I write in a recliner with a trackball on my chest. I’ve done so ever since my first detachable keyboard around 1980. I had a desk built to fit this reclining style a few years before my daughter was born in 1986. As you can see, the recliner worked out well when she was an infant.
Soon after her birth, we moved to bigger digs. I took my desk and recliner with me and installed them in my new office with a panoramic view of the San Fernando Valley that I rarely enjoy because my eyes are always glued to my screen. When the photo was taken with my daughter on my chest, I was writing with Wordstar, a fantastic program that needed no mouse so you never had to take your hands off your keyboard. Wordstar is responsible for a lot of the keyboard shortcuts we still use, like CTRL-C to cut and CTRL-V to paste. My daughter is now 28, gainfully employed, happily married and pregnant. Wordstar has been murdered by MS Word, which makes me wonder how I’m going to fit my trackball and my grandson on my chest.
I never get backaches in a recliner. I can write uninterrupted for hours, assuming the phone doesn’t ring, the water heater doesn’t explode, and I can resist checking my email. The only downside is falling asleep. But given the choice between a nap or a backache, the recliner is a no-brainer.
I’m still in the same fake Eames chair recliner 35 years later, though I’ve had to repair it a few times. The white lambskin on the back was my daughter’s when she was a baby. I never realized how enmeshed she was in my writing! But I guess there’s no separating writing from life in the real world.
Craig Faustus Buck is a writer of many faces. His journalism has appeared in hundreds of publications from The New York Times to Sports Illustrated to Le Monde. He’s co-authored six non-fiction books, including two New York Times bestsellers: Toxic Parents and It’s Your Body. He’s written and produced scores of TV series and movies, including the crime series Magnum PI and Simon & Simon and the Academy Award-nominated short film Overnight Sensation. His short stories have been published in a broad selection of anthologies and his latest, “Honeymoon Sweet,” is nominated for an Anthony Award. His crime novel Go Down Hard, a novel of sex, thugs, and rock-n-roll, is out now from Brash Books.
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