Seemed like a good idea

until I couldn't enter or leave my office for fear of being buried alive

This may wind up being the shortest post since starting this project. I can barely hold myself upright at my desk, but at least I have relocated my desk and unburied it from beneath HEAPS of stuff piled on there so I could move every flipping thing in my over-crowded office from A to B to C to D under E over F between G and H and back again…

I think this will make my space more functional and maybe even earn some feng shui points. The two bookshelves are now tucked into the corner (rather than looming over me) and my desk has pivoted 90 degrees so I’m no longer sitting with my back to the door.

Instead, I’m right beside my window which, though it doesn’t exactly look out onto a spectacular view as my office faces the neighbour’s side wall, I now have a good view of the bushes between us and them. Who knows, maybe some birds will appear when spring returns.

I’m most excited about the fact I can now extend the second wing of my table/desk so I finally have a proper work surface on which to draw. Before, I didn’t have room to open everything up and the main work area contained my standing desktop (which goes up and down and is exactly the wrong height for drawing), my laptop, critical files, printer and… yes, a bunch of junk. The junk has, for now, been removed, but even with a clear surface, there just wasn’t any room to put a piece of paper, never mind a bigger sketchbook.

That meant I was contorting myself to draw while balancing my sketchbook on my knee or dealing with half the book hanging off the corner of my desk which was leading to all sorts of cricks and cramps.

The big page above was done on the new drawing wing (I’m thinking I need to draw this table/desk setup properly so you know what I’m talking about) and it was so great to be able to have my various drawing implements spread before me all while the book was both open and level! Of course, I mostly used my fountain pen, but at least I felt like I had some options. Maybe tomorrow when I’m not quite so knackered.

My new room configuration also allows me to prop the sketchbook up in good light positioned in such a way that there was no shadow so snapping a photo with my phone didn’t require my usual contortions.

I’m still not quite done with this onerous task as I have not gone through all the excessive stacks of papers and files, most of which I can get rid of. Even though it feels kind of impressive to look at a huge stack of files labeled, ‘Deforestation - Draft 1’, ‘Deforestation Draft 2’ etc. through ‘Draft 6’ and then a few versions of page proofs, all of which are heavily marked up so you can barely see the typed text underneath, who actually cares?

I have forty books out there and they ALL went through many revisions. Imagine how much paper that is to hang onto! All that matters is that eventually I got to the end of the editing process and the books now exist out there in the world. Tomorrow I’ll be making multiple trips to the recycling bins to get rid of all those drafts. And, no, the irony of the existence of half a dozen printouts of drafts of a book whose working title was ‘Deforestation’ is not lost on me.

Here’s what If a Tree Falls: The Global Impact of Deforestation wound up looking like after we’d worked our way through all those messy drafts.

It was a companion to Deep Roots: How Trees Sustain Our Planet, which came out a couple of years earlier (actually, all the way back in 2016 - how time flies :) . Deep Roots had a similar number of iterations. Those drafts, too, gone!

Excuse me now while I go and keel over.