Filed under: Fun Stuff
Take a peek inside the spaces where some of today's authors write, ponder, and procrastinate. This week: Cat-lover and How To Moon A Cat author Rebecca Hale's flowered couch.
I'm in the process of completing a move, so many of my belongings are still in a state of flux, but one of the first things on my list--after assembling the bed--was to set up a place to write. That is to say, I spent a great deal of time finding just the right location for my favorite flowered couch.
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Portrait: Copyright 2010 R. Parker Blackburn. Cover: Courtesy photo.
In my view, there are three essential elements for a quality writing space: quiet, comfort, and cats. At my new home, all of these requirements are met from the seat of my beloved couch. Its soft, overstuffed cushions are perfectly conformed to the shape of my posterior. Strategically located in the center of the new living room, the couch is a tranquil oasis amidst a sea of unpacked boxes, positioned for optimal airflow and close proximity to the kitchen's hot tea making facilities.
Cats advise on all my work, even my non-cat fiction; their collaboration is a critical element to my writing process. So, the next step was to begin arranging the rest of my furniture in such a way that the room's creative cat chi focused in on the flowered couch.
From the couch's comfortable seat, I now have easy access to a constantly cat-occupied climbing tower, a wooden coffee table-cum-horizontal cat-sleeping surface, and an array of cat-amenable flowered cushions. Should I find myself needing any additional cat mojo, an extra cat or two can often be found in the dark area underneath the couch.
Don't be fooled by the sleeping poses of the cats in the attached photos. Each of these fluffy, flurry critters is hard at work, intently focused on resolving a troublesome plot issue in my next book. I can assure you, being a feline writing assistant is a difficult, strenuous job.
Of course, there is an office - or there will be, once all the boxes are unpacked. It will be furnished with a stiff, unrelenting chair and a roll top desk whose surface will soon be cluttered by piles of scribbled on paper, wadded up sticky notes, torn out newspaper clippings, and several ceramic coffee cups with dried up teabags stuck to their sides.
The office is the spot where writing's darker, more tedious work occurs, a torture chamber dedicated to the task of painful revision. This room is best avoided by non-writer family members, lest they be confronted by a frustrated, emotionally wrought author, who has pulled out half her hair during endless hours of parsing and reworking sentences. Cats, on the other hand, are welcome to lend their assistance.
The flowered couch is a far more pleasant setting, dedicated to the boundless possibilities of early drafts. I write in my head; I like to see something in my mind before I put it into words. Images, phrases, characters, scenes - these all float through my dreams and rather wild imagination before being converted into keystrokes on my laptop. Curled up on the couch, surrounded by my feline support team, I have the perfect place for implementing that transition.
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Courtesy of Rebecca Hale
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Courtesy of Rebecca Hale
I bought the flowered couch over fifteen years ago. It was the first real piece of furniture I purchased on my own. I had just returned to Nashville for my third year of law school after a summer associate job at a DC law firm. Armed with a couple hundred dollars I'd saved up from my summer employment, a good friend took me to a furniture manufacturer where she helped me pick out the fabric. I selected a pattern with enormous blue and green, Hawaiian style flowers on a cream-and-white background. It was a bold choice, perhaps more suited for a set of drapes than a sofa, but I fell in love with it immediately.
After my newly constructed couch was delivered, my frail grandmother, then in the last year of her life, insisted on braving the rickety stairs to my second floor apartment so that she could take a seat on my hard-earned purchase. I still remember how proud she was to witness this milestone, and I often think of her when I'm stretched out across its cushions - although I wonder what she might say about all of the cats who now call the couch home.
Easily the most well-traveled piece of furniture in my possession, the flowered couch was schlepped from one coast to another during my nomadic younger years. While on a sojourn in Northern California, the couch had a near fatal run-in with one of my dates, a man with an inexplicable revulsion to flower-covered furniture. After much discussion, he convinced me to let him list the couch on Craigslist. Thankfully, no one responded to the advert for: "Colorful flowered couch. Free to good home. Elvis once slept here."
Needless to say, the boyfriend is long gone, no doubt, seated somewhere on a drab divan in a colorless room without a single flower in sight.
Meanwhile, the couch, the cats, and I are set to continue writing together well into the future.
Rebecca Hale is the author of the recently published How To Moon A Cat and several other feline-focused novels.
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Terence S. Jones, Flickr
