Since I've become Editor-at-Large for Southern Writers Magazine, I've
enjoyed interviewing more people than ever.
One of the questions I like to ask is, "Do you have a special place where you like to write?"
Depending on what I'm writing, I find I write in different rooms and sometimes
outside where I can see the deer ease in of a morning to steal apples from my apple
trees. I catch the ideas as they come in and release them through the flow of my pen onto paper.
I wrote the young adult novel Shakespeare's Pink Cadillac (forthcoming) while sitting on my family room sofa
with a few scenes written in the study while listening to Jaci Velasquez songs.
Naked on the Fast Track (forthcoming) was written sitting at my kitchen table so I could be near the refrigerator
while I was fasting for twenty-one days on bouillon and fruit juice. And no, I wasn't naked while writing it but I was drinking
plenty of Naked fruit juice! And yes, my dreams were really
strange during this period. I kept dreaming about fried chicken dinners and chocolate cake with messages
written in the icing between the layers. Of course, the dreams found their way into the book.
My childrens stories were written either downstairs in an office or upstairs in the study.
And a trilogy of romance novels were written at the barn while waiting on the farrier
to shoe horses or in my nest. My nest is in bed where I have a good overhead light, a copy of
The Chicago Manual of Style and my latest read resting nearby, and a mug of hot mocha or sweet iced tea ready on the nightstand.
So, I find that by switching up where I write, more ideas come to me. It helps to stimulate
the brain, just like it helps to hop in the car and take a drive knowing that while I'm out looking at
new scenery, new ideas will flow in. Sometimes it's a trickle, sometimes a stream, but I have had entire
book ideas and poems rush in like a raging river before a flash flood and pull the car over to write down the words and ideas.
And of course, it will help to write that new scene I have in the back of my mind -- the one that takes place
in the bed of a pickup truck down by the pond -- while actually recreating the scene.
Time to go to the kitchen and find the blue checkered tablecloth and fill up the picnic hamper so I can sit in the back of the truck and throw out some fishing line.
Of course, I'm a catch and release kinda gal.
Where do you write and where are you most prolific?
