Missing in Action
Only for one day though! On Saturday I went to that most joyous of things, a meet-up with other writers, some old friends, some people whom I’d never met; it was a complete blast. But it wiped me out, so I failed to post yesterday.
In fact my mind has been on a strange issue recently. A friend of ours died suddenly at the age of 46. He left many things undone and many friends behind – and I realised that as a writer, I have a ‘body of work’ that my family may one day have to deal with for me. How many of us ever think about what will happen to our work when we’re gone? Or the burden it may place on our loved ones to sort through all that ‘stuff’ and work out what we would have wished them to do with it.
So I’ve begun to make a few notes in a book that I hope will never be needed, but that should at least help my family sort out where all my stories are and what’s happening to them, if something happens to me. And I discovered that my old college is collecting memoirs from students that deal with their time at college, so I already know where some of my material should go and I hope future social historians will find it useful!
We never think it will happen to us – but don’t we write, in part, to leave something behind? I’ve resolved to leave something other than a mess of papers.
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