You can’t sit in the chair; there’s already a cat in it.

November 26, 2013 6:23 AM

"You are standing in a hallway at nine in the morning, facing a dining room/kitchen to the south. To the west are stairs up. To the north is an office." -- The Writing Life as interactive fiction, as lived through by Patricia C. Wrede.
posted by MartinWisse (19 comments total)

I'm going to stop everybody right now and tell them to read The Books Of Enchantment before continuing, one of the few fantasy series was that gut-bustingly funny to me as a kid without just being random or absurd. (Unicorns are jerks!)

I apologize again for harassing you on AOL when I was 8 PCW
posted by The Whelk at 6:29 AM on November 26, 2013 [3 favorites]

Your head feels rather fuzzy.

>GET COFFEE. GET COFFEE NOW.

The first email is an urgent request to contact the agent by last Friday to discuss the proposal for your next book, which you were supposed to have finished last month; reading between the lines, there’s a potential offer she wants to discuss.

The second email is an auto-notice that your agent is out of town for the next two weeks, with no phone or email.

>Oh, crap.

Heh, way too accurate.

Seconding The Whelk's suggestion for the Books of Enchantment. SO GOOD. Reminds me that I need to read the second of her Frontier Magic books still.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 6:39 AM on November 26, 2013 [3 favorites]

FWIW only have a few hours to write a week due to kid/work/life commitments seems to be an excellent way never to suffer from any form of "writers block" ever. I wouldn't recommend it for a variety of other reasons but it has at least that going for it.
posted by Artw at 6:45 AM on November 26, 2013 [3 favorites]

You can’t sit in the chair; there’s already a cat in it.

This is clearly the story of my life.
posted by Decani at 7:23 AM on November 26, 2013 [1 favorite]

Patricia C. Wrede's Dealing With Dragons was one of my favorite books as a kid.
posted by Rory Marinich at 7:24 AM on November 26, 2013 [1 favorite]

omg Dealing With Dragons.
posted by postcommunism at 7:36 AM on November 26, 2013

Hunh. The last book, the one with Cimorene's son and the more traditional plot, was actually written and published first. I never knew that.
posted by postcommunism at 7:51 AM on November 26, 2013

Just push the cat off the chair. Come on people, who pays the rent here?
posted by tylerkaraszewski at 8:43 AM on November 26, 2013 [2 favorites]

Come on people, who pays the rent here?

. . . well, it's certainly not the writer!
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 9:11 AM on November 26, 2013 [7 favorites]

> "Just push the cat off the chair."

You monster.
posted by kyrademon at 9:28 AM on November 26, 2013 [1 favorite]

Sit on the cat, it'll get the idea... Most of the time.
posted by Artw at 9:32 AM on November 26, 2013

I always liked slowly tipping the chair on its side, often saying something stupid like "Oh no! Something's wrong with the gravity around here!" until the cat got the point and decided to pretend that leaving the chair was its idea all along.
posted by Spatch at 10:45 AM on November 26, 2013 [1 favorite]

I........um, just get another chair. (Yeah, brain parasites in control.)
posted by mightshould at 10:48 AM on November 26, 2013 [2 favorites]

Every writing space is surrounded by cat posts in my household. Laptop keyboard still sometimes gets stepped on.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 10:49 AM on November 26, 2013

Sometimes I think I am too soppy about cats, MeFi acts as a good counterbalance to that notion.

I'll happily throw him off the bed of he's getting in the way of me sleeping too.
posted by Artw at 11:00 AM on November 26, 2013

PICK UP RUG
DRAG RUG
ROLL RUG
PUSH RUG
LIFT RUG
MOVE RUG ah there we have it.
posted by ErikaB at 11:29 AM on November 26, 2013

Hunh. The last book, the one with Cimorene's son and the more traditional plot, was actually written and published first. I never knew that.

That makes a lot of sense--it was always the weakest of the books.
posted by chaiminda at 12:55 PM on November 26, 2013

I looooved Dealing with Dragons and the other two books in that trilogy. I'm really happy to know there are more books by this author.
posted by bunderful at 9:36 PM on November 26, 2013

There are a bunch of Wrede novels available as Kindle books for $1.99 today.
posted by Zed at 3:45 AM on December 2, 2013 [1 favorite]