Sarah's writing journal

I'm just about to change laptops and am frantically saving material from my hard drive, because I'm not as careful as I should be about keeping stuff. But it made me think. When I was looking through my notes for the next novel, The Seduction Committee, I made the decision just to keep the working files. So this means that when I'm famous, dead, or just dead famous etc etc, I will look like even more of a genius with none of the crossings out, wrong turnings, that we like to look at, and preserve in the libraries of universities across America, with the work of writers who actually wrote by hand. I, on the other hand, will seem to have got the writing process right first time. One of my most precious possessions is the hand-written manuscript of a play by Alice Duer Miller - there's something about seeing and holding a piece of paper she's written on, that you just can't replicate from a printed sheet. Lucky anonymous bidder then of the David Beckham letters, even if they concentrate mainly on girls and football. And so - just to stop this completely being a gratuitious excuse to post a photograph of that beautiful back - my writing prompt today will be 'buying David Beckham's tattoo.'