“Home office” sounds so . . . respectable.

Maybe for some professions, it is.  And maybe even for some writers.  I don’t know.  But for a lot of us, the home office, if we’re lucky enough to have one, is more like a cave where the books and papers are organized by geologic strata and topic drift, with the desk and chair and attendant writing machinery (computer, typewriter, quill pen and inkwell, whatever) rising above it all like a lighthouse on a rock.

Plus, often, a cat.

That’s if we’re lucky, and have a room to spare.  Jane Austen, famously, wrote her novels in the family parlor, and shoved the papers underneath the blotter whenever anybody came in.  Louisa May Alcott’s fictional alter ego, Jo March, set up her writing desk in the attic.  I thought a lot about both of them during the years when I had my own writing gear set up in our fortunately-large kitchen — not for lack of a spare room for the office, in my case, but in order to have a commanding view of the front door, the latch of which our pre-school offspring had, unnervingly, proved themselves able to open.

Writers through the ages have managed to ply their craft under the most trying conditions imaginable — in hospitals, in prisons, on ships at sea, in grinding poverty or in the diamond-encrusted straitjacket of social expectation — and have undoubtedly cheered themselves by daydreaming of the perfect office they would make for themselves someday, if only.

Sometimes, if they’re lucky, they get to have that perfect office.  And if they’re even luckier, they don’t then sit down in the perfect chair at the perfect desk and take up the perfect pen (or the perfect typewriter, or the perfect computer) . . . only to have their muse demand to be taken back to that cramped walk-in closet with the typewriter set up on a board across two suitcases and the toddler throwing his alphabet blocks out of his playpen and in through the open door.

It’s easy to tell when a plumber or an electrician is hard at work.  They’ve got parts and equipment all around them, they’re doing things to other things with tools and things, and you can tell when they’ve finished because there’s a working thing where there wasn’t one before.

It’s still fairly easy to tell when a teacher or a scholar or an accountant is hard at work.  They’ve got piles of books and papers, or they’ve got lots of computer files, and they’re writing on them or typing in them or reading them, and you can tell that they’re finished because when they’re done, they stop.

Writers, though . . . writers may have piles of paper and lots of computer files and lots of books scattered all around, but at any given moment they may be staring out into space, or playing Solitaire on their computer, or putting together the world’s longest paper-clip chain, and maybe they’re just goofing off, but on the other hand maybe they’re off somewhere inside their own heads working out the final twists on the plot, or trying to come up with the perfect opening sentence.

And there’s no way to tell from the outside which is which.

It’s a wonder our friends and family and household pets put up with us sometimes, it really is.

If you know an author, and are at the same convention with them, or share the same local bookstore or library or coffee shop, and you see that they’re scheduled to give a reading:

Go to their reading.

Unless they’re serious rock stars like Neil Gaiman or George R. R. Martin or J. K. Rowling, most writers live in fear of the dreaded 10 AM Sunday morning reading slot . . . the one where the audience consists of four rows of empty chairs and one drowsy con-goer who fell asleep in the room after the last party of the night before and is now too embarrassed to leave.

What do you get in return for taking the time to attend a reading?  Well, stars in your crown in heaven, of course, and the chance to hear early drafts of forthcoming books and works-in-progress, and the sincere and profound gratitude of the writer in question.

Especially at 10 AM on a Sunday morning.

Writers and other freelance artists have more than a little in common with small farmers, and not just that people in both occupations have insanely complicated income tax forms and a tendency to get depressed when thinking about health insurance.

They also have to hold all sorts of odd jobs in order to continue working at their chosen vocation. A sculptor I once met, for example, said that most of the ceramic artists he knew kept themselves in rent and food money by making coffee mugs.  And I still treasure a sign I once saw outside a farmhouse on Route 3:

FRESH EGGS
TAROT READINGS
AROMATHERAPY
CHAIN SAWS SHARPENED

My own list of oddball writer jobs is atypically prosaic, mostly versions of “taught freshman English someplace,” though I did spend one semester in graduate school as an elderly faculty widow’s live-in companion, which was not the sinecure you might think, and a later summer answering correspondence for the National Solar Heating and Cooling Foundation.  I spent a lot of time putting together letters out of prefab paragraphs that all said, more or less, “Yes, you can retrofit your house for solar energy.  It will be very expensive.”^†  I’m pleased, these days, to note that science has marched on, and solar panels have dropped enough in price that they’re even showing up in a low-income area like far northern New England.

^†My favorite, though, was the guy who wrote to ask if he could use passive solar energy to run his earthworm farm. I had to take that one upstairs to the engineers, who were equally delighted to see it — apparently earthworm farming was an ideal application for passive solar.