Where Writers Write: C.G. Bauer

Welcome to another installment of TNBBC's Where Writers Write!

Where Writers Write is a weekly series that will feature a different author every Wednesday as they showcase their writing spaces using short form essay, photos, and/or video. As a lover of books and all of the hard work that goes into creating them, I thought it would be fun to see where some of TNBBC's favorite authors roll up their sleeves and make the magic happens.

This is C.G. Bauer. He is the author of Scars on the Face of God, a powerfully chilling novel of what the power of religion can do to a small, poor town. And what faith, or the lack thereof, can do to each of it's inhabitants.

He first appeared here on TNBBC in an author interview in 2011. He and I have since kept in touch about his writing and I knew this series wouldn't be complete without inviting the Philadelphian to share his writing space. Come see...

Where C.G. Bauer Writes

It's a fourth bedroom used as an office that my wife wishes was really still a bedroom, unless the proceeds of my writing were to miraculously present us with a beach house on the water, at which point she'd maybe think of making a shrine out of it. (Ha. That's rich. She'd still want her fourth bedroom back.) 

It includes: 

• a leather sofa 
• a long, second-hand, mahogany corporate desk 
• a big screen iMac on said desk
• a massive black printer/copier/fax machine that looks garish crowding one edge of the desk (fax line not set up; again, too lazy)
• a sheathed middle eastern knife that I use as a paperweight, curved and ornate, with some Arabic language writing ("Die, heathen Yankee scum"?) on the blade, a gift from my well-travled son-in-law
• an oriental rug I inherited from my father which he bought in China and on which the dogs have peed. 

Against one wall are two bookcases filled with requisite writing reference manuals, novels I have yet to read, and unbound manuscript pages of critiques from my peer writing groups, also yet to be read. 

Wallhangings: 

• a baseball-themed clock
• a men's softball team photo circa 1990 that includes me, the greatest slow-pitch softball pitcher to have ever played the game, with my team and I all looking studly in our softball uniforms (shirts AND pants) paid for by our local sponsor, Huntington Gas Station and Service Center
• a photo-realism picture of the Penn State football team being led down W. College Avenue in University Park, PA, by the late Joe Paterno
• a Norman Rockwell print titled "Choosin' Up" showing 1930s kid baseball players
• a local artist's original pen and ink print called "A Grand, Final Gesture of Defiance" that shows a field mouse giving the finger to a bird of prey about to devour him
• and the most cherished wallhanging I have, a framed newspaper article written by my daughter regaling her small town readership about the crazy stories I used to tell her when she was a kid (stories that left her damaged, she says), which she presented to me on Father's Day some years back.

Now that I'm finished describing it I realize my writing space is very inspiring, these "thousand words" worth much more, to me at least, than a picture.

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Check back next week to see where the magic happens for Alan Heathcock!!