Sarah's writing journal

The building site on the right is my writing room at the moment, so it's probably not hard to understand why I'm a bit obsessed at where other people write. My ideal is to have a hut in the garden, like George Bernard Shaw's which actually rotates so that it's always in the sun, but the closest I'm likely to get is one of the huts in the allotments above!
I fancy the skinny tall one.

I was interested though to find this article about communal writing rooms in New York, and was feeling envious about it being only in America writers could find such spaces, when I came across some in London's Soho Theatre. Definitely worth a look, although I'm guessing you wouldn't be able to leave things a mess there. I identified completely with the story about Angela Carter in the National Gallery's Interrupted Lives book. Apparently when a photographer went to take her picture at work, he was horrified to find she'd spent days clearing up beforehand. The photographer, Mike Laye, commented "My assistant and I set to, emptying the waste-paper bin and scattering the contents over the floor, then adding books and records that had been nicely racked, into piles on the floor! She was pretty shocked at what we had done to her once-tidy study but did confirm that we had returned it to pretty much its usual state!"

In the meantime, it's just me and the builders making messes on our own. Expect lots of stories about strong tea and mobile phone tones - have never heard so many different ones. It's almost beautiful.

And my writing prompt for today is the parrot that gave the game away. Strictly fictional, of course.