erika, remind yourself that J.D. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book while on welfare.

Slap me down if I'm being sappy; I just cling to examples of people like me who succeeded. (e.g. Harriet Doerr, whose first novel, Stones for Ibarra, was published when she was 80.)

Yes, she is "as a god" to me at the moment.

Betsy, no slap, but more stories like that would be encouraging. I'd heard that about Rowling but forgotten.

Jeanne Ray was 60 when she wrote Romeo and Julie, a delightful novel about two middle-aged florists long separated by family hatred. Part of the reason she wrote it was that she was tired of not seeing people her own age in books.

Sorry to barge in, but Betsy is playing my favourite game; I love collecting these kinds of writers' stories too.

Mary Wesley published her first book at 70. "I have no patience with people who grow old at 60 just because they are entitled to a bus pass," she said once. "Sixty should be the time to start something new, not put your feet up."

Mary Lawson's book Crow Lake just won the Canadian First Novel Award. It was published when she was 55.

A writer writes, period.

Publishing age is not a bar to a great book; why should it be? The longer you live, the more stories you have to tell.

Yeah, I know; it's just that at this point in my life I find the stories of authors who plugged away at it, usually part-time, for decades both comforting and inspiring.

Especially on days like today, when my work consists of massaging and collating multiple press releases into somewhat-readable form, and I can feel any stray bits of creativity I have left leaking out my ears (along with the grey matter).

Oh, I think the later in life writers are kickass. I also tend to think that the books I'll write at 60 (assuming I make it that far) are going to be far more amazing than anything I've had to say to date.

But I'm not the ideal person for this discussion, I think. I wrote my first three and a half books while running computer operations for a two-city banking regulatory law firm. I dealty by hiring a secretary whose mother is a famous poet, so who knew what I was about, and I got a lot done.

Without that, I'd have got a lot less written, I guess.

I'm having one of Those Moments.

"Matty Groves" is, realistically, a few weeks away from being finished. It's at nearly 55,000 words, and I'm charging down the straightaway to the big finish and epilogue, which are the easy parts for me to write. In the first two, I did the Big Bang Exorcism Concerts, all 13 or so pages, in one gulp each.

For some reason, I'm finding the feeling about finishing "Matty" very odd. It isn't that my house will be untenanted; on the contrary, I can then ask my betas and my agent to look at the entire thing instead of sections, and while I'm waiting for input, I can research UXB units in London after WWII and also do a little refreshing of my memory on the 15th century, both for the fourth book ("Cruel Sister"). Also, I can go slamming fulltime into "The Eden Tree", which I want to concentrate on.

So I don't know why I'm feeling so odd about being close to the end on this one.

But I am.

"Matty Groves" is, realistically, a few weeks away from being finished. It's at nearly 55,000 words, and I'm charging down the straightaway to the big finish and epilogue, which are the easy parts for me to write.

Yay, you! I checked for the first time last night, and Nihilist Chic is currently at 35,000 words or so. It's longer than I thought it was. Which is odd. The end's all plotted, except that I just made a major change that means I have to rework everything, and I've scrapped working linearly for awhile, to go back and write some secondary character stuff.