Emmae Gibson 2009

4th February 2009. Snowed in this year, as it happened. In Appin, where it doesn't usually. Happen, I mean, snow, I mean. Which made it a doubly happy happening, snowing and 4quating, all wrappin'd up; left it in the rack of books and birthday cards in the village shop:

People write books for children and other people write about the books written for children but I don't think it's for the children at all. I think that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it, getting the children to agree that it is indeed a world. Each new generation of children has to be told: `This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.' Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: `This is not a world, this is nothing, there's no way to live at all.'

from Turtle Diary, ch 24.

Chosen with certain grown-up children in mind.

Struggled home and sent yellow cosmic paper to several members of a writers' group, quoting this other, familiar, wonderful struggle:

Right, said Kleinzeit. Enough. He opened the door of the yellow paper's cage, and it sprang upon him. Over and over they rolled together, bloody and roaring. Doesn't matter what the title is to start with, he said, anything will do. HERO, I'll call it. Chapter I. He wrote the first line while the yellow paper clawed his guts, the pain was blinding. It'll kill me, said Kleinzeit, there's no surviving this. He wrote the second line, the third, completed the first paragraph. The roaring and the blood stopped, the yellow paper rubbed purring against his leg, the first paragraph danced and sang, leaped and played on the green grass in the dawn.

from Kleinzeit, Picador edition 1976 p.108.