This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
My current ‘writing room’ is my orange Kate Spade bag. Wherever it is, so is my MacBook Air, which means I can write. I carry it everywhere and I’m sure some doctor out there will tell me that’s a recipe for back problems when I’m older, but I don’t care. I was born in Canada, had a whimsical stint in New York when I was 22 and then moved to London. Since I left University, I have moved on average every six months meaning whatever was core to my being had to be portable. That’s where handbags big enough to hold a laptop came in handy – and luckily – in fashion.
The first bag I carried around like that was a knockoff Louis Vuitton canvas bag I got from a dodgy guy on Canal Street in New York. My 15-inch laptop weighed six pounds and I lugged it around The Big Apple every day just in case I found the inspiration to write. I did, and managed to pen a pretty terrible picture book whilst in cafes, on trains and even sitting in Christopher Park with homeless men and pigeons.When I moved to London the bag moved on (I could only re-sew the strap on that horrible bag so many times), but I continued to carry around my writing. Over the years, my ‘writing room’ came in shapes of free canvas bags I’d been handed at events, actual lap top bags that I tried to pass off as handbags and finally, the perfect combination, my Kate Spade Southport Avenue Carmen.
The majority of The Accidental Socialite was written in six months sitting on my bed between 9pm and 2am on Monday nights. However, I also wrote during my lunch breaks, on planes, in random hotel rooms across Europe and even in the changing room of my gym during the half hour wait I had before my 80s Aerobics class started. The only reason that book was ever finished was because I promised to send a friend five pages every Monday and I wrote whenever I had my laptop and a spare few minutes.
People in general just don’t have time to do what they love anymore, so the only way for me to finish my book with a full-time job and overtime social life was to use time I was normally wasting. Carrying my laptop with me made realizing my dream easier and my writing more interesting when my surroundings crept into the book. In the end, I have memories of writing my book that come with where I was when I wrote it.
Stephanie's novel The Accidental Socialite is out now.