I can write anywhere, really, but I also value ritual spaces, meditational bowers. As a writer, I’m a clock puncher. Ass-in-chair first thing in the morning, a cup of coffee, and a blank page. By some standards, I’ve not been very successful. I have my own standards. In these spaces, I’ve put in my 10,000 hours. Written millions of words. I trust that, barring the collapse of society, a few of those words will make it into the wider world.
Although I’d been writing stories since I was twelve, this was my first dedicated writing space in 1997. It was two years after I finished college, and I was living in my mother’s basement. I’d been unemployed for a few weeks, but I took $150 of the $300 I had to my name then and purchased an IBM Selectric II and a box of typing paper. I promised myself I’d get up every morning at 5am to write. In the twenty plus years since, I’ve missed fewer than 60 days.
It wasn’t long before I expanded the real estate (getting a job helps one’s ambition). A good friend I’d known since grade school gave me an old Dell NX20, but I still wrote all my rough drafts on the IBM, which chopped off the top of every third tall letter.
I had a small studio apartment in Boulder, CO when I started at Naropa University. By the time I took this picture, I’d entered the 21st Century with a Gateway Solo laptop. I still had the NX20. Sometimes, I wish I’d kept the IBM Selectric. It may have been magic.
This is the only decent picture of the storage closet I used as an office when I was sharing an apartment with my friend, the writer Laura Hawley Smith. She had the bigger of the two bedrooms. I took the smaller bedroom so I could have the closet office. This is where I finished The Evolution of Shadows.
After being fired from my job in Boulder just before the lease on the apartment expired, I returned home to Wichita and my mother’s basement rather than be jobless and homeless in Boulder. After getting a job at Watermark Books and starting to teach composition at Butler Community College, I got my first Mac, an iBook G4, which lead me to think I could do anything. So, I started The Project for a New Mythology, a DIY literary zine inspired by Wallace Berman’s mail art publication “Semina.” That battleship of an office desk I got from my father may have had something to do with it, too.
After I became the inventory manager at Watermark, I moved into an inexpensive, but large one bedroom in a complex not far from the store. My sister had been leasing the place but decided to move to New York with a friend, so I grabbed it. I was still doing The Project for a New Mythology and sending out The Evolution of Shadows. This may have been where I finished a project called By The Still, Still Water, which may never see the light of day. It was about the Korean War and the generational trauma experienced by a survivor of the Chosin Reservoir and his family.
There was a large closet in the living room of that one bedroom apartment, and I thought I’d try a standing desk there, which would allow me to close the doors when people came over. It didn’t last long. This was where I was standing when I read the email from Fred Ramey telling me Unbridled Books wanted to publish The Evolution of Shadows.
After selling The Evolution of Shadows to Unbridled, I quit my job at Watermark, got a job in the corporate world as a technical editor, and moved in with my girlfriend. The book was on its way to advance reviewers at this point, and I was starting work on what would become The Palace of Winds, a novel set during the Great Depression that combines my grandfather’s biography and the story of Jason and The Argonauts.
At some point, we realized my girlfriend wasn’t going to use her half of the office, so, I took over the whole room. I was still working on The Palace of Winds, and I was coming to terms with the knowledge that By The Still, Still Water was irreparably flawed.
This was sometime after 2010. I was still deep into working on The Palace of Winds, and was beginning to think about a podcast so I could talk to more writers on a regular basis.
I started The Outrider Podcast shortly after this picture was taken. Things were not going well in the relationship.
This is Isobel. She was the cat who lived with us. She would sit in the hallway outside our bedroom every morning and wait for me to get up. I’d feed her, make coffee for myself, and then she’d follow me to the office and lie on the floor next to me for a while, waiting for belly rubs. The rest of the time, when my girlfriend was awake, Isobel pretended not to know me.
We broke up in 2014, politely and on good terms, after nine years together. I moved into a small one bedroom in the Midtown neighborhood of Wichita. To economize space, I tried a half-loft with my bed on a trundle. It was a bit wobbly. As you can see from the mic, I was well into the podcast by then.
Trying to control the wobbly state of the platform, I decided to get low. It didn’t help much. My coffee still sloshed all over the place. I was still working on The Palace of Winds, and may have made my first stabs at what would become Far Nineteen and a few other still unformed things. Words do pile up, even if they never turn into anything.
I bought a sturdy desk and put the bed on the platform, which made it real fun when the earthquakes started. By this time (2015/2016), I was working on Far Nineteen and starting to submit The Palace of Winds.
Why all the computers, Jason? For a long time I had a complicated back-up system that was born out of the failures of the Gateway Solo 1150. I would back up on the main computer, back that up to an external hard drive, and back up again to a second and sometimes a third computer. Why? Nerd. It all stopped when I got a 2012 MacBook Pro, and my 2009 Macbook stopped being included in the newer versions of the Mac operating system. After some upgrades to the MacBook Pro, (SSD drive, replaced the internal DVD drive with a second SSD) I no longer felt like I would lose everything next time something crashed.
After a couple of years in the one bedroom in Midtown, I got Dawn from some friends who were looking to thin their herd of pets. She found me during a Christmas party, decided I was safe, and spent the party sitting on my lap. Before the end of January, she’d come to live with me. She doesn't normally sit on the desk.
This is where she prefers to be when I’m writing. I rarely get to use the whole chair anymore.
Dawn was having some separation anxiety. She’d come from a house with three other cats and two dogs, so being alone eight hours a day while I was at work was a bit lonely. She started over-grooming and licking the fur off her forelegs. So, this little weirdo came to live with us. Her name is Ursula. Where Dawn is gentle, docile, and affectionate, Ursula is every crazy cat stereotype, but still adorable.
I moved across the street in 2019 to get a slightly bigger apartment with more space for me and the cats, and I once again had a dedicated writing space instead of writing in my bedroom. The podcast was still rolling along, I’d completed three manuscripts (The Palace of Winds, Far Nineteen, and The Poisoned Moon), and a host of new projects and ideas were in the works.
A few minor upgrades and allowances for the COVID-19 pandemic. The mark-up desk on the right was given over to a workspace for the day-job, which was keeping the lights on and refrigerator full.
With the pandemic, I was spending a lot more time at the desk than I normally would have. Also, working my day job from home meant the second desk I would normally use for spreading out and hand editing manuscripts and organizing all my notes was surrendered to the man. So, I invested in upgrades to the writing desk to move things back and up for more space to write by hand when the mood struck me.
In June 2021, I bought my first house as an early fiftieth birthday present. It’s a lovely 1920 Craftsman bungalow that needs a little love, but is incredibly sound for 101 years old. My writing space is huge, and I can’t wait to pull up the carpet and restore the hardwood floors, and also refinish the window frames, which should be the same stained wood as the doorframe. I hope to produce a lot of good work here.