AT MY DESK: Alison Stuart

AT MY DESK
Alison Stuart

Thank you for having me as your guest, J’aimee. I will just pull my chair up to my desk and we can chat… about my desk.

My desk is one of my most beloved possessions. I can still remember the day my parents bought it. Mum and Dad had just built an extension to the house (a study) and on one of our Sunday afternoon drives up into the beautiful hills that surround Melbourne, they came across an antique shop. We all fell in love with the desk: A 6 drawer pedestal cedar desk with a green inlay (fabric unknown). It wasn’t fancy and wasn’t perfect even back then, but it was exactly the right size for the new study.

I am not sure when it became MY desk, although I was certainly exerting some sort of proprietorial influence on it during Years 11 and 12. Then came a period when I was living away from home and moving a large, cedar desk around between share houses was impractical so it remained at my parents house until they decided to do some remodelling and I was, by then, in my own home. The cedar desk came to me and here it has remained ever since… some thirty plus years.

My husband built some bookshelves to sit on the desk where I keep my favourite reference books to hand. It lives in the room where I have my sewing machine and all my quilting bits and bobs. The one room in the house that is 100% MY space! The importance of a Room of One’s Own (as Virginia Woolf would say) is not to be underestimated.

You will see on the shelf above my computer there is a small statuette of an English Civil War soldier who has been with me for years – my little writing talisman. Hanging from the bookshelf are Mardi Gras beads and my pen holders are Mardi Gras cups from my visit to New Orleans. Everything I need is within arm’s reach and inevitably my desk also sports a cat… Oliver Kat who likes to think my writing is greatly improved if he sits on my keyboard. It famously appeared in the ABC Art Nation piece that was done on me a few years ago.

It’s still a little battered around the edges and, I am ashamed to say, there is evidence of some youthful doodling on its pull out drawer. It is certainly not ergonomic but the desk and I go together like an old married couple and we will not be parted. All my books have been written sitting at this desk and although I have set up my Mac notebook with its own screen on another table in my room, I still gravitate back to this space, which is a nuisance because all my WIP is on Scrivener which is on the Mac. I think some rearranging may be needed…

 

Lord Somerton’s Heir
Alison Stuart

Can the love of an honourable man save her from the memory of a desolate marriage?

From the battlefield of Waterloo to the drawing rooms of Brantstone Hall, Sebastian Alder’s elevation from penniless army captain to Viscount Somerton is the stuff of dreams. But the cold reality of an inherited estate in wretched condition, and the suspicious circumstances surrounding his cousin’s death, provide Sebastian with no time for dreams — only a mystery to solve and a murderer to bring to justice.

Isabel, widow of the late Lord Somerton, is desperate to bury the memory of her unhappy marriage by founding the charity school she has always dreamed of. Except, her dreams are soon shattered from beyond the grave when she is not only left penniless, but once more bound to the whims of a Somerton.

But this Somerton is unlike any man she has met. Can the love of an honourable man heal her broken heart or will suspicion tear them apart?

Escape Publishing
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To celebrate the launch of LORD SOMERTON’S HEIR, Alison is running a month long RAFFLECOPTER CONTEST.  To enter, all you need to do is click HERE