I don’t know why I write exactly.  It has something to do with need and possibly desire, I suppose. It’s not something I “chose” yet every day, I have to choose to sit down and write.

Plenty of days, I would rather wash my kitchen floor and organize my junk drawers. Fortunately, there are other days when resistance takes a back seat and I get lost in the play of making up worlds and people that don’t exist.

Regardless of how I feel about writing, my writing space in front of a window with a view, doesn’t fluctuate. It is predictable and constant. This container of simple utility and to me anyway, beauty, consists of the following:

• One round wooden table placed in front of a window with a view, weighing in at two hundred pounds with a removal steel pedestal. I purchased it for $35 from a pretty college student of cultural anthropology — wearing no makeup, a gypsy sundress, and Birkenstocks.
• Two solid wood, walnut-stained chairs in the style of my fifth-grade teacher’s desk chair, discovered at a thrift store moving locations. $8 each.
• Two anemic brown chair cushions from Bed, Bath & Beyond at $16 a piece.
• One 2015 MacBook Air priced for obsolescence.
• Paper notepad + pen to track ideas for characters, scenes, structure, etc.
• One brushed black ceramic vase containing fresh flowers, usually mums that give the most bloom for the buck
• One dead (of natural causes, promise) Palo Verde Beetle, discovered on my front porch.
• One smooth black stone (oval) kicked loose from a landscape border and onto the sidewalk.
• One slightly bent gingerbread man ornament with a torn gold string that caught my eye on a morning walk.
• One sun-dried pomegranate featuring a heart-shaped hole and two remaining, nearly petrified seeds, which I found in an alley.

There’s a standard metaphor that writing a novel is like driving down a road on a foggy night with one working headlight. You can see what’s immediately in front of you and no farther.

My writing space provides something of a second headlight… to help get me if not out of the fog, then to the next word, sentence, and scene.