Workspace

I know you are both dying to know what my workspace looks like. Well, here it is.

It's not a dedicated workroom - but then, what is? Most houses don't have a 'study' or 'office' in the same way that they have an observatory to study worms bedrooms or a kitchen or a bathroom.  Mine, for example, was once a kitchen. The kitchen window is on the right (you can see the light filtering through the goldfish tank on the windowsill). The desk once occupied the space where the kitchen sink used to be. To go further, the desk isn't designed as a desk - it's a piece of wood that was once the side of a wardrobe, supported by screw-on legs bought from a DIY store.

The bookshelves are deal planks.

It's also a music room (see the piano, top left). And, as you see, my office is also occupied by various pets. The family sometimes use it as a place to put random clutter ('don't worry, I'm only putting it there for a minute').

For full disclosure, here is a view from the desk, looking back towards the door. The ominous black mass bottom left is all the equipment with which I serenade the good burghers of Norfolk and the Lands Adjacent with my beat combo, and lucky burghers they are, too.

You might also be wondering why I have no fewer than three yes three not one not two but three yes count 'em three computers. Isn't that a tad excessive? Well, maybe - but they allow me to compartmentalize my various activities.

The one on the right - with the black keyboard - in the top picture - oh do keep up at the back - is the one on which I do my day job (I work for the Submerged Log Company). The screen is attached to a generic PC laptop (tucked away elsewhere) on a dock. When I go to the orifice office I detach the laptop and attach it to a very similar arrangement there.

The big one on the left, with the display showing a photo of Jupiter, is a 24-inch, 2.66GHz, 4Gb iMac running OSX Lion, bought new (by me) in 2009. Although ten years old, it's still central to my set up. I do most of my writing on it. After drafting much of my latest book on an iPad, I've been finishing it off here. The big screen is also lovely for watching TV - and, perhaps most important of all -- the computer has a CD/DVD drive, which allows me to burn CDs of the live performances of my beat combo. It's helpfully next to the piano: the audio feed goes to the piano audio input so I can play along to YouTube music videos and pipe the lot into my own head, so as not to disturb the butler the whole of Cromer my fellow residents.

The one in the middle - with the ladybird - is a 21.5-inch, 2.77GHz, 8Gb iMac made in 2012. I felt I needed a new(er) Mac as my iPhone would no longer sync with the older Mac. Technology, eh?

When I bought the new(er) iMac secondhand it was running OSX Sierra and was terribly slow. This was partly because I had divided it into two users, as Mrs Gee was the primary user, but I needed to get into it to look at my photo stream. Now, Mrs Gee is using Offspring#2's 21.5-inch, 2.5Ghz, 4Gb iMac, which Offspring#2 no longer uses as she has gone to college with a new MacBook (are you following this? - Ed) I've now streamlined it for a single user and upgraded it to OSX Mojave. It's less slow now - I use it largely for recreation, for social media. I am typing on it now.

My parents bought me the office chair sometime in the last century. It's a bit scuffed as you see but still just about managing to accommodate the Gee posterior with the appropriate lumbar support.

Now, I have a theory hypothesis hunch lunch hunch that people do their best work if they are slightly uncomfortable, in the same way that an oyster needs a piece of grit to make a pearl. Roald Dahl's writing shed, for example, looks decidedly makeshift. Michael Morpurgo wrote in bed until people complained of the inky stains on the bed linen. Most writers' rooms are a mess of makeshift and make-do-and-mend.

The mess, I think, is necessary - a tidy desk is the sign that nothing much is going on. J. R. R. Tolkien had two rooms in his Oxford family home. One was a study-bedroom in the house itself (he tended to be write late at night after heavy sessions with C. S. Lewis down at the Eagle and Child and didn't like to wake his diurnal wife). The other the converted garage, which is where he kept most of his papers. In a letter to one of his sons he wrote that he'd been spending that particular day tidying one or other of his offices as papers had got everywhere. An untidy office, he said, 'is a sign of literary or philological preoccupation'.

Tolkien's two offices leads me to my next point - writers never write in just one place. I suspect that even when a writers gets an office just to his or her liking, they probably do a lot of writing somewhere else instead.

I am sure that at least one of you is wondering where I wrote my various books. Well, I'm going to tell you.


(In Search of) Deep Time was mostly written in our first house, an Edwardian terrace in Ealing, in West London. I drafted as much in spare hours here and there until the text got to about 25,000 words, and too long to re-read all at once, after which I decided to take some time out. I spent a fortnight at my parents' house. Or perhaps at the library of the Linnean Society in London, to which I'd commute and work 9 to 5 with an hour for lunch, like a job. After all that I'd pretty much broken the back of it and I could finish the rest at home. I got paid a substantial advance for this (ah! those were the days! - Ed) -- enough to pay for Mrs Gee to take a 3-year sabbatical and start a family. I wrote the last chapter, a 6,000-word stretch, in one go, in the spare room, while rocking Offspring#1 in a car seat with one toe, not daring to stop. Although the editor pulled the rest of the text around quite a bit, this chapter was more or less untouched.

Jacob's Ladder took a long time to get off the ground. It was written at two or three different homes (there was a time when we moved house more or less for sport), and there was definitely a session at the Linnean. I finished it in what was by then our home, a small house in Barkingside, East London, in a space under the stairs, on a bright yellow desk called ROBIN, from IKEA, reduced from £110 to £45. The space was not just cramped, but open to the distractions of home (Offspring#2 had arrived by then, so we had not one but two count 'em two Offspring, both under five) - but the space proved highly productive. While finishing off Jacob's Ladder I knocked out not only The Science of Middle-Earth but also A Field Guide to Dinosaurs. After that I converted the garage into a much more spacious workspace .... and productivity dropped sharply. I did, however, manage to draft what eventually became the Sigil trilogy.

Not long after that we moved to Cromer. In those days I used to commute to London far more often than I do now. My novel By The Sea was written entirely on the train, originally on an Asus Eee and then an iPad Mk1, in weekly episodes that were published on LabLit. My first office in Cromer was a tiny cupboard under the stairs, (although this time it had a door and a window), but this extremely uncomfortable podule generated The Accidental Species, by far my most commercially successful book. Can you see a pattern emerging? My current workspace, to be fair, hasn't been so bad, having produced not only Across The Bridge but almost half of 30-Second Biology. And I am gearing up for two more projects. one of which is almost complete and was substantially drafted in cafes, on trains and hotels... on an iPad Mk2 with a bluetooth keyboard, now my favourite go-anywhere device.

The moral of this story is, I think, that the environment of a writer's room is really only secondary to what goes on inside a writer's head.