Two Rooms with a View

We Teaching Authors are looking out our windows this month (what else would you do in August?)

Coffee and a laptop on the deck.

To be honest, my home office has zero view. It was originally a tiny living room with plantation shutters. If you open the shutters the view is...a bunch of shrubbery, grown to where there is no view.  It's so claustrophobic, I only use it when I don't need to be inspired...just focused. Revisions and research and such. Nothing like a no-view room to keep you on task.

Here is where my laptop and I spend the majority of time in good weather...the back deck. Our lot is so heavily wooded that in summer I can imagine I'm on a Vermont mountain top (if I ignore the ancient swing set we've never gotten around to taking down.) We are surrounded by neighbors, but unless someone is mowing the lawn or using a chain saw, I feel alone in the woods.

We also have a rental house on Ocean Isle Beach, NC. We spend a lot of time there during the off-season (Oct-May) because it stays rented the rest of the time. When my husband and I designed it, I made sure to put in a writing porch off the master bedroom. Now that is some view.

Need coffee!

The ocean calms me, even on the days when it's so gloomy, you can't tell where the sky ends and the sea begins. For me a calm mind is a working mind. All the negative you-don't-know-what-you're-doing gremlins disappear. Words materialize on the page. Magic! When weather forces me inside, the view is the same from the dining room table. Even when fog rolls in, rain falls, and the waves explode on the shore, my creative mind stays in a Zen-like state.

And coffee appears, along with creativity.

No matter what the view, this is what writers aspire to achieve, this condition of creative mindfulness, aka, The Zone.  Go forth, and find your Creative Zone.

Find the horizon...I dare you!

Sunrise the morning before Hurricane Michael last fall.