I wrote the majority of "Here Be Monsters" at our kitchen table. It has a nice view of some clutter and a tiny saltwater tank and pictures of dogs and other family/friends and the woods outside of our house and provides plenty of space for me to spread out. I like drinking some form of liquid caffeine (Coke or coffee) while writing, and often cover the table with notebooks and maps and miscellaneous scraps of paper.
Writing at the table means that the dogs (currently two, Miles and Puck) are at my feet or waiting on one side of the door leading to the woods behind our home. They don't bug me nearly as much as Kiwi, the mantis shrimp living in the saltwater tank on the table, does...she comes out to watch me type (which is creepy), whacks on the snails cleaning her tank to let m know that she's hungry (which is noisy and annoying), and redecorates her tank constantly (throwing stuff around, which is visually distracting).
I sometimes listen to music, but nothing too busy or with words...it generally comes down to Mozart or JSB's Goldberg Variations or Segovia. I don't turn off the phone, but I do screen callers, and almost nobody makes the cut. I keep a browser open in the background, because I find that I look stuff up all the time, but stick pretty much to google and wikipedia (avoiding gmail and FB during writing time helps it work).
Most of my writing sessions during the writing of HBM resulted in the production of "chunks" of book between 1500-2500 words in length. I tried not to focus on the wordcount as much as completing a segment of the story before stopping for the day; so some days I ran long and some days were shorter (my NaNoWriMo day wordcounts varied from 800 to 4500).
I don't know that this is the best way to write, it's just how I wrote while working on HBM. I'd love to hear about where and how you write...thanks for sharing!
Jamie
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