Finding a Place to Write...

 ...friend and author Tom Halford joins me today.  Thanks for being here, Tom, and tell us a little about how and where you write?

TH  Writing can happen anywhere at any time.

A person might not be physically writing something down, but they might be planning out a character arc or a plot twist.  It helps, however, to have a space specifically for writing.

Virginia Woolf famously wrote about this in “A Room of One’s Own.”  It would be fair to say that Woolf astutely argued for the importance of a physical room but also for intellectual room to value women writers.

Some writers have more than a room. I recently heard that famous Canadian author, Lawrence Hill, has his very own shed.

Some writers take it even further.  I’ve heard of authors who have their own writing cottages. 

I have had quite a few different writing spaces.  When I was a kid, I used to sit at my parents’ kitchen table and scribble into a notebook.  As I got older, my mom and dad bought me a leather-bound journal, which looked very professional.  I worked from my bedroom, and I probably envisioned myself as something equivalent to Ray Bradbury in the opening credits of The Ray Bradbury Theater.

When my wife and I lived in South Korea, I usually sat on the floor and worked at a coffee table that was purchased by the company we worked for.  From there, we went to St. John’s, Newfoundland, and I built my own coffee table to work from.  I had found scrap wood just outside of our apartment and screwed it all together into something resembling a desk.  It was a hunk of junk, but I still think about that desk.  It reminds me that if you want to write enough, then you’ll make space for it.

From St. John’s, we moved to Plattsburgh, New York.  My desk didn’t survive the move, but I found an old, plastic card table.  It was behind a door and it had an unidentifiable brown stain that I still haven’t been able to remove.  I unfolded that and got to work whenever I had free time.  That table has been good to me for roughly six years now.

I packed it up in the U-Haul when we left Plattsburgh to come back to Canada.  I have it set up in my basement just outside of the laundry room now.

I was once lucky enough to meet one of my favourite writers, Michael Winter.  He saw that I had one of those leather-bound books for journalling.  He pulled a couple of tiny, tattered pieces of notepaper from his pocket.  I think he’d gotten them from a bank machine.  He told me that was all I really needed.

I think he was right.  A physical space for writing is a clear advantage to those who have it, but the mental space and need to write is what I think keeps a writer working.


... about the book  Effie Pitts is not your typical hero of a crime novel.
Looking for her husband who disappeared during a bachelor trip across the border, Effie stumbles onto a hidden connection between a series of crimes plaguing the citizens of Plattsburgh, New York.
Tourists and shoppers have been disappearing for four years, and locals are certain a serial killer is prowling the streets of the small border town—that is until a mysterious cult known as The Pure White Hand surfaces.
Effie travels to the United States looking for answers, but she only finds more questions.
Where is her husband? Has she bitten off more than she can chew?
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