Tonight, I'm compering an anniversary event A Life In Letters at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. It's a pretty flipping amazing honour, and I've got actual proper actors - Arthur Bostrom and Verity Henry - to be the voices of the letters.
Delving through his letters - kept in a secure archive in Manchester - has been pretty revealing. The life of a writer laid bare: the aspirations, the arguments, the mentoring and the sheer mechanics of it all. All the while being more erudite than I could ever hope to be.
As for me? My writing life at the moment consists solely of these moments:
"Time to write a blog post, oh look Twitter, maybe I'll nip to the newsagent, hey I wrote a thousand words, hello Facebook, what's this in this bin?, sorry I didn't reply to your email, editing editing editing, more Twitter, that's not my porpoise, eek deadline!, probably should put some clothes on, time to write a blog post..."
I don't think Burgess mentions nipping off to the newsagents once in his letters. I've a lot to learn.
