I am not a creative person, and so today’s writing prompt from Krikket of Nerd Girl Thoughts has me a little stumped:
Tell us about your physical creative space, and how it influences your content creation.
I am an evangelist for clutter. It drives my boyfriend insane. “Why don’t you organize your books and DVDs so you can find what you’re looking for?” he asks.
I don’t know what I’m looking for. I like having happy surprises. During the recent power outage, it was dark, and I took random books off the shelf to read by the LED flashlight of my phone. And I remembered where I was the last time I read them. Greg Egan’s “Schild’s Ladder”, for instance, still had the ticket stub in it for “Ratatouille”. I saw that with my stepmother sometime after my Dad died. I was visiting her up in Deerfield, New Hampshire and sleeping in her trailer out back, and that’s where I left this book, after reading it, before rediscovering it a few months later.
Since I am not a creative person, I don’t really have a creative space. I do have a very cluttered desk, but I don’t think it influences whatever creativity I can muster. It’s a very personal desk.
If I do have any sort of creativity, it’s borrowed creativity. I’m getting to the age where if I died, they wouldn’t say that I died young. A lot has happened to me in all these years, and so I have a lot of stories. Some stories I’ve told again and again. Some stories I haven’t told hardly anyone at all. Some stories I will never tell — but I have them, and they’re mine. Instead of being creative, then, I can mine my own personal experience for content.
Messy as it is, the contents of my desk remind me of my life. On the wall is the 3D rendering of my bedroom back in California to see how the colors I’d chosen to repaint it would look. Next to it is one of the two laser cut plaques I made, one for my boyfriend and one for me, of the Circle of Veeshan symbol with a heart instead of Norrath, and the year below it written in Skyrim runes.
Next to that is the plaque for a multilanguage translator I wrote for the Sony Magic Link back in 1995. There’s the original line drawing for the cover art for the “Magic Bag” game pack where my first two published games were collected. Next to that, a map of Norrath. Then, a plaque given for “Spell Finder”, a spelling checker shipped with every Sony Magic Link. That name was an inside joke, being inside me, the only person who would think it was funny.
See, along with the “Spell Finder”, I wanted to include a “Grimoire Checker”.
Next to that is a Mother’s Day gift from my son.
If I need inspiration, all I need to do is look up, or look inside. I have a cluttered house and a cluttered mind, and wherever I look, I remember a story.
