Thanks for the update - such a great story!

Families, families - like fluff, they're everywhere.
Some love it - personally I could live without - hey, that's exactly what I'm doing - whou, lucky me
And lucky you too, as I assume you're one of the family lovers.
Good luck with your lost & found

Just take a walk every day as a habit, and you'll surpass all that
Saffron is a good thing too against depression - and it's generally good for the nervous system
A good time to take up painting - if ever wanted to - playing around with the colors & forms should get you in "flow" (a state where we forget ourself and everything around us - very advisable )

Thanks, Anivid.

Lately, I'm not feeling so heavy and immobile all of the time. When I feel I can barely move, I try to get out of the house and go somewhere (that isn't the grocery store or the doctor), and I'm usually much better for a day or two afterward.

What I need to do, I know, is not wait so long between, and get out while I'm still feeling better so I can make it last.

Hi Teresa,

Things are beginning to clear up for you - I know
But just in case the deep sea monster tries to drag you down again - you might need a Depression Support Group.
Best from Anivid

They are, certainly, very reticent. I've never heard a complaint out of them, though they do grow wan and sickly if you drop a lot of water on them.

(The colorful item -- actually several items -- is a stack of hat boxes under the table, which is suspended above the floor in all sorts of ingenious ways.)

I expect african violets are too refined to mention their neglect. (That, or they're closely related to shrinking violets; perhaps literally. )


Regarding the room in question, it looks very cheerful**. I hope it works its spell.


** - Even the colourful - though, to me, unidentifiable - item that's pretending to hold up the printer.

That's what I need, somewhere like that! Very nice. My old bedroom used to be yellow for a very long time. A nice happy colour - yellow flowers always cheer me up.

And there's nothing wrong with African violets! They don't mind if you forget to water them, and they flower for ages and ages.

You can choose the background color, and you can change the color of the bars (as you can see) and tinker with a lot of other things (some of which look so hard I wouldn't dare try them) by clicking on Blog Control Panel and then on Customize Blog Style when the next menu comes up, which brings up a lot of options and colors you can use.

Fun with colors! I change mine whenever I change my avatar.

Whou, you can choose the background color ??
- lavender is nice though
(but I only found the letter colors )

Thank you, everyone. I'm really quite pleased with it. Because it's so much better organized, the room seems larger and airier than it did when I used it all those years ago. Even though there is a lot more in it now. And (drumroll) I'll have room for a Christmas tree. In the days of the shared office/craft room I was able to squeeze a tree into my half of the room (although I had to block off some of the book shelves to do it). I just hope nothing happens to evict me from the room before then.

And TJ, I like African violets. I've had a certain amount of success keeping them alive in the past. I did think of something like daffodils or tulips, but they don't last long.

Hex, I wrote a lot of books in crowded and public areas of the house. Many a lady authoress has written her books on the kitchen table. (I've never heard of a man doing so, but in these enlightened times perhaps some do.) But I was comparatively young and hardy then.

And Woolf's point (I hope everyone read Part One of this article?) was that with all the other pressures that women suffered, the fact that they didn't have their own places to write in was going to have a destructive effect on their creativity. It would be difficult to write if you were also raising thirteen children, your family didn't want you to write, and there was never any quiet time. Of course my four only felt like thirteen children.

The nicest thing is the sense of space, because actually I'm not that far removed from the noise. It's easier to ignore it, though.

(I hope this lavender background doesn't make it too hard for people to read my remarks? It didn't seem to me that it would be any worse than the default turquoise, and the color palette available is limited. But if it's bad I can just use white.)

Very envious, that looks like a wonderful room! We have a room that we deem the library in our house, because it is all books, book, book, but No One's computer is in there so he uses it more.

I hope that the room proves to be wonderfully inspirational!

Pride and Prejudice was marketed as the work of a Lady, not by the specific lady, Miss Austen. And was she shy? Contemporary accounts on that seem to differ.

But Fanny Burney destroyed her first manuscript (which she had written in secret) because she felt she had done wrong to write it. Later, when she wrote Evelina, she submitted it to the first publisher anonymously -- it was rejected because of that -- and convinced her brother to pose as the author with the next. Nobody knew she had written the book until after it was a critical hit and had received a great deal of praise (which I suppose the critics could hardly take back) when nobody knew that it had been written by a young woman.

And the Burneys moved in quite different -- more literary and intellectual -- circles than the Austens in their parsonage. Their friends would have been less shocked to find an authoress in their midst than the Austens' neighbors.

The Brontës, you'll remember, originally sent their work out to be published under male pseudonyms, When the truth about Jane Eyre came out, I think people were about equally divided between admiring Charlotte for writing it, and shocked because a woman had written such a book. After Charlotte died, Mrs. Gaskell felt obliged to write in her defense that she had managed to write about these things without being sullied herself. If the author had been a man, no such defense would have been necessary. (Of course it's funny to think of Jane Eyre as shocking, when so many readers today are put off by all the moralizing.) Mary Ann Evans wrote under the name George Eliot so that people would take her work more seriously.

So, as you say, undesirable rather than aberrant by that time -- but how many gifted young women were discouraged from writing because their families did, in fact, consider it wrong? I'll bet they were many.

I have a laptop :s

Also, a hall table/ kitchen table -- failing that, I'll use the bed as a table and sit on the floor beside it. I also enjoy a variety of cafe tables. I need to clear the junk out of our attic and make that into an office... (should only take me a year or two). Now I've seen how lovely it can look, though... I'm very tempted.

Congratulations on your room... Its truly lovely and I have serious room-envy now! (I always loved that quote)

My own "room" is a shared office cubicle off one side of the living room in our flat. However, I have claimed the early mornings when it is ALL MINE (and children are at school), and I own exactly one-third of the cork-board on the wall, on which to hand inspiring pictures, quotes and notes on WIP. I also have a cubby-hole that no one is allowed to open. So at certain times of the day I can pretend its my very own space and happily type away.

See, that’s the style
Light and air – inviting colors – neatly organised writing bubble.
Just waiting for Teresa to enter – before it clams the door
Congrats so much dear Teresa – and when continuing your daily outings on foot (also called « the horses of the apostles ») you’ll soon be de-ailing
I just love what you’ve done for yourself.

Re Jane Austen, the door to the room where she worked creaked, and she wouldn't have the hinges oiled, so she always had notice of anyone entering the room!

I don't know whether she hid the work through a belief it was unfeminine, though, so much as she was a little secretive and/or shy generally. And P&P was marketed as the work of a lady, and other female writers did use their names, of course, so it wasn't seen as wholly unacceptable, and Fanny Burney was actually feted as an author. I think by the time they were writing it was seen as less aberrant, if not actually desirable.

A lovely room, Teresa. Good luck with the new writing.

Wonderful news! And a wonderful room! (And yay! for coloured files and storage boxes.)

No more African violets, though -- you need something yellow to fit in with the room, something a little more vibrant and heart-lifting. (I always find saintpaulias a little melancholy -- but that could be to do with the fact I end up overwatering and killing them...)

Very lovely. I have a little office all of my own, and it is lovely to have just a little place of calm.