My less-than-private, not-so-well-appointed office

The New York Times ran a piece a few years ago that featured 25 “writers’ rooms.”

Spaces where writers did their work. Here are a few:

That same year, The Hartford Courant did a feature on me that included my writing space, which was and still is the end of the dining room table. 

Not much has changed since then.

I’m still on the end of the dining room table. Charlie is much larger now and more mobile, making him even more capable of distracting me with pleas to build railroad tracks, wrestle, or play “Star Whores.” I’ve migrated from Windows to Mac. The bottom shelf of my bookcase is now filled with games and puzzles. 

But that’s about it. Unless I leave the house to write in the library or McDonald’s, I sit in the center of my home, head down, oftentimes with headphones blaring rock ‘n roll to drown out the noise.

Those lovely, well lit, perfectly appointed writers’ spaces featured in the New York Times?

I wish I could say I don’t need a space of my own to work, but in truth, I want one so badly.

I dream of the day when I can have a door to close off the rest of the world. A simple door that would allow me to focus and concentrate on the work and not on the 10,000 other things going on around me.   

Until then, I get by.

I wake up at 4:30 so I can have a couple hours of silence. 

I hunker with headphones and mental blinders and write.  

I sit in quiet libraries and white-noise filled McDonald’s and any other place I can find and work like hell so I can get home. 

But someday, maybe, I will simply shut a door in my home and work like those writers featured in the New York Times. 

Won’t that be a blessed day indeed.