When I’m on tour people often want to know where do I write. I’m not sure what the folks who ask me that are imagining. Maybe they envision a spacious book lined office with a massive desk littered with papers and computers? We have one of those in our home, in both our homes actually, but those aren’t used for writing books. In our household, I write the books and Bill writes the checks, and he needs a desk with drawers and files to keep track of all the business pieces of our lives. All I need to write books is a comfortable chair, a laptop, and my head. Oh, and coffee–lots of coffee.

This summer I’ve been doing most of my writing on the verandah, keeping heron watch all the while out of the corner of my eye. By the way, I no longer have to do that part–watching for the heron–because our two motion activated heron water blasters, one on the front pond and one on the back, are doing that just fine. The remaining fish, (The Big Guy included) no longer traumatized by the rampaging heron, are becoming somewhat more social again. They come up from under plants and rocks to visit when it’s feeding time. And as long as I remember to turn off the switch, I don’t get blasted with a spray of water, either.

Watching out for Herons from my veranda.

Bella and my chair, where we work and do heron watching.

I’ve included a couple of photos. In one, you’ll see the view from my chair, going down to the pond. There should be a glimpse of the heron statue we bought. As a heron deflector, it’s totally useless, but I’ve grown to rather like this one mostly because it doesn’t eat the fish.

The second photo shows my chair, without me in it, but with Bella snuggled in her Furrcedes (Yes, that’s really what it’s called!) keeping me company and keeping her eyes peeled for moles and herons. As for the coffee? That’s staying warm in the metal cup on the table and my computer is just barely visible on the table on the far side of the chair.

Welcome to my summer writing station. There are heaters overhead if it’s chilly and a fan and drapes if it’s hot. In the winter, I’ll be back inside cuddled next to the fireplace here, or out on the patio in Tucson. But this style of writing wouldn’t be possible without living in the age of computers, and by that I mean laptop computers.

My first computer was an Eagle PC with 128 K of memory I took it to Canada once to finish writing Improbable Cause, and the process of loading the behemoth into the trunk caused my husband to remark, “It’s portable all right, as long as you have three men and a boy.” By the way, he was going to Canada on business, and I was going along. He had just finished reading the rough draft of Improbable Cause. As we drove north he said, “The writing at the end sounds like something that would show up in the Seattle PI–as though a reporter wrote it. You need to put the characters back in it.” Initially, my feelings were hurt by what he said, but in the long silence that followed (people who are half Swedish/half Danish can do long silences!) I realized he was right. And soon after that, I realized Big Al’s feet hurt.

Bill took me to the Westin in Vancouver. The computer and I went up to the room with the help of a bellman, and Bill went off on his appointments. When he came back, I was deep into the rewrite process. I worked through most of the night with the poor man trying to sleep next to me with a pillow over his head to avoid the clacking of the keyboard. (Now that we’re both deaf as posts, the racket probably wouldn’t bother him at all.)

Then the miracle of laptops came into my life. In Bill’s and my first house together, the bedrooms were on the top floor, my computer was in the basement, and the laundry room was on the ground floor off the kitchen. Do you see a problem here? With five people in the house, I needed a way to ride herd on the laundry without running up and down the stairs, so I bought my first laptop–a used Toshiba dual floppy laptop that we bought from a real estate appraiser in Centralia. (He said his customers, mostly farmers, didn’t trust him to do his work for them on a laptop. What he really needed was a pickup truck.)

I’ve been working on laptops ever since. Outside on patios, like today. In the St. Johann Sport Hotel in Austria and the Hotel zur Poste in Bernkastel-Kues in Germany. Those are the two hotels where I did the final rewrite on the second Walker book, Kiss of the Bees.

Over the years I’ve written in cars, in planes, on trains, and on cruise ships. And I’ll be doing it on a cruise ship again this week as we cruise the Norwegian jfords. I’ll be having fun part of the time, but I’ll also be working because the deadline for this book is now actively ticking.

That means that some of Joanna 16 will be written off the coast of Norway which answers another often-asked question, “Do you have to be in Arizona to write a Joanna book or Seattle to write a Beaumont book?” Readers of this blog already know the answer–N-O!!!

Remember that old TV show, Have Gun Will Travel?

You could say the same thing about me. Have computer will travel.

And no, Bella is not going on this trip. She won’t be happy about it, but she’ll be in good hands, doing mole and heron duty while we’re gone.