My Desk Tour

A little over eleven years and a month ago, I posted my first blog post. My post counter currently sits at 745 posts. A lot of water has flowed over the dam since then. 

Back in the old days of 2015, it was said that every author needed a website or at least a blog. And so, with my first release, A Summer in Amber, I started this blog with a post talking about that book, its settings and origins. You can find this first post Here. 

The idea behind a blog or website was to promote your books, and to demonstrate that there was a human being behind the name on the cover of your books. I've stuck to that purpose over the last eleven years. I announce and talk about my books around the time they are released, talk a bit about myself, and share a few of my opinions mostly on things writing and publishing and a few other innocent topics. Not because I think they are all that important, they are not, but, because that's the purpose of this blog. And nothing more.

So, in that modest spirit, I offer you, dear reader, and all you dear bots, a glimpse of the desk at which all the worlds of C. Litka are brought to words, if not life.

Bottom to top; we start with my green resin chair. Nothing fancy about it at all, indeed, it's back is broken, so that I had to stich it up with wire. You can't be extravagant as an author. You can't see all of them, but I have three old chair cushions on it whose purpose is solely to get me at the proper height for comfortable typing; neither too low, nor too high. This, I believe is important. As is how you type. I learned to type on a manual typewriter where you couldn't use palm rests to support your hands while you typed, you had to hold them in front of you and pressed down with your fingers to type. To this day I continue to do so, with my writs straight while hovering over the keyboard and typing down with my fingers, and after all these years and millions of words, I still haven't experienced carpel tunnel. Knock on wood. I think this is because my wrists remain straight, unlike people who type on keyboards and laptops, while resting their wrists on the desk or top of their laptop's palm rest, i.e.  at the same level or below the keys, which means they have to arch up their hands and fingers to type. But what do I know? These days, I really appreciate that the chair has armrests. They are a great help when it comes time to standing up. All in all, a legendary chair, a highlight of the future museum.

My desk a cheap pressed board with fake contact paper wood veneer desk, dating back to about ca 1992. It used to be one of the kid's desks. However, the top of the desk is now made of Brazilian Rosewood which I salvaged from the scraps of the hardwood floor we installed in our old house. I had to add a cushion or two to account for the increase in the height of the desktop this addition caused.   

I like to keep my desk clear of clutter, so you're seeing it in pretty much working condition. I have a drawing table where I keep all my junk.

The keyboard is a Keychrone K3D2 mechanical keyboard with low profile blue keys. I've used several mechanical keyboards over the years, and prior to the mechanical ones, I used a Logitech K810. The present keyboard can be used wirelessly, but I keep it wired, which allows me to wake the computer by just pressing a key whenever I return to it. I don't mind the one wire.

My current computer, seen as the second smaller screen on the right is a 2022 14" Lenovo Yoga 9i with a 12th Generation Intel i7 and 16 gigs of RAM. I purchased it to replace my HP Envy from 2017, but did not actually make the switch until a year or so ago. Only after I did so did I discover that the Envy's battery was bulging, so I removed the battery and now used it plugged in as the computer on my bike-on-a-rack for my explorations of the world, via train videos. Before the Envy I was using a Lenovo IdeaPad 100S, a little red $200 11" laptop with a keyboard and monitor. You don't need much of a computer to write. Prior to my red Lenovo, I was writing with a Mac Mini, and may've wrote the first part of Some Day Days on either an original iMac or a iBook. I wrote my first novel and novella on a manual typewriter, and in the 90 's I wrote my unpublished YA story on a Cambridge Computer Z88, my first useful computer, which I bought when I couldn't afford a Mac. I used to be a Mac guy, but changes for the sake of changes in MacOS began to bug me, plus, I could get a perfectly suitable laptop for my purposes for $200 vs $900 for the smaller Mac Air, so I switched Windows, and have not looked back. When I do have to trouble shoot my wife's iPad, I find that Apple's software drives me crazy. Anyway, I use my laptop with a 360 degree hinge in "presentation mode" so all I see is its touch-screen, which I use mostly to display the YouTube music I have when I am working.

The old 21" Acer monitor dates from 2014. I have it set on a home made stand that keeps it low on the desk, as I like to look slightly down on it rather than crane my head up to see it. In the shadows behind the monitor I have a Tivoli Audio stereo radio from 2001 that I use for my speakers. Sitting on the radio unit on the left is my statue of Popeye "I yam what I yam", an to the left, my little LED desk lamp. You can just see the top of a jar where I keep Bali's Best Tea Candy. And above the desk is my painting of Maig Glen from A Summer in Amber.

I spend at least an hour every morning after I roll out of bed at this desk writing my fiction. At nine, I call the morning session a day, and head up stairs to toast a slice of my home-baked bread, slather it with orange marmalade, and brew a cup of (loose leaf) tea for breakfast while checking in on various websites, starting with a glimpse of London via the Abbey road webcam. In the evening, I will usually spend another hour or two at my desk writing blog posts, book reviews, and when things are going well with the stories, I will also continue the morning's work.

So there you have it. I am blessed with just enough gumption to sit down at my desk every morning to write something, whether I feel like it or not, as often not as otherwise, but once I start typing, words get written, and thus, so, eventually, stories. Given the number of devices I see offered for "distraction-free" writing, I guess I'm also blessed by being too old for social media, so I am never tempted to use my computer during my writing hours for browsing social media or other distractions, which also contributes to stories getting written. And well, I must also mention that I have time to write - no job, no kids around the house, no lawn to mow. That, I am sure, makes a difference, though I did write a fantasy novel, SF novella, a YA novel, over the course of years when I was working.