Virginia Woolf's Golden Rule and my room of a writer's own

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

Office vibe has a huge impact on the quantity and quality of the work I deliver. My personal rules for max office efficacy:

1) Every object must earn its footprint. For me, that means everything in this room has to A) serve and purpose and B) make me happy. Utilitarian + Joy = worth it. And yes, art serves a purpose. If it's the right art. And the right dog is worth his weight in gold.

2) Nothing but work happens in the workspace. My most precious natural resources, time and space, are both limited. Word games, social media, and frittering are better done on the beach. 

3) I work at home; I do not live at work. The meta goal is a happy, healthy life. Be like the Ghostbusters: Don't cross the streams. 

"For my belief is that...if we have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting–room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky. too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down."

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Buy This Book: Love at First Bark by Julie Klam

The wonderfully funny author Julie Klam won me over with You Had Me at Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secrets of Happiness, a hilarious love song to Boston terriers, and Please Excuse My Daughter, a memoir of her privileged upbringing and stormy young adulthood.

Coming to bookstores this month, Love at First Bark: How Saving a Dog Can Somehow Help You Save Yourself is about the alternately hilarious and heart-ripping task of rescuing dogs, who have a habit of turning around to either bite you or rescue you right back.

Visit Julie's website here and check out the great trailer.