Science & Tech Quote by Margaret Mahy

Chained is doing a lot of work here: it’s a word of captivity smuggled into a cozy domestic scene, hinting at how modern authorship can feel less like inspiration and more like a kind of voluntary house arrest. Margaret Mahy, best known for children’s and YA fiction, is describing the unglamorous infrastructure of making books: not a garret myth, not a quirky ritual, but the plain fact that the computer has turned writing into a daily, screen-bound practice.

The bedroom-office collapse is the real subject. She’s not just telling you where she writes; she’s mapping a life where labor leaks into rest. “It is just as much an office as a bedroom” is a quiet reversal of priorities, a frank admission that the private space we idealize as refuge is also a production site. The bed becoming “an extension of my desk” is funny, faintly bleak, and sharply contemporary: the place designed for sleep and intimacy gets rebranded as workflow overflow.

There’s also a generational context humming underneath. Mahy’s career spans the shift from handwritten drafts to word processors, from writing as a physically separate activity to writing as something the machine makes always-available. The line doesn’t romanticize the squeeze; it normalizes it. That normalization is the point: creativity here isn’t a lightning bolt, it’s endurance, routine, and the small, human negotiations you make when the work won’t stay in its own room.