Shoe drinks

I thought I’d post tonight about my favorite writing environment, since it was on my mind after I spilled soda on my new (to me) couch the other night. That was pure Murphy’s law–I had a real beater couch from my parents for years, and spilled absolutely nothing on it, and then about a month after I get my nice, high-quality used one, over goes the red soda. Fortunately, I got it sopped up in time, but now I have to go back to my old method of dealing with drinks I don’t want to put in my water bottle (or have that-flavored water for a couple days, no matter how well I wash it).

Part of my favored writing environment is that I like to tuck up my feet, so I generally take off my shoes as I sit down, leaving them close to hand. And faced with a glass that you don’t want to tip over, and with an untippable object with a hole just the right size…

Incidentally, I love those cups, even if I have no idea what to call them. Cups? Sounds too short. Glass? It’s plastic. At ye olde day job, that would officially be a tumbler, though in historic sites we’re only dealing with glass ones. I just love them because they’re sized to hold an amount of beverage that an actual adult would like to consume without getting up every five minutes to refill, and yet when you accidentally drop it, it bounces cheerfully.

Anyway. There’s not much more to my favored writing environment. The only hard rule is that I only write fiction on the laptop, never the desktop. Otherwise, it’s a comfy, curl-up, lean-back kind of place to sit. In my apartment, that’s the couch or the bed, and the bed’s hard on my neck for long periods because I can never smash the pillow into the exact angle of lean I prefer for reading and typing. It’s a drink to hand, sometimes the local dance music station streaming from the interwebs (they have no commercials!), and sometimes a YouTube music video I play over, and over, and over. I have an extremely high capacity for repetition in my music. I find I’d rather find one song that’s the mood I need for that story and play it twenty times in a row, than waste time sorting through other songs to find another that also fits the mood. I’ve heard of people who have mixes dedicated to longer works or styles of stories to avoid such things, but the mood I want not only depends on the story, but on me, so it’s easier to choose it each session.