”We have to move,” she said. 

     Our landlord had indeed died a few months before and his widow, in order to settle the estate, had decided to sell the house we were living in.

     We are experienced gypsies, but the holidays are not the best time to look for a new place. There’s less than usual out there, and besides — Thanksgiving. Christmas. Y’know?

      Nonetheless, we found a place, and with the help of some wonderful friends, got moved into it. We have now reached the point where we can say we’re settled in, at least in most of the rooms. My books are still packed, and our vast collection of tchotchkies remains to be dealt with, but we have seeral rooms in which we can eat, sleep, prepare food, and relax in the evenings. That’s a great deal. But one thing was lacking.

     Internet. We have been without internet access from our new place for a solid month. This has had several side effects, such as forcing me to start drinking coffee again — purely in order to get access to the web of course — and sneaking around the ether trying to find an unsecured server. Or whatever they are. 

     How did our pioneer ancestors deal with this? Smoke signals? The historical record doesn’t say. But the worst is over. We can now waste time online again without ever leaving our new place to do it, and the world has righted itself.

     Which is my roundabout way of saying I can start blogging again. And with Ambush Books about to debut, I will have something new to blog about. 

But why stop there? I’ve decided to write up a theory that the plays of Christopher Marlowe were written by Truman Capote. And who says Moby-Dick wasn’t written by Ernest Hemingway? And Zelda FitzGerald must have written the novels of Jane Austen during her lucid periods. She wrote Wuthering Heights during her non-lucid periods.

Anybody else want to play? Who really wrote what?

But this is only a fashion, and fashions change. All that it will take is for one historical novel to become popular, and the new trend will be forward to the past.

Which is why I’m hopeful about online publishing. The economics of the new world of electrobooks make the risk of publishing stories set in the past viable again, and I am going to be testing them. I have a completed story about the Spanish-American War, another about a cross-country trip by car before there were roads (Which is also the old-time movie story) and a pirate yarn about the illegitimate children of Mary Read and Anne Bonney sitting unfinished on my computer. No one wants them. Which is to say, no one in New York wants them. But historical does well in adult and children’s writing, and who knows? One of my books may be the one to make the same true in YA. Anyway, it’s worth a shot.

But so much is going on in publishing as a direct result of the online revolution that the new relationship with the blogoverse seems relatively minor. The standard pocket-sized paperback is being replaced by the download. Kindles make it possible to carry a library around with you, and some of the available titles are amazing. Things that you would have to have access to a university library to read once can be had for free with a few taps of the keys. Everything is changing, and traditional publishers are confused and scared.
Or maybe it’s just the really big ones who are staggering like brontosauruses going down for the count.Indy publishing seems, from what I can tell, to be perking right along. In fact, as the big ones panic, rejecting titles they would have accepted two years ago, and dropping advances to a quarter to an eighth of what they were, the stand-alone get-it-done knows-her-business-and-her-market publisher looks better and better.
But the real new frontier is electronic publishing. The possibilities here are amazing. Self-publishing’s been around at least since William Blake, but now it’s coming roaring back, and the markets for it are emerging rapidly. There’s also going to be a new kind of on-line-only publisher, offering higher royalties on lower-priced items, a situation that benefits everybody except big publishers and lumberjacks.
For readers and writers, things are confusing, but they’re looking good.

I was writing to a friend a couple of days ago about the early onset of the rainy season here (we hope it is the early onset of a season and not just a flash in the pan before a winter drought.) She said wether like this, i.e., rain, made her feel more driven to write. Given how much this young woman seems to turn out already, any increase must cut seriously in to her sleep, but she sounded happy, the way writers always sound when writing is going well.

It made me think of a discussion my listserve got in to some years ago in which we talked about the environments we created around ourselves to make writing easier/more pleasant/possible. There were a lot of surprises. There was a Navy chaplain who had a room done up Indiana Jones style, and a famous writer who worked in a purple room. A lot of us wrote to music, which I find almost impossible.

Christopher Fry, the English playwright, was perhaps the most environmentally sensitive writer. wrote a quartet of plays, each of which was supposed to be emotionally tied to one of the seasons, and is supposed to have written outside whenever he could. Hence, The Lady’s Not For Burning. I wonder how he managed to write the winter play, though, given what English winters can be like.

For myself, I seem to need three things: a computer, a flat surface, and quiet. I have a room to myself for writing now, but if we have to move, I can shoe horn into a corner somewhere and carry on, which is a comforting thing to know. I wrote two good books at a small desk in the corner of the guest/family/Douglas room in our last place, and was very happy there. My neighbor raised beautiful flowers that grew up over the fence and smiled at me. I had all that color without any of the work. Lovely.

But the best advice I ever read on writing environments was, “Don’t have one.” This came from a Jack Woodford book published back in the 1930′s. Jack Woodford was a pretty successful hack who turned out short stories, novels, and screenplays. His take on the subject was, the more sensitive you are to your surroundings when you’re writing, the less able you’ll be to write when you need to. He had a point. Lope de Vega, the famous Spanish playwright who was a contemporary of Shakespeare, claimed to have written over 1100 plays in his long life, and the claim is probably true because we have almost 750 of them. He trained himself to be able to write anywhere, even inside a lurching coach. How did he manage that with a quill pen and some ink? I don’t know, but he did it.

Maybe the great principle here is to be aware that environment is important, and depending on your circumstances, either discover exactly what you need to get the job done, confident that you’ll always be likely to have it, or to learn to write in a 16th century stagecoach with a quill pen and still get your word count done for the day. Because at the end of the day, that’s the thing that matters most.