Some people need a special space and just the right conditions in order to write.

A quiet office with the perfect color of paint on the walls is necessary for them to focus and channel their creative energies. Fortunately, I am not one of those people.

At work, I have to write stories with whatever noise is going on in the newsroom — televisions, phones, people shrieking at the sight of mice — and the news doesn’t stop just because I don’t like the bland desk that’s holding up my monitor:

In the spirit of full disclosure that’s not actually my desk. It’s AV’s, but we work at the same place and I assure you mine looks the same.

At home, I have a lot more control and thanks to the wonders of laptops and wireless Internet, I can work just about anywhere I want. Not that I do, but I could.

Everything you read here is composed in one of two places. There’s the desktop computer in my bedroom:

Or more frequently, it’s sitting downstairs in a recliner using my laptop:

I guess I do have one special stipulation though — I find it very hard to work in silence. Maybe that goes back to writing so often in the newsroom that I’m used to having at least some background noise. I find the sound of silence somewhat distracting.

Ever since college I have turned to music to combat this problem. On very rare occasions that means opening up iTunes and letting it skip around my playlist playing whatever it wants. Usually though, I listen to one of three artists, and in an odd twist, this is the only time I ever listen to them.

The first is Nickel Creek. I can accomplish absolutely anything with them as my background noise. The only problem is that I only have one of their CDs, so the window of productivity is pretty limited.

The second, Delta Goodrem, does not present that issue. I think I have three of her albums, and thus can work for hours with her wailing away at a just-audible level.

If things really aren’t going well and I’m having a hard time getting myself to just buckle down and work, it’s time to go to the secret weapon — DMX. I know, you probably assumed from the start that DMX was one of the three, but I had to make sure. His song “What’s My Name” basically sounds to me like “Do Some Work.”

When even that doesn’t work, I may solve my Rubik’s Cube in a last-ditch effort to get the creative juices going. But sometimes even the best of us can totally fail, and end up opting for more successful pursuits such as napping or quality time with the Playstation.

That may mean you go a week (or two) without seeing any new content, but if you get too desperate you can always just pretend it’s 2006 and read those entries instead.