Logistical issues -- (Cecilia Peartree)

 

For reasons I won't go into here, I have been preoccupied lately with the logistics of writing. None of the options I've tried to date has been entirely satisfactory, but some have been much better than others, so I thought I would review them here in case anybody else lands in a similar boat to mine - though I very much hope they won't as I happened to be working on three different novels when I unexpectedly landed in a hospital bed, and it was very frustrating not to be able to continue with my usual writing routine. The worst thing was that I had just finished the draft of one of the novels and made notes for the edit.

One of the first things I asked the family to bring in for me was a notebook, and eventually I wrote several chapters of the project I had intended to start on that month in it. Writing by hand is not ideal for me, to put it mildly. It isn't a case of using a special fountain pen and inscribing carefully chosen words in an elegant copperplate hand, but more that I dredge an old biro out of my bag and scrawl something that looks as if it's been written by a crazed spider and is often completely indecipherable.

One of the things I looked forward to most about returning home was sitting at my computer and typing. Unfortunately it wasn't quite as simple as that. First, while slightly phobic about the stairs, I attempted to balance a laptop on the special tray I had been keeping for just this kind of emergency. However, the arms of the reclining chair in which I spent most of the month of May were just at the wrong distance apart for the tray to balance on safely, and this meant one end of it had instead to balance on my leg. Because one leg was more or less out of action, this put more strain on my 'good' leg and on my back, both of which protested with increasing vigour as I tried to write for longer each day. 

Since then I've made a bit of progress, and have overcome my fear of walking downstairs. This encouraged my son to move the larger of my two laptops back on to the table in the conservatory where I usually do most of my writing. That was fine up to a point. The computer chair isn't comfortable enough for me to sit on for more than a couple of hours at the best of times, and once I was downstairs I wanted to spend time writing and also carry out some tasks for my local committee, but I found it very difficult to sit there for long enough to do both.

'Fortunately' I was spending quite a lot of time online at that stage, in an attempt to engage with the world outside my house, and one day I noticed an advert for a neat-looking folding table. I thought it would probably take the weight of my smaller back-up laptop and sure enough, not only was it exactly the right sort of size but it was light enough for me to be able to move it around and fold it myself and it could be placed right in front of the recliner with the laptop screen exactly the right distance away.

It's all systems go now for my multiple projects - I have a new routine of working downstairs for a couple of hours on a new first draft, because I can see the garden and the sky, which I find helps with my thought processes, then having lunch and retreating upstairs for a few hours in the afternoon, not to sleep but to listen to music, read, do committee tasks, collect up short stories and wrestle with the novel I've been trying to get finished for months.