If you find my disappearances annoying how do you think I feel?

Here’s one of the reasons for my most recent defection: "Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman’s Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany" by Marie Jalowicz Simon, translated by Anthea Bell, foreword and afterword by Hermann Simon (her son). My paperback edition was just published in May, 2016, a gift from my partner on the screenplay we’re writing. Have I told you that the true story we’re working on takes place in Nazi Berlin in 1941-42? So the book is useful to me for what i can learn, but it’s also a knockout.

In 1942 20-year-old Marie Jalowicz, a Jewish Berliner, resolved to stay out of the concentration camps. She took off her yellow star, took on an assumed identity and went to ground - that is, she lived in the city avoiding capture until the end of the war. No papers, no no money, no food, no coupons, no bed. She moved from place to place dependent on the generosity and silence of people/strangers who supported her. No one informed on her, though there were times when she was in real danger, and in fact, suffered a great deal. Bu she didn't die.

She never told her story until shortly before her death in 1998, and then her son taped her account, told with amazing chronological accuracy and a memory for names, events and places, checked by her son and put together by him and the writer Irene Stratenwerth. It’s harrowing and moving and inspirational. Perhaps you will understand why I neglected my blog.

And then I feel guilty. Where is it written that I should feel guilty about not writing my own blog?

I’m not going there.

I can’t complain. It’s not that I receive that many emails. But still….

Sure, I like to see what Lands End and IKEA and Folio Books are offering, plus a couple of shoe stores, and Tilleys, and LCBO Gourmet offers, and my PC Plus offers for the week, and Canadian Stage and the National Theatre and my daily NYT online , plus a few other current pitches, soon to drop away (?), oh, and Rexall, VIA Rail, Porter Airlines and Air Canada, and Rogers and Go Daddy..STOP. I mean, it’s not like a friend who is doing heavy-duty research and reaching all kinds of contacts who reach back to her, or another who is taking a course online and who gets assignments and corrections and comments from cohorts, or another who is ghost-writing a book and has to consult all the references. But I do receive Nicolas Kristoff’s newsletters (I like him), and the NYT’s Cooking for the Week, and the weekly book review. i signed on for a renewal of the TLS but i haven’t had time to read it. And I’m getting lengthy bulletins from Faerie Magazine - again, no time. I’m on Fitbit and don’t know how to respond to everything it asks of me. And then there are the surveys. I think they’re getting worse and more frequent. I am so grateful when I am told I don’t qualify for their survey - like, I’m too old or I don’t have a car, or I have almost no electronic companions. (You’re one of the few.)

So - I am faithful and diligent. I check my email every day and I respond and delete and file and download and print out. Ay there’s the rub. After the print out, what? I have piles of paper on either side of me and piling up on an adjacent table and a three-tier file holder, and I hate to mention the print outs of my current works in progress that require notes or rewrites or even filing - gone but not forgotten and still nagging at my conscience. I also keep copies of my blog, coming up three years now. Oh dear.

In another part of the forest, that is, not in my office but on another desk in another room (I call it my Paper Desk), lie other piles of paper: bills and receipts and clippings and tear sheets of stuff I want to keep or send or file, and notes and thank-yous I must write, and birthday cards (thank heaven for Jacquie Lawson!) to send (some people don’t have email), plus ageing To-Do and Follow-Up folders with noodges and ideas….I can’t go on.

When computers first became available to the general public, someone predicted that we would soon be living in a paperless society. I wish.

No, I don’t.