This post is sponsored by Notino.
Some authors can write a book pretty much anywhere. On their phone. On the toilet. On the back of a cereal packet. While standing in line at the post office. I could go on.
These authors are straight-up unicorns, as far as I’m concerned. Their very existence is amazing to me, because I … am not like that. No, in order for me to write a book, a very specific set of circumstances has to exist. I need, in no particular order…
Peace & Quiet
I know a lot of people who write in coffee shops, just to get a change of scenery. This is amazing to me, because I can literally only work in my office, surrounded by all of my things, and with a pair of noise-cancelling headphones at hand just in case there’s even the slightest noise outside that might disturb my v important work (I can’t listen to music while I’m writing because I’d probably just start typing the lyrics, but I occasionally play white noise if I have to…). On my desk, I also always have…
Emotional support Stanley and trusty cup of coffee
The coffee cup will get refilled multiple times; the Stanley cup is basically just there so I can pretend to myself that I’m going to drink enough water, even though I know perfectly well I won’t. (Seriously, though, I’m an absolute sucker for a Stanley cup. I know it’s a total cliché at this point, but I am nothing if not basic, and I love them so much I have a second one that sits on my bedside table, just so I can pretend I’m going to drink water in the evening, too…)
Sort-of on the subject of hydration…
Lip balm and hand cream
Is it just me, or do you also turn into a dried-up husk of a person every time you sit down in front of your computer? I know that actually drinking the water in that Stanley cup would probably help with this, but why would I do that when I could just buy lots of products to throw at the problem instead? I never go anywhere without my hand cream and lip balm, and I keep a set in my desk drawer at all times, too. My current lip balm is by Essence and the hand cream is L’Occitane, although I switch these up fairly regularly, and will try something new every time a product runs out.
Oh, and I don’t normally have a jar of collagen eye masks on my desk, but these ones had just arrived, so I put them there to remind myself to actually use them. As well as collagen, they also contain niacinamide and hyaluronic acid, all of which promise to help undo the effects of all of that time staring at a screen on my under-eye area. Unfortunately for me, I’m really bad at remembering to use skincare, so I’m hoping that having them right in front of me will remind me to put them on while I’m working from time to time. Will I actually do it, though? Only time (and my eye bags) will tell…
Mechanical keyboard
Forget writing on my phone (I genuinely have no idea how people can write an entire book on a phone… I can barely get out a single sentence without multiple mistakes…) — I can’t even write on a keyboard unless it’s exactly the right type of keyboard. If you’ve ever wondered what happened to the Princess in ‘Princess and the Pea’ fame when she grew up, well, now you know…
My preference is for a manual keyboard – or a ‘clicky’ keyboard as I call it – which makes a satisfyingly loud ‘clacky’ noise when you type on it. I suspect this is probably really annoying for my husband, who shares my office (I did ask when I got it, and he claimed it doesn’t bother him…) but I really enjoy typing on it, and anything that helps motivate me to type is worth it, as far as I’m concerned.
(The cute puppy isn’t included, unfortunately; Nellie belongs to friends who live in our street, and we were just puppy-sitting her for a few hours. Isn’t she adorable, though? She’s basically a real-life Jellycat pup…)
All the notebooks
I’m fairly old-school when it comes to note-taking and like to write everything by hand, which is why my desk drawers are overflowing with notebooks. They’re not pretty or well-organised (I love looking at photos of people’s bullet journals, but I’m just not patient or creative enough to make my notebooks look aesthetically pleasing…), and my handwriting is barely legible at this point, but, I don’t know, there’s just something about the act of putting actual pen to paper that I love?
I have a little ritual now whereby I treat myself to a new notebook for each new book I start writing, but I also have a few others which I use for various different things, and, like most of the writers I know, I just seem to keep buying more, even when I don’t actually need them. When you’re tired of notebooks, you’re tired of life, right?
Reedsy Editor
Finally, I write all of my books using the Reedsy online editor, which used to be free, but which is now £5.99 per month, and totally worth it, because while it might not be the most complicated or feature-rich writing program out there, the interface just really works for me: I love the goal-setting feature, and it allows you to back up your work to Word, or export it as an epub, so while I have tried other, more expensive programmes, this is the one I keep coming back to, and which every one of my books so far has been written on… including, I hope, book number 10. Which I am STILL currently busy plotting, and feel like I will be working on for the rest of my life at this point.
I should probably go and get on with that, shouldn’t I?
Until next time,
