My Writing Room by Jean Goodhind

This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.

My writing room is a tip. I fully admit to tidying it up before my dearly beloved took the photo. Actually, it’s not really a tip in the sense that it’s where the public throw their rubbish. It just gets to be a tip because I’m always lost in my own imagination and admin stuff. I.e. anything to do with accounts, bills and supermarket receipts get thrown in there awaiting my considered attention.

In reality my writing room is the forward double cabin of a 46ft sailing yacht named Sarabande Serene. For many years my husband and I ran a guest house on the outskirts of Bath. After giving up the tourist business we moved to a sailing yacht for various reasons including no mortgage and no council tax and the Mediterranean weather. Sarabande actually has three cabins, two heads (that’s showers/loos to the uninitiated), a saloon and a galley (kitchen). It even has a freezer, a fridge, a washing machine and a surround sound TV system so I’m not quite the buccaneer or ageing hippy you might have thought I was.

There’s a section of the double bed that drops down to form my seat and my computer sits on what I term a desk, but is actually an adjustable stool I bought in Tesco.

My only view of the world is through the hatch above my head. At present my view is of the clouds floating across the blue winter sky in Sicily and the mast gently moving from side to side.

Depending on the weather, I sometimes regroup my operation to the cockpit where I can stare at the scenery or muse on the prospect of catching a fish for supper. So far we’ve captured more scenery on the camera than fish on the hook. We need to do less of the former and practice a lot more with a rod and line; if we had to depend on our fishing skills, we would starve.

Sometimes I write in the morning, sometimes in the evening, and sometimes in between, sometimes in a marina and sometimes whilst anchored in a bay. At sunset all writing stops, fresh food cooks and a cold bottle is rescued from the fridge and decanted into a wineglass. These are the perks of not being a landlubber, that and the fact that the rain is warm!

Jean Goodhind’s latest novel, Killing Jane Austen, is out this month.