Cleaning up one of my old Macs today as a hand-me-down, I was sweeping out the web history and came across a story I had bookmarked on Neil Gaiman's blog about his 'Sandman Papers' (the post goes back about 10 years or so) and how he was in something of a quandry about where to 'file' them apart from his attic. Last week, I also posted a picture of Gaiman's library which is very cool - as one would naturally expect. Which got me to thinking. If I can break out as a decent supernatural writer, what the hell have I got to leave behind of interest? I have nothing and I don't appear to work like everybody else. I thought it might be interesting to take a snapshot of it - feel free to leave comments for future discussion. I think that would be pretty cool.

I have at my disposal a MacBook Pro loaded with necessary and unnecessary tools. I have an iPad that substitutes for the Pro when it's needed and I also have an iPhone. Granted, the Pro and the phone are work tools supplied by HQ but they are here and I use them hard. I also have maybe 12 notebooks (not that kind) that vary from the pocket Moleskine to huge blank page art pads - oh, and one pen. A Harley Davidson branded Waterman that I found in an antique shop for £4. There is no rhyme or reason to what I choose to write in. There are parts of books and stories scattered from notebook to notebook, digital post-it notes, Evernote, emails to self and so on. When a notebook gets full or too messy to use anymore, I start a collating process of ripping pages out and typing them into whichever digital 'thing' has the most work done. Only then is it transferred to a place of safety and has the right to be called a 'first-draft'.

As these collations are made, anything on paper, I set fire to in the garden. I'm not even sure why I do this. I think I just like the seeds of my thoughts and stories becoming inanimate smoke and disappearing back into the "whole". The digital scraps get thrown into the trash and deleted. Not quite so dramatic, granted but it all keeps me moving in the right direction. Whatever happens, I will be leaving nothing behind that's for sure - and I'm not sure how I truly feel about that. I would quite like my papers to be filed somewhere important for people to look at in the future.

But a bigger part of me thinks, why? What for? Why do people need to pore over all the things that I threw away? The important thing surely is the story itself - and maybe some cool collectible editions if such a thing ever surfaces.

I don't think I will be changing my habits anytime soon either. I like it this way and since we had that house fire a couple of years back in which Eleanor lost everything that had been saved by her folks up until the time she left school, I'm even more set on this train of thought.

Everybody should be acutely aware of the transience of life.