Out with the Old, In with the New

Orcutt2016WorkspaceA New Year demands new writ­ing projects and a new work­space. And since I’m a writer who is deeply inspired or dis­cour­aged by his envi­ron­ment, I need a work­space that has a lot of inspi­ra­tional quotes, pic­tures and objects around me when I work.

Look close­ly and you can find all of my tal­is­mans and inspi­ra­tional knick­nacks, includ­ing

  • Cook­ie Mon­ster!
  • Screen­shots from Raiders of the Lost Ark, Butch Cas­sidy and the Sun­dance Kid, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Nat­ur­al.
  • A paint­ing of a sum­mer scene by amaz­ing artist and high school friend Kris­tine Zan­no Kratky (based on my short sto­ry “Sum­mer on the Cape”).
  • My Muse, Alexas.
  • Chest­nuts that I smug­gled into the U.S. from France (I got them in the Jardin du Lux­em­bourg in Paris).
  • Shell cas­ings from my friend Bob Hanaburgh’s Sig Sauer .45 ACP.
  • A snowy cab­in in the Rock­ies.
  • Two pic­tures of Ernest Hem­ing­way.
  • Pic­tures of my two grand­fa­thers.
  • A stun­ning red­head who was the inspi­ra­tion for Shay Con­nol­ly in my Dako­ta mys­tery, A Real Piece of Work.
  • Thomas Cole’s paint­ing The Oxbow.
  • Man­u­scripts from my next three projects.
  • The Great Gats­by, A Move­able Feast, and The Sto­ries of John Cheev­er.
  • A pic­ture of Mount Ever­est.
  • A gran­ite stone from a quar­ry that my grand­fa­ther and great-grand­fa­ther cut stone in.
  • My Mont Blanc pen.
  • Stones from Lit­tle Round Top at Get­tys­burg, Appo­mat­tox, Maine, and Castle­craig (one of my ances­tors’ cas­tles in Scot­land).

 

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By Chris Orcutt

CHRIS ORCUTT is an American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years' writing experience and more than a dozen books in his oeuvre. Since 2015, Chris been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.

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