer’s office, they picture a place crammed with piles of papers and towers of books. Also, shelves of tchotchkes and talismans. Being surrounded with stuff has been equated with what it means to be a writer.

NOT my office, thankfully.

I’m not like that. As I’ve gotten older, I find that clutter makes it hard to concentrate. Unfortunately, the writing life comes with clutter: scraps of paper with written notes, advance readers copies and galleys waiting to be blurbed, half-full notebooks you can’t bear to get rid of, too many tote bags. There’s a walk-in closet but it’s mostly full of my husband’s extra guitars and amplifiers (his office doesn’t have a closet).

I learned a couple things from the guesthouse experience. First, I like a long, narrow-ish desk. I used a gigantic Ikea dining table as my desk in the guesthouse and it spoiled me. Even though that table is now in our dining room, I often sneak in there to work. The trouble is, not many furniture makers make long, narrow desks, so that’s kind of stymied me.

I like getting away from the desk, too. I sit on the couch a lot when I write, and I like to lounge on a bed to read. There’s a couch in my office but it’s uncomfortable (my husband claimed the one that had been in the guesthouse and I felt so guilty about making him move again that I let him have it). I go down the hall to use the bed in the guest room to read, usually surrounded by both dogs.

UPDATE: I started this post to explain how I might be screwing up the courage to tell my husband that we were going to have to build a writing shed for me. But I moved the furniture around to find that it might just work. The desk was the main problem; I didn’t feel comfortable with it (this is the same scarred old desk I used in that guest room over 20 years ago!) but in this new position, it doesn’t feel as awkward. So, maybe I’ll be able to make this work out after all.

But that writing shed? I’m not ruling it out. YOLO is one of the sayings I live by. I figure if you really want something, and you can afford it (financially, emotionally) then get it. I’m one of those people who is really, really sensitive to her surroundings. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, humor me and entertain your fellow readers by dropping a link to your ideal space in the comments, whether it be for writing or hobbies or whatever.