Update

For the legions reading this blog (hey Luke, did you find it?), at last an update. I finally finished the story that wasn't working back on my 'bad writing day' in July (July! Can't believe it!), and it was just accepted for publication in Meanjin in September next year. Also, my story 'Salt' was just published in New Australian Stories, by Scribe. It didn't, however, get anywhere in the Boroondara Awards. Nothing. Nix. Boo hoo.

In more evidence that mine own worst enemy is mine self, I met up with Louise Swinn of Sleepers fame the other day (hey Lou, did you find it?), and gloomily recited to her the plot outline of my novel-to-be-or-not-to-be-that-is-the-question. She seemed to think that I knew what I was doing and what's more, that it might even sell! (I felt a bit bad about this possibility. If it's likely to sell, doesn't that mean that it's kind of crap? :) ) Well anyway, I left this meeting with a spring in my step. Maybe I really do know what I'm doing! I still feel unready to really get stuck into the writing of it, but it has been congealing in my mind since then...

I'm not giving the game away here, but the book is based on my grandfather Osmar White, who wrote Green Armour, a classic first hand account of the war in New Guinea in 1942. I have about 100,000 words of letters he wrote to my grandmother over the course of WWII, a veritable gold-mine. The difficulties are numerous - not least is the problem of fictionalisation: too much, too little? I can't rewrite Green Armour, his own marvellous account of the experiences that left him scarred, transformed and deepened. But I am starting to see a way forward...

Years ago, before I was a writer, I dreamed he gave me a manuscript to complete. Perhaps it was just about continuing the line of writers, writing on the unfinished family story as it were, but I had the sense there was something he regretted having left unsaid. So I choose to take the dream more literally, to try to finish something he failed to complete. As I have no idea what that is, I can only trust that something will lead me to get it right in the end. Perhaps that sense of an imposed mission is the only thing that will give me the confidence to actually write a damn book.