Today I'm joined by author Betsy Tobin whose latest book Things We Couldn't Explain was published this week.
An innocuous enough question, and one that usually translates into: what do you do? But for us authorial types, it tends to be a bit more literal. When I tell people at drinks parties that I write books for a living, they genuinely want to know physically where I work. I suppose they want an image of me hard at it: scrunched over a desk, closeted away in a garret, tucked up in a library carrel, etc. Over the years this question has probably vexed me more than any other, not because of who’s posed it, but of the difficulty in giving a satisfactory reply.
Where indeed? The answer has been as varied as the number of people who’ve asked it. Over the last fifteen years my office has been: at the kitchen table, up a ladder in a closet-sized loft, in a damp spidery barn, in bed with no heat in the dead of winter, in a well-lit closet, on the sitting room sofa cornered by pets desperate to be taken out, locked into the basement with my children screaming above, in the quiet study room of the local library surrounded by twitchy homeless people, or in a greasy café with builders leering at me.
