Not writing till after I've seen the display at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. And so I missed the date. It's tomorrow, and I didn't write yesterday because I waited to report on the display at the Schlesinger. It's called What They Wrote, What They Saved: The Personal Civil War (SORRY, I can't get out of the italics now) - a fascinating collection of letters, photographs and journals of the women and families in the North concerned about and involved with the Civil War.

The handwriting is exquisite, and you can see where the writer dipped the pen to refresh the ink supply, with the exception of one young man whose messy handwriting revealed that he was probably suffering from what we would recognize today as PTSS. (Are those the right initials to use for Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome?) There is one whole display case devoted to the communications of the Beecher-Stowe family, and one of the accompanying notes refers to the possibly mythical report of the meeting of Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The president is supposed to have greeted the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" with the remark:

"So you're the little lady who inspired a war."

I've never read the book that apparently was an international best-seller and hugely influential. I am Canadian, of course, and therefore not personally or emotionally involved with this major American historical event, but I have always been fascinated with women's diaries, letters and journals and with their reactions to circumstances in their lives that were affected by public events. Their personal documents give us insights not otherwise gained. I remember when I was working on my play about Alice James, I was allowed in to the Houghton Library and granted the viewing (and handling) of Alice's letters to her brother, Henry, and Henry's letters to her. I wrote that the ink on the letters was blood-warm. I was reminded of that as I read the material in the Schlesinger display. It makes history so personal.

Oh, I hope people keep on writing letters and diaries!

I mean, where does my book leave off and my blog begin, or maybe where does my blog leave off and my book begin? I'm spending a lot of time with the book but the blog comes up once a day and I'm seamless. Sort of.

I'm trying to keep me separate and not steal my own thunder, but it's hard. I'm me, after all, and I can only spread myself so thin. I think I finished the book (again) today, that is, the rewrite of the first draft. The danger with rewrites is that if you use material from the first or later drafts as you go along, you are in dreadful danger of repeating yourself and not noticing. It happened in only one of my books, that I am aware of. By the time you, and your editor, and your copy editor, have read it so many times, you can't remember where you last read some of the deathless prose, so that the same paragraph may show up twice in the same draft. Horrors!

So you can see the dangers inherent in writing a daily blog. More repetition, for one thing. But also coming up with an idea in the blog that I decide I'd like to use for the book. I read something and I think, "Gee, I wish I'd said that," and I have. Is it okay to plagiarize one's own writing?

I hope so.