UKYAX MG Tour: Emma Trevayne
UKYAX MG Tour: Emma Trevayne
Hi All!
Today is my stop on the UKYAX MG Tour and I am here to introduce you to the lovely Emma Trevayne, who has written a great post on her favourite places to write!
First though, here’s some information on her book!
About the Book
Grave robbing is a messy business. A bad business.
And for Thomas Marsden, on what was an unremarkable spring night in London, it becomes a very spooky business. For lying in an unmarked grave and half covered with dirt is a boy the spitting image of Thomas himself.
This is only the first clue that something very strange is happening. Others follow, but it is a fortune teller’s frightened screams that lead Thomas into a strange world of spiritualists, death and faery folk.
Faery folk with whom Thomas’s life is bizarrely linked. Faery folk who need his help.
Desperate to unearth the truth about himself and where he comes from, Thomas is about to discover magic, and ritual, and that sometimes, just sometimes, the things that make a boy ordinary are what make him extraordinary.
Favourite Places to Write
By Emma Trevayne
Faye asked me to come up with my favorite places to write, and here we are! Thanks for having me as part of the UKYACX tour, Faye!
5. My desk.
I guess if this was going in order of most frequent, rather than preference, my desk would be in the top spot. It’s where I write most of the time, it’s where my desktop computer is (most of the time, and more on that later) and well, it’s my desk. It’s where I work. As desks go, it’s a pretty good one. It’s crammed with office supplies and research books and my laser printer, which is an essential tool for a writer. I used to have an ordinary inkjet, but surrendered to a laser printer the day it took me three hours to print a manuscript I needed to edit. But I digress. My desk is fine, it’s next to a window that looks out on some trees, and I have a comfy chair. The computer itself is whizz-bang fast, with a huge monitor that lets me see lots of a chapter at once. All that said, there are better places to write…
4. Coffee shops.
I have to be in the mood for this, but sometimes coffee shops are the perfect place to work. Sometimes I want solitude, and so I stay home and work at the above desk, but occasionally I need to be surrounded by the buzz of people. There are times when having to actively shut out the bustle going on around me improves my focus far more than if I were at home, or somewhere else nice and quiet. Plus, coffee shops have coffee. And more importantly, cake.
3. The couch.
My laptop isn’t as fast as my desktop, and in all honesty I only just got it fixed after it sat broken on a shelf for a year. It’s lovely to have it back, though, because it means that on days when I really need to curl up and be very comfortable while I’m writing, I can work from the couch. Working while curled up is sort of a double-edged sword: it’s cozy and relaxing, but sometimes it’s too relaxing, and I find myself sinking into the cushions and daydreaming instead of properly working. On the other hand, when writing is tough, being hugged by the couch can be exactly what I need. While my laptop was broken and I was writing a very challenging book, I actually moved my desktop to the couch. It was extremely unsteady and inconvenient, but it helped when I needed it to.
4. The Royal Festival Hall.
There’s a member’s space at the top of the Royal Festival Hall, an arts center that sits on the bank of the Thames in London. I’ll occasionally join other writer-friends there (usually author Tom Pollock) and we’ll sit and work in companionable silence. This, I’ve found, is only productive with a certain kind of writer-friend. It has to be someone who also wants to sit and write in companionable silence, not someone who wants to chat for three hours and craft the odd sentence here and there. Of course, I love getting together with other authors and talking forever, but for a work session, there has to be work. One of the great advantages to this is that while there shouldn’t be constant conversation, there’s a friend right there to help you when you get stuck. This has saved me on more than one occasion. (On more than a hundred occasions, probably.)
5. My kitchen floor.
Hear me out. I know this is weird. My best friend teases me about this, but yes, the kitchen floor. I developed this habit at least three houses ago, so it’s not the specific floor of the kitchen where I made coffee this morning. Any kitchen floor will do. I wrote almost all of Flights and Chimes and Mysterious Times in the kitchen, and a huge chunk of The Accidental Afterlife of Thomas Marsden. Several Cabinet of Curiosities stories came to fruition there, and a few of the more challenging chapters of my next MG, The House of Months and Years. I don’t know why this is so effective for me, but my best guess is that of all the rooms in my house, the kitchen is, in its own way, the least distracting. Yes, I keep thinking I need to get up and make a snack, but there isn’t a television that’s probably showing a tennis match like there is in my living room/usual office, and there isn’t an impossibly comfortable bed like there is in my bedroom. From the kitchen floor, all I can see is cupboards that probably need cleaning, which is definitely not as enticing as writing. In the interests of later being able to walk I do put a few cushions down, but that’s about it. In that brightly-lit and slightly uncomfortable position, I can do some of my best work. I will still grant that it’s weird, though.
Thank you, Faye!
Where do you write?
