Scene of the Blog Featuring Jeanne of Necromancy Never Pays!

This week we're heading to Ohio to visit Jeanne of Necromancy Never Pays. I can remember my very first days of discovering book blogs. There was something about the name of Jeanne's blog that struck my fancy. I had to visit, and I've been a follower ever since.

If you've never visited Necromancy Never Pays, I hope you take the opportunity to do so. Say hi while you're there!

Jeanne's content is her "bling"; if you visit blogs looking for flashy widgets and the like, you won't find them here. You'll find Trivial Pursuit for Booklovers, poetry, book reviews, and lots and lots of thoughtful posts.


Who is Jeanne? According to her Blogger bio, she's "a reader, a PhD in English, a Writing Center Director, an adjunct professor of English, a mother, a wife, a cat owner, and a person who is fond of reading satire, attending the theater, and building sand castles at the beach."

She also "believes in the importance of intellectual property rights, providing links, citing sources, and crediting inspiration where appropriate."

Jeanne's a very interesting lady, and I've enjoyed reading her blog for a long time now.

Speaking of time, it's time for me to shut up and let her show us her blogging space! Don't forget that, if you'd like to see the photos full size, all you have to do is click on them.

I started out blogging from my bed, because when I got the idea for Necromancy Never Pays and had the time to experiment with it, I was recovering from a knee replacement. I had injured the cartilage in my left knee when I was 22 and then again when I was 35 and finally there was no cartilage left and I couldn’t even get up and down the stairs to my desk anymore. Within my first six months of blogging, I was back to my desk, which had been moved to the living room on the main floor of my house. And that’s where my desk remains; I have to keep my books kind of picked up since it’s our main living space.

Right now I have two laptops, both belonging to the local college, because I use them for my work as Writing Center Director and I saved my Word files so oddly that my computer expert husband hasn’t made the time to laboriously gather them together and get them transferred to the new laptop. On the left, the desk has some books on top of the older laptop (which is on top of a box I store papers in) that I checked out of the local college library for finding poems to use on the blog. On the right it has some blog files, some household files (how did those get there? There’s an entire household desk to my right, which is where they belong) and a bunch of teaching files. In between is my clock, photos of my kids, and my blogging mug, which says "never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few" and holds pens, including my Ravenclaw pen from the Harry Potter Exhibit in Chicago last summer. In the little drawer on the right, under the files, are the cards I've selected for use in Friday's Trivial Pursuit for Booklovers.

In front of the enormous picture window is the enormous blue chair I bought right before my surgery, because our other chairs were too low for me to easily get out of without too much deep knee bending of my good right knee. In front of it is the footstool I put my feet up on while I type on my laptop and look out the window.

There’s a table to the right, in between the desk and the chair. I got a photo of it with its usual accoutrements-- cats, books to review, and some textbooks and videos I use in class.

I took a photo of the built-in bookshelf in our living room. It’s as tidy as it ever gets because I had just cleaned out most of the double and triple-stacked books and taken them downstairs, where the bulk of our 7,000 or so books are; the ones we keep upstairs are the ones we use most frequently, or just like to see every day.

I love what Jeanne said about the books that are kept upstairs because it makes them sound like exactly what they are: valued members of the family. Having had my own knee problems over the years, I can sympathize with her about chairs that are too low to the ground.

Jeanne's home looks so lived in and comfortable-- a place where booklovers would feel completely at ease. Thank you so much for allowing us this glimpse into your home and your creative spaces, Jeanne. We really appreciate it!

Stop by next Wednesday to see where Scene of the Blog will be visiting. See you then!