Writing - January's best bits

After a pre and post Christmas break I'm back to writing at my treadmill desk, but it's in a new location. We had to move it at the end of November to make space for the Christmas tree and after the tree came down I decided I'd like the desk to stay put, in a corner of the lounge.

At the moment I'm finishing off my PhD and tentatively working on something that *might* be a novel. It's exciting to think about new characters and this time I'm really interested in exploring/employing different structures to tell the story. I need to reread Sarah Waters' The Night Watch to see whether a step back into the past is something that might be possible.

Moving the desk to a new spot seems to have lead to other changes in the writing environment/routine. I've recently decided that I like writing to smells. I acquired three Yankee Candles over Christmas: one smells like fresh laundry, another smells of cherries and the third smells of cinnamon. The cinnamon one is my absolute favourite - it makes the whole room smell like Christmas biscuits.

I have a lovely new notebook (which I bought when I was supposed to be Christmas shopping). It's really soft and bendy and it can squeeze into my bag without getting damaged. Every page has a different colour/pattern. I'm writing a lot of notes at the moment which is unusual as I normally prefer to type things and press 'save.'

After years of putting up with a Blackberry that just couldn't handle the internet, I finally faced the boredom of phone shopping. While messing about in the shop I picked up a Samsung Note 3 to make a joke about massive, brick-sized phones from the 1990s - the joke was on me when I ended up buying the brick, which I now love - it's got a tiny pen thingy so I don't have to do the whole fat-fingers-on-touch-screen thing. I even managed to find a book-ish case (it's supposed to be Little Red Riding Hood). I've started to keep the phone in my pocket while I write at the treadmill because it's got a pedometer and it makes a little trumpet fanfare when I reach 10,000 steps.

And while I'm writing/walking I can hear the lovely cuckoo clock Neil bought me for Christmas, chiming the hour and the half hour from the dining room.

I'm standing on a chair in this photo - the clock has to be more than six feet above ground level so its chains have space to dangle as they unwind. When the cuckoo sings, the little woodcutter chops wood with his axe. It's brilliant.