having gone away for a night to work on the final piece, and had the delightfully retro experience of reworking pages of handwritten text with only scissors and stickytape technology, I was very glad to get back to the computer...now that the piece is finished I am surprised at how personal it got, given that I started out with the idea of fictional characters based on the people I knew 20 years ago, but was sidetracked by that one letter.

The Radio National Book show last Friday ran a piece about writers' archives: how archive centres keep everything, down to a writer's socks (the last he wore) in one case. I guess it's like life itself: it can be hard to know at the time what will be significant later. I marvel at the memories some writers display when they write their autobiographies, and wonder just how accurate they really are, and how much is bravado: after all, if everyone has a terrible memory for places, facts and names, it's hard to be contradicted...

the piles of paper that accumulate in my study are there for a reason, I guess. I'd just like to be better at editing and interpretation: again like life, it's a problem of too much material rather than too little. which is where word limits and deadlines come in handy. so with submission due tomorrow, I have a bizarre urge to say of this blog: The End.