I have written books at the kitchen table (The Web) and while dinner cooked on butcher’s paper on the bench beside the stove (Prince Lachlan) and in the bedroom in a corner between the cupboards and the laundry.

The laundry was pretty good for a while. I used to put the washing on and the water would make hum along to the hula beat that it gets going. Sometimes the dryer would be on bathing me in warm currents of air. The mushroom farm was under my desk. This meant that my writing was sometimes fungus flavoured and I sneezed a lot and two guinea pigs lived in the old laundry trough. There was no water attached to the taps so the guinea pigs were safe and dry and used to scamper around scaring the hell out of me if it was late at night.

I didn’t start out with a computer – as I have now. I started out with an old school book and a pencil. I typed the first story on an ancient typewriter that was antique even when I had it. Now it lives on the bench in my studio and I sometimes bash the keys just to remind me what that was like.

When I sold my first couple of books I bought an electric typewriter – WOW! My cats loved it and used to walk backwards and forwards over the super-sensitive keys so my manuscripts were often decorated with lots and lots of strange and mysterious messages. They did it an awful lot but I don’t think they ever managed to make even one proper word.

So, I now have a studio and a computer and a printer and a scanner. The bottom line is still the same though – the books don’t happen unless I sit down and get busy putting thoughts and ideas onto paper or a keyboard. Writing can really take over your life. It can be with you when you sleep and it can be the first waking thought in the morning. It can be your sunny Sunday afternoons and your cosy Saturdays when the rest of the world is watching footy or jumping around enjoying themselves. Sometimes I let this happen. I let my writing consume me – eat me up so that all I eat, sleep and wake is the book I’m trying to finish and the next one I’m anxious to start. I’m not unhappy about this – I don’t mind living in my ideas fog but I don’t think it’s all that great for people who need me to do other things.

I do like visiting schools. I do like going to Festivals. I do like going swimming and walking the dogs and being with my family.
It took me a long time to work out that I had to discipline my writing so there was time in my life for all the things that needed to be done and that I needed to do - as well as write.

Now I use a diary. I plan my intentions with my current work and plan my intentions with my future work. Some writers work for a set number of hours each day – I work until I meet the intentions that I had planned. If I intended to write the next four chapters of a novel in one week then that’s what I do. If I’m lucky and they happen quickly and easily I might be finished early in the week – that’s a bonus. Then I go shopping, or have a day visiting my family or simply go and sit in a cosy corner and read or sew or knit or draw.

Part of my life as a writer is answering mail and editing my own work to meet publisher’s standards. Part of it is working with other people who want to become writers – all these things go into my diary. I don’t do more than I’ve planned, and I don’t do less. It’s a way that works for me. Often people ask me when I find time to write and teach school on the three days that I go into work (rather than stay home and work from the studio). It’s all a discipline. You can plan most of it and, if you’re careful and consider yourself, then it becomes possible. If you plan too much, it won’t work. All that happens is that you become sad and cross and stressed and fidgety thinking that you’re a failure because you can’t get your work done. If you plan too little, well…. I guess you don’t get a whole lot of everything finished.

Studios and keyboards and fancy trimmings are nice to have if you’re a writer. They are not absolutely necessary though. A lot of time is spent in traffic queues, and bus stops and airports just thinking and planning – and catching your thoughts on bits of paper.
If they’re good, trust me, you’ll find a time and a place to take them further and write them into a book.

My studio is my work place – but being a writer means you can pretty well give it a go where ever you happen to be. At some point, though, you have to find a place where you can sit and put your ideas into a structure and that can be pretty well anywhere that suits you. What makes my studio so special is that it is my place – it even had a rainbow captured across it the first time I ever took a photo of it. If you look carefully you can see it.

My studio is something I gave myself – when I figured I’d earned the right to consider myself a writer.