Office update and first guest blog

Yesterday I guest blogged at History Hoydens, talking mostly about my research process. And I learned that I'm going to have to be very diligent during my blog tour if I'm going to get any work or writing done, instead of, you know, just obsessively checking the blogs every 15 minutes to see if there are new comments.

Speaking of writing, my office is coming along. I don't have my desk set up yet, nor my Inspiring Images up on the wall, but the walls are painted and I'm starting to unpack my books. Behold!



The darker wall is Okra, the lighter one Oolong Tea. Those are my research books, about half unpacked--lots of military history, with a heavy focus on Napoleon and Wellington and their campaigns, plus a goodly amount of general Regency sources and stray books on subjects unrelated to the 18th or 19th century that I might write about if I ever get tired of mining the Napoleonic Wars. Want to know how ladies wore their hair in 1818, or who-all Wellington wrote to right after Waterloo (his letters from that period were unusually full of exclamation points!!! to the degree that I asked him if he were 46 or 16!!), or how the Athenians tricked the Persians into engaging their fleet at Salamis? I've got you covered.

For those who came in late, here's what my walls used to look like. Big improvement, no?

Why I've been so scarce in these parts

The past few weeks, Mr. Fraser and I have been longing to tackle the pile of boxes still filling our garage and the basement mudroom. But every time we go to open one, we bump up against the fact that we can't unpack much more until our offices are ready and we have shelves up in the kitchen. Which means that in order to unpack, we need to paint. (We hired a painter for the living room and painted the master bedroom and Miss Fraser's room before moving in but didn't have time to tackle the rest.)

So about ten days ago I started tackling the wallpaper in the room destined to be my office, a small bedroom which had last been decorated as a nursery some 20 years ago, as best as we could judge from the paper design. It looked like this:



One wall of balloons, the teddy bear border all around. I could not write in such a room. Certainly not historical romance or historical fantasy. Not even children's picture books. Maybe horror in which an innocent author is mummified alive in wallpaper strips by maniacally cackling evil teddy bears. At least that's how I felt on my fourth pass at the accent wall with my second bottle of wallpaper removal gel.

But at long last the room is wallpaper-free, and we've painted three of the walls Oolong Tea (a midtone olive green). Once it's dry enough to tape in a few days, we'll paint the former balloon wall Okra (a darker olive). And once I get my furniture in and the research books unpacked, I'll post pictures of my new writing cave in all its glory. I'm planning to put up some inspirational images of my chosen era to keep me in the writing spirit and to drive out the ghost of those hideous teddy bears. I've already got a print of a fashion plate of a woman in a ballgown, not this one but similar:



And my military history geek with a crush on Wellington side wouldn't be happy without a good Waterloo image. Probably this one:



I'm at most halfway there, but it's such a thrill to finally have my very own office to decorate as I please!

My very own office

As I mentioned in my introductory post, Mr. Fraser and I just bought a house, and we're getting ready to move in three weeks. We've got a ton to do. Among other things, there's hardly a room in the house that doesn't need repainting, and we want to get it done before we move because it's so much easier to do before there's furniture to work around.

So we're living in a world of paint samples and bickering over color. For people with similar tastes, Mr. Fraser and I can get up a good argument over, say, whether Martha Stewart Bay Leaf is too dark for the kitchen. I say yes, because a kitchen should be a bright cheerful color, like yellow. He says I'm just saying that because my mom had a yellow kitchen. We agree on Wedgwood Blue for our bedroom, then send dueling emails about just what shade that is. Turns out I was thinking of the very darkest pieces of jasperware, while he was imagining a far softer hue.

One room, however, is mine. All mine. The smallest bedroom is to become my office. (Mr. Fraser gets an office too, a little bigger but with less natural light and doubling as the guest room, so I figure it's a fair trade.) I'm ridiculously excited about it--a true, dedicated writing space set up for my needs and decorated to my taste.

At first I was going to make the room dark, maybe a deep claret red or forest green. Those, along with black and navy, are my go-to colors for clothes, and I love the deep richness of them. But the more I looked at that tiny, tiny south-facing room, the more I thought that what's beautiful on a sweater or dress might be a bit oppressive in a small room--not to mention upping the temperature a few degrees during our rare Northwestern heat waves.

However, my Very Own Space cannot be pastel. No way, no how. So, despite having lived in rentals all my adult life, looking with longing to the day I can have walls that aren't white, I'm painting my office...cream. With white trim. Specifically Martha Stewart Rice Paper with Picket Fence trim. (The color names crack me up.) I'll bring in the rich colors with curtains and rugs and give it personality with what I choose to hang on the wall.

I think. I may change my mind between here and the paint store.