The Cave of Wonders

                          By: Maegan Beaumont


Lately, I've had a lot of people question me on my writing process. 
How I write (with my hands). How I choose to write what I write (I don't... it kinda chooses me). How much I write on a given day (It depends. I set a personal goal of 700 words a day. Sometimes I barely make it. Sometimes I quadruple it.) 

But without fail, someone always asks this question:

Where do you write?

In the spirit of full disclosure... I can write anywhere. But that doesn't mean all writing spaces are created equal. I've been known to stay in bed all day with my laptop and my dog and I can do that just as easily as I can set up at the dining room table.

But when I'm really looking to bank some major words, I head to my writing cave. It's kinda like the Bat Cave only there's no bats and no butler who brings me tea and cleans my grappling hook.

My desk is way too small and my chair has seen better days but this is where the magic happens.

Any writer worth their salt is a voracious reader. This is how I justify hiding in my cave and reading when I should be doing laundry.

No cave is complete without a dog and access to coffee. 

So there it is--the answer to where... just don't ask me why because that's something I haven't quite figured out.

Maegan Beaumont is the author of SACRIFICIAL MUSE, the second book in the award-winning Sabrina Vaughn thriller series. A native Phoenician, Maegan's stories are meant to make you wonder what the guy standing in front of you in the Starbucks line has locked in his basement, and feel a strong desire to sleep with the light on. When she isn't busy fulfilling her duties as Domestic Goddess for her high school sweetheart turned husband, Joe, and their four children, she is locked in her office with her computer, her coffee pot and her Rhodesian Ridgeback, and one true love, Jade.

























"... Sacrificial Muse is heart pounding intrigue at its very best. A fast paced, exciting read that I couldn’t put down." - Book Chatter

Summer

Many years ago, I read a slim little book called A Month in the Country, by J.L. Carr. It’s about a World War I soldier hired for the summer to restore an ancient mural in a village church. It’s on the depressing side: none of the characters are on track for a happy life at the last page. But what makes the book memorable is its flawless evocation of summer. So flawless that I’ve read the book more than once—and I’m one of those readers who like escapism and humor. I can’t remember any particular passage, but sitting here at my keyboard I can recall the book’s summer: endless sun, blue skies, the drone of bumblebees, the scents of earth and grass, the feeling that my entire self, body and mind, is in Paradise.

“The Harlequin Tea Set,” an Agatha Christie short story, almost captures summer this way. Liz Michalski’s novel, Evenfall, also has moments of pure summer—eating peaches warm and ripe from the tree, basking in the sun in an overgrown orchard.

I live in the Northeast US—winter lasts a long, long time here. So it’s no surprise that I favor summery books. Even the one sort-of-winter book that I’ve always loved—The Snowstorm by Beryl Netherclift—isn’t really about snow. The title refers to one of those glass balls you shake to make “snow” fly around a scene inside. (There is a real snowstorm at the end, and the book is one of the better time-travel novels I’ve read.) There’s also Robert McCammon’s Swan Song. He creates nuclear winter so well that the first time I read it, I kept looking out the window to make sure the world was still green.

I scanned my bookshelves for a spring book, and found none. I do have a favorite autumn book: The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope. That’s it—one book—even though Hallowe’en is my favorite holiday. (That’s a post for another time, and a discussion of movies that scare the pants off you. Love ‘em.)

I love to write in the summer. My laptop screen can’t compete with sunshine, so I take my three-ring binder and fountain pen and sit in my backyard. Grass between my toes, iced tea at my side, red-winged blackbirds (among many others) calling in the trees, and katydids everywhere. Yet I’ve written all different kinds of weather into chapters on those days. I’m weird like that. This is also one of my favorite places to read.

Is there a book on your shelves that epitomizes your favorite season? My TBR pile in only 6 books deep at the moment. It needs to grow—after all, summer’s only a few weeks away.

What Are You Lookin' At?

By Deborah Sharp

Does where you write make a difference? Well, it definitely would if you were plopped in close proximity to the 'gator hole pictured, left. Nothing like a little incentive to meet your deadline, right?

But, in general, are you picky about your surroundings when you sit down to write? I am. I envy authors who can shut themselves into a windowless room and hammer away at their masterpiece. I know I'm supposed to be creating a physical world for my characters. It shouldn't matter to my imagination where I am or what I see as I do that. But it does.

My Mace Bauer Mysteries are set in the outdoors in Florida. Hence the 'gators. Just a little toothy research. I don't necessarily need to be sitting in the swamp to write about the swamp, but I do like to write outdoors. I like to feel the warmth of the sun; hear the breeze rustling through the trees. I can usually accommodate this need to not be cooped up because of Florida's weather, and because I do my first drafts in longhand, then polish on the computer. Yep, I'm a proud Luddite. It's easy to pop my journal or a notebook into my backpack and leave the house for open spaces.

As I scribbled out version one of this post (Kids: ''Scribbling'' is what scribes did before laptops and netbooks), I absorbed the atmosphere of one of my favorite writing spots in Fort Lauderdale. It's a garden behind the Unity Church, where I park myself at an outdoor table under a shady gazebo. Leaves from a Seagrape, as big as salad plates, flutter to the ground. The afternoon sun dapples through the branches of a Gumbo Limbo. Florida natives call it the Tourist Tree, because its peeling bark is a sunburn-like red.

I'm not a member. Yet no one at the church has ever questioned this middle-aged woman who arrives on a bicycle, slides out her notebook, and gets lost in writing for a couple of hours. When I get stuck, I wander around the garden and look at wooden sculptures with colorful prisms and inspirational passages. I'm not particularly religious, but something always manages to strike me.

Like this one: Divine imagination is awakened in me

And indeed it is, outside.

So, how about you? Where do you like to write? What do you like to see when you write?