There's a new addition in my tiny office, and it was worth making room for.
Our old shop, a dilapidated addition to the house dating back several decades, was damaged beyond repair in a winter storm. We hastily put the contents into a rented storage space and began the construction of a replacement. The story of the new space is a saga in itself, but suffice it to say it took longer and cost more than we expected. (Which will come as no surprise to anyone who has dealt with construction.)
The dumpster in the background got filled a couple times as we made way for the new building.
When completed, it provided us with a shop for my husband, storage, and the corner for my new office. It really is kind of a tiny room, a 7 X 11 corner carved out of the shop building. As a result, I have resisted the impulse to put anything non-essential in the space. It is intended as my writing space, and I work very hard to keep it free of clutter.
I eventually added another table and a couple chairs, so it really isn’t this sparse!
I have mostly succeeded. An adjustable height table for my computer and associated gear, and two chairs. I put a couple bulletin boards up to hold notes on my current projects, and I was in business. No muss, no fuss, and most of all no outside distractions.
But a few weeks ago I made room for an addition, and it makes me insanely happy to have it here.
It's a bookcase.
Now that must sound silly. Writers must have lots of bookcases, right? Of course. I have to confess that there is almost no artwork on the walls of our house because those walls are packed with bookcases, which are in turn packed full of books. But I was keeping the office uncluttered, right?
But I needed a bookcase to hold some very special books. Books that I could not refuse when a friend offered them to me. Books that I have been trying to resist for several years.
I am now the proud owner of a 66-volume set of Erle Stanley Gardner novels. Each volume contains two novels, and the matched set looks great all set up in its own bookcase.
But it isn't the look that I care about. It is what Gardner and his work mean to me, and the amazingly generous friend who gifted them to me. A friend who understood that without Gardner and his creations - especially Perry Mason - I would never have become a mystery writer.
I was an early reader. I can't remember a time when I couldn't read. I started when I was three, according to my mother, and I have never stopped. But one of the downsides of an early reader is that our reading ability far outstrips our social and emotional maturity, and we end up reading things that are perhaps less than appropriate for our age group.
Which is how I started reading Perry Mason when I was about ten. By current standards the books are probably rather tame. There's little onstage violence, or sex, or blood and gore. Justice is served, Mason always prevails, and the good guys win. But for a ten-year-old in the 1950s? We were supposed to read Nancy Drew, and the Hardy Boys. I'd already done that, and my great-uncle was subversive enough to share his paperbacks with me as soon as he finished them. Even now I credit him with my mystery career.
Ten-year-old me didn't think of becoming a writer, though. I had loftier goals; I wanted to go to law school, to be a lawyer, and then a judge. I wanted to participate in serving justice, like Perry Mason.
That didn't happen.
But somewhere along the line I started telling stories, eventually I started publishing novels, and finally I got the chance to see justice served, even if it was only in stories. My stories. Stories I was able to share with others.
I don't have 132 novels to my name. Far from it. But there's still time. And I have a bookcase full of Perry Mason stories, and Bertha Cool/Donald Lam stories, and others to inspire me and remind me why I started doing this in the first place.
They occupy a place of honor, the only distraction I allow in my tiny office. They are a reminder of how I started writing, and what telling these stories mean to me.
And they also serve as a reminder of the friends who knew me well enough to know how much this gift would mean to me.