Authors Electric

Debbie Young Evokes Her Dream Office (with a little help from the National Trust...) Debbie Young, going places... "Where do you write?" asked a very pleasant lady at a talk I gave recently to the Cheltenham Writers' Circle. I gave my standard answer: how lucky I am to have my own study in my  Victorian Cotswold cottage , with a big desk facing a window that looks out over the garden. But next morning, when I sat down to write there, I shrieked as a sharp pain shot from my spine to my ankle, reminding me that lately I had been spending far too long at my desk-with-a-view - and I felt  desirous of change . Prompted by the arrival of my new  National Trust  card in the post the day before, and licensed by my friend and mentor  Orna Ross  to fill the creative well with a weekly "create date" with self, I stowed my purse, my shades, and my notebook and pen into my backpack, donned my walking boots, and set off to nearby  Dyrham Park . ...

I've blogged about this subject before and previously I've shown a photograph of my desk, as this is where I do the physical part of my writing (well typing). However over the last few months it's occured to me that I may do the physical part of my job at my desk but I also do a lot of 'writing' using the old grey matter. This is where the ideas form once inspiration has struck, where I plan my story arch, where I have conversations with my characters, work out the sections for a piece of non-fiction and start to construct sentences etc. So this month I've decided to share some of the places where I 'write.' Where inspiration for this blog struck and I began to think about the other places I've 'written'  Where I was and what I did whilst plotting a picture book - which was nothing to do with dogs or ball throwing Here I planned a non-fiction feature for Practical Pre-School This view inspired three non-fiction features - ...

My desk is an old dining table. It has been with my husband longer than I have. He didn’t acquire it by choice. Years before I met him his mother found it by a skip. She delivered it to Dave ‘in case he’d find it useful’. He didn’t, because he didn’t need two dining tables. So he put it in the box room. Then I moved in. I was a private scribbler, a manic creative. The box room became my study and the table my playground, with a computer and a litter of notes. Short stories, a tinkered-with novel, naive submissions. Gradually commissions happened. My prose left the house as printouts and disks and returned as proofs and then real books. The table and I had become serious. It was not a lovely beast. Not just because of the haloes from hot mugs, the cigarette burns and the grooves from children’s scribbles. I’ve never seen wood that looked so like Formica. I sanded and painted the top, in a paler tone of the smoky lilac on the walls. The table’s legs were neither substantial nor retro spi...

It's one of those things that seems to fill endless feature columns in Sunday papers but whether we're readers or writers, we still never really get tired of this particular kind of nosiness. So I thought I'd take this New Year's chance (I say that, but the actual reason I chose New Year is that it's the only hope you'll ever have of my study being tidy enough to be pictured) to ask where people write, and take you on a little tour of my space. There's more to where we write than you might think. Our writing spaces say a lot about us. This is mine. Sort of. Where I do my most productive writing is actually on a pavement on a busy street with my back against the wall watching the people go by. But I rarely have the opportunity for that, so this is where it happens. So. What does it say about me. Well, first off you'll notice the magnolia paint. Which can mean only one thing. We're not homeowners. With my credit history and a job in the south of Engla...