It sounds so simple, but it isn’t, actually. I have to bypass the Internet, even a little glimpse into it. Not just for the reason that it distracts me, and I can find something to do, but because it changes the direction of my thoughts, pulls me into the world instead of pulling me into myself. I used to walk the dog right after breakfast, but I make him wait now until I take my morning break. I do not answer the phone. I don’t do anything but go to the office with my coffee in hand and sit down at my desk. I’m allowed to write a journal or lists of things I’d like to accomplish or even lists of scenes. I don’t even let myself do a meditation right there in the corner, which is all set up for it. Even that can be a way for me to avoid going into the world of my novel.

I can journal, etc, for 20 minutes, then I have to open the file and get moving. Usually what happens is that I can’t go into it cold–it feels too challenging, too scary for my still emergent creativity–so I find a spot I know I want to tweak, or one I know I’m going to like, and I read there. I change a word or two, rewrite a sentence here, a sentence there. I read aloud to get the cadence right, maybe, or play with subtext or echoes. This always works to pull me back into the world of the book at hand, and out of my own head and life and agitations.

And surprise! By 11 or sometimes even by 9:30, I’ve done my pages for the day and I am free to do other things. Like today, when I am headed out to Barnes and Noble for a coffee and a nice amble. Maybe I’ll look at journals for my upcoming travels.

How do you trick yourself to do things?

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Run by two fantastic women writers I adore, who are both introverted and smart and cheerful.  Check it out.

Which of course, none of us will discount.  Who could mind crowning success?Okay, I’ll take it.

But like everything else, publishing is changing so much, and the lists are filled with new books each week.  If you make it this time, can you make it next time…higher? And what do you have to do to get there?  A hundred signings in a hundred cities, leaving your family and your passions and your dog at home.   If you do it often enough (think Jodi Picoult), hitting the lists high enough and regularaly enough, eventually it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.  But that’s a long time coming, my friends, and it takes as much luck and good timing as hard work and good books.   (Not to mention enormous publisher support.)

The recent announcement that Borders is possibly putting itself up for sale has been on my mind all week.  It struck me–again–that the books showing up in the stores are flowing through a very small bottleneck, the buyers for the major chains and Walmart.  Very small neck–a handful of people who are deciding what arrives in the stores in what amounts. Which decides what readers see, browsers spy, shoppers buy.   Not a particularly fertile system for writers.

The entire economy is changing, of course, but in particular, the book industry is in the midst of an enormous shift.  Over breakfast this morning, CR told me about a new computer/imaging screen that is so thin and flexible it can be rolled up.  It’s is still riddled with problems, but when such a model emerges, there is bound to be one that eventually does what you want it to do, afforadably.

I am as passionate a bibliophile as it is possible for a person to be.  In my family, this is a trait passed down like blue eyes and a penchant for creativity.  I have far too many books, and continue to have too many no matter how I resolve I’ll only keep the ones I really, really love.  Even so, they pile up in corners and on my desk in in the basement where I am going to “sort through them.”   I give them away by the boxful; the DAV and ARC callers love me because they know I’ll always have something for them.

No matter how I love books, I can see plainly that they are a bulky and inefficient way to deliver the printed word to consumers.  It is wildly expensive to ship them, for one thing.  You’ve mailed a big box of something somewhere–think about how it pinched your pocket book.  Now multiply that by millions of boxes of books, every year.  And imagine you are a publisher and have to pay to have those books shipped if they don’t sell.  (A silly system, but never mind that for now.)  

The future is coming–technology will transform the book industry as surely as it has transformed the music industry, and wise writers (and publishers) will be paying attention to this trend.   Although the transition might be rocky for many of us, eventually, I do believe this will be good for writers in the long run.  More markets, more variety, more choice. 

And just for the record, I don’t think the NYTimes Bestseller List is going anywhere.  That would be sad! But what if it also had a section of bestselling electronic releases for the week?  

While we watch the brewing revolution, a good number of my titles are available electronically.   On Kindle you can buy some titles that are not as easy to find in stores:  Madame Mirabou’s School of Love and No Place Like Home, among others.   My recent Ruth Wind books are all available electronically, including the brand new novella collection, A Mother’s Love.  (Cute story about a yoga instructor, by the way.)

What would be your ultimate reader?