MY WRITING SPACE AND INSPIRATIONS

The first two pictures are of my writing space. We call it the office or the study. You enter it through French doors opening off the foyer. My husband bought me dark cherry wood office furniture, and it's a wonderful place to write and create my novels. Inspirations...
The double windows face the front of the house with pleasant views of neighbors' homes and the three-headed pygmy palm trees in a stone planter in our front yard.

There's a comfy chair in the corner to read in. The unusual curvey lamp in the corner, over near my printer, is a Jane Seymour lamp. She creates home decor items for Parisian stores nationwide. A dear friend gave this to me. On the top shelf are all my published books, both novels and the nonfiction collections I have chapters or short articles in.

I know. I'm ending sentences with prepositions. But I like Sir Winston Churchill's exclamation when someone corrected him about this: "My dear madam, that is something I will not up with put!" GRIN

Also on the top shelf is a picture of Pulitzer Prize-winning Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's typewriter, an old upright. I've seen it in person. Her house is in Florida at Cross Creek. With one of her advance checks from a novel, she installed an indoor bathroom and threw a party for her neighbors so they could see it. She put ice and cold drinks in the bathtub and a bouquet of red roses in the commode. To this day, a bouquet is in the commode, though it's silk. Read a few tidbits about Rawlings here.

Surrounding me are pictures of my beloved family--daughters, their children, etc. There's also a picture of Milton and me on our wedding day in an embrace. Adjacent to it is a picture of Rhett and Scarlett in a similar pose. Between these two pictures is a framed letter Milton wrote me one year on Valentine's Day. You can read it here.

Milton has a workstation in the study with a computer, even though he has a beautiful office at the church (he's a pastor). He pays the bills here, and he writes. He's a great writer. I've turned every Monday on my blog into Milton Monday, and he'll be posting regularly. A couple of weeks ago, I was writing my WIP (work in progress) and started crying at a certain scene in the novel. Milton rolled his chair over to mine, put his hand on my shoulder, and patted me over and over, bringing sweet comfort to my soul.

On my desk is an engraved wood-grain plaque with gold lettering that says, "Lord, help me to remember that nothing is going to happen to me today that You and I together can't handle." --An old preacher's greeting to each new day.

I can't describe my whole office--and all the things that inspire me--because it would take up too much space.

Oh, I must describe this: on the wall is a framed painting of a rainbow trout swimming furiously through a mountain stream. My brother painted it, and it won the 1988 Nevada Trout Stamp Contest. It's actually a signed print. Bubba's (we're from the South) rainbow trout was on every fisherman's license in the state of Nevada that entire year. Bubba entered the Federal Duck Stamp Contest several times with his paintings of ducks and even placed in the contest. If you win, you can become a millionaire through print sales. We like to think that had he lived, he would've won. He died of liver cancer.

The bottom picture is of my ebony Yamaha piano in the living room. I sometimes go there to take a break from the tedium of writing. I might play How Great Thou Art or Edelweiss or other songs that inspire me. Above the piano is Renoir's Girl Playing the Piano. It's a print, of course.