WHAT'S ON YOUR DESK?

GAYLE LYNDS

I seem incapable of writing without three desks. Two are angled at ninety degrees, and on one sits my large PC. That's where I write my novels. The third desk backs up to the PC, and on it is my laptop, where I do email. I discovered a few years ago I needed to separate my work from email. (Oh, the temptations of lovely correspondence in which I discover new friends and re-connect with old!) With my computers separated, I'm forced to stand up and walk around them to different chairs. This means I must make a conscious decision and switch gears, lubricating both my brain and my body during the transition.

Papers clutter my desks --- notes to myself, clippings, and research --- punctuated by mugs holding pencils and pens. I make Herculean efforts to keep the papers in neat stacks, but inevitably I'll need to open a map, and the appropriate papers must be pulled to correlate with the maps. The result is a return to tsunami-like conditions. Oddly, I still manage to find what I need.

I often drink coffee and tea while working, and munch on toasted grain bread topped by almond butter. Therefore, crumbs also inhabit my desktops. My cats like the crumbs, grateful for my untidiness. After they've finished cleaning up after me, they settle into manuscript boxes, purr loudly, then drift into sleep. 

And I work on.

New York Times bestseller Gayle Lynds is the award-winning author of eight international espionage novels, including The Last Spymaster, The Coil, Masquerade and Mesmerized. Her books have won "Novel of the Year" (The Last Spymaster) given by the Military Writers Society of America, and have been People magazine's "Page-Turner of the Week" and "Beach Read of the Week." Her thriller The Hades Factor, written with Robert Ludlum, was a CBS miniseries 
in April '06. 
Visit her website.  

SAY WHAT? Commonly Misused Words

Gracious - kind, courteous, compassionate.
     I don't believe I've encountered a more gracious host.

Graceful - elegance of form, movement or speech.
    They neither spoke nor moved, hypnotized by the graceful dancer.

Stranger Than Fiction
(2006)

Starring:
Will Ferrell
Emma Thompson
Dustin Hoffman
Maggie Gyllenhaal

An IRS agent begins to hear a popular
 novelist narrate his life.

A MOMENT IN THE HISTORY OF WRITING

In 1959, a graduate student in creative writing at Stanford University heard about a CIA-funded research program. For $75 a day, he could be injected with a variety of psychoactive drugs, including psilocybin, mescaline and LSD, and write about his experiences. He volunteered.

The impact of that research hit him both personally and professionally. He took a job as an orderly at a psychiatric ward, so he could watch the so-called mentally insane up close. He also began to hallucinate, and the predominant image was that of an “Indian sweeping the floors.” 

That, he decided, was exactly what his current writing project needed. Chief Broom would become the narrator of a story that questioned society’s perception of sanity and insanity.

Ken Kesey’s final product, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, hit the bookstores three years later. It was an immediate critical and popular success.
 

 Page 4