I must tell you, and I hope you won’t be too jealous, but the weather in Georgia right now is absolutely GORGEOUS. Bright and sunny, a little nip in the morning, warming in the afternoon, humidity nearly non-existent. Honestly, if you were singing, “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” you’d be singing about my little corner of the world.
Though I work on the inside, I love the outside. And I wanted to sort of bring the gorgeous outside into my writing space. So I made a slight modification to my office (which you can read about in “My Writing Room With a View” over at The Muffin.)
Seriously, it’s an inspiring view! Except that I feel like I should be writing about puppies or rainbows or pumpkin festivals. You know, subjects that require a certain amount of bliss. Instead, I am barreling into the scaryscreepy, not to mention intense, climax of my YA novel. What I need is abject terror! Chlling fear! Run-for-your-life tension!
Yesterday, I went back upstairs around 10:00 at night to work on some edits/rewrites of the chilling chapter. Looking out into the inkyblack night really put me in the mood. So now I’m thinking that maybe for this gorgeous day, I should work a little on my happy, little picture book and save the creepy for tonight when the wind blows eerily through the trees.
What about you? Is your writing affected by your surroundings? Maybe I need to put up some curtains until I finish the work-in-progress?
Or maybe I just need to quit making excuses–and write.
Cathy C. Hall Writes 
My surroundings definitely affect my writing. The other night when lightning hit in our neighborhood and smoke dectors started shrieking I jumped off the couch and turned off my laptop.
Hahahaa! Thanks for that one, Donna!
Not really. There are times when I really look forward to writing (the husband is gone with the Boy Scouts on a weekend trip…it’s just me and the dogs) but I wherever I can plop my butt down and tap away on my laptop is a fine place for me to be.
Good for you, Sioux! I’m easily distracted, I’m afraid…by the weather outside, the music the Beneficent Mr. Hall plays (I always start humming, then singing), a stray Junior Hall in the house, my stomach growling.
I plow through. But outside factors usually make it into my writing (thus Mr. Hall in the blog posts. And food ion the first paragraph of my novel.) 😉
I just close the curtains to my window and dive into the writing. Then when my husband looks in on me and I have tears running down my face or I’m laughing like a crazy woman, he knows to just shut the door. I don’t do scary. I’d scare myself silly.
I DO scare myself silly, sometimes, Suzanne!
(I laugh out loud a lot, too. But I have found that what I think is uproariously funny, the rest of the Halls…not so much.;-)