Guest post by Michelle Moran, author of The Heretic Queen (with giveaway)

I'm thrilled to welcome one of my favorite writers, Michelle Moran, author of Nefertiti and The Heretic Queen (read my reviews here and here) to Diary of an Eccentric! Michelle is here to talk about one of my favorite topics: writing spaces!

Welcome, Michelle!

One of the questions I am asked most frequently has to do with my writing space. Every author has a place that is sacred; a place where reality stops and the world the author has created begins. For me, I write in an office on my first floor, looking out of my window onto a garden of over two hundred roses and eight fruit trees (none of which I can take credit for, by the way. The woman who sold the house to us had retired and spent her life gardening!). I have a variety of images hanging in my office. One is a black and white photograph of the Wright Brothers taking flight, the other is a beautiful Didier Lourenco whose paintings evoke life on the Mediterranean better than any other artist I know. But there has always been a space to the right of my desk that has gone unfilled since we bought our house, and back when Random House commissioned a painting for the cover of Nefertiti: A Novel, I had the brilliant idea of purchasing it. After all, what better image could fill my empty wall than one that represented my first success?

So immediately, I contacted the representative for the artist Doug Fryer, and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted the painting. I told myself that I would purchase the original at whatever-the-cost, imagining that whatever-the-cost would probably mean around $500. Or maybe $600. When Doug’s agent emailed back, however, I discovered that for the ten by fifteen inch oil painting, I would need to fork over several thousand dollars (the agent also mentioned that this was a bargain, and that the artist’s other paintings go for thirty thousand). So I looked at my husband, and he looked at me, and to my great surprise he said, “Well, there will only ever be one debut novel.” So now I sit beneath the gaze of Egypt’s most fascinating queen, and it’s worth every dollar!

Thank you, Michelle, for taking time out of your busy schedule to stop by my blog! I'm so looking forward to your next book!

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Michelle is generously offering 2 hardcover copies of The Heretic Queen to my readers!

To enter:

1. To make things interesting, you must answer a question:

If you are a writer, what would be your ideal writing space?

If you're not a writer, tell me your favorite place to curl up with a good book.


2. You must leave your email address so I know how to contact you if you win!


This contest is open internationally and will end at midnight EST on Sunday, March 1.

Good luck!