Douglas Rees's Blog, page 3

WHO Wrote Shakespeare?

There's a new movie coming out called Anonymous which will explain to all of us how Shakespeare's plays were really written by Edward De Vere. Come on, guys. Edward De Vere was cute as a button and he could write passable sonnets, and — wait for it — he did know Shakespeare. But that basically is all the evidence there is. Everything else is willful misreadings of things in the plays to find secret clues where De Vere is supposedly announcing his authorship. The Da Vinci Code for theatre buffs.

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?

Maybe the Past Has a Future

I write mostly light paranormal these days. Which is fine. But what I like most is writing historical fiction. For which there is, unfortunately, no market in YA right now. The editors are persuaded, and they may well be right, that today's kids are not interested in stories about the past. At least not enough to buy them in large quantities such as publishers love to sell.

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.