Dear diary, keeper of secrets and innermost thoughts

Before blogs, there were diaries! Paper books with blank pages inside for you to fill with all your secret thoughts. Imagine having all that freedom to write and fill those pages with things that you want to make note of. To collect memories so they’re never forgotten, even as time steals our recollections? That is so exciting to me! (Maybe I’m a nerd, but hey, I used to read the dictionary in primary school, so you’d expect me to get excited over something like this!)

Did you know there is an International Diary Day? Neither did I until I heard our local ABC announcer talk about it on the Early Morning Breakfast Show yesterday. I googled and found that it’s to celebrate journal writing. The history of Dear Diary is really interesting.

It’s said to have started in Japan, around the 10th century AD and were called ‘Pillow Books’. This is because the ladies kept them under their pillows for safekeeping and for a bit of privacy! How cool is that?

Diaries got their current English name from the word “day”, which, in Latin, means “dies”. I guess that’s why writing in a diary is encouraged, so we follow an event to the day we die.

I’ve always kept a diary. Ranging from living diaries when I was travelling with mum and dad on holidays. These diaries had exquisite text like: ‘we just passed a windmill’… (That’s enough to signal to any clever observer that the writer is going on to have a successful career in writing novels, isn’t it?!)

As I grew older, I found diaries were great for getting things out of my mind. If I was upset about something, I could write it down. Once I did that, the emotion left me. So often I’ve written letters inside these pages. I’ve told people what I really think of them or what is really going on. (If you’re reading this and think I could have written a letter to you, I probably have!) I’d love to send them, but I never will. What it’s done is get what is upsetting me, or making me angry, or happy, out of my body so I can move on to something else.

The pages hold my real life - god, I could upset and ruin some lives with the things I’ve recorded! Actual conversations, happenings. Sometimes even details of the most personal bedroom tales! And I’ve kept every diary, from when I first started. I guess I’ll get rid of them before I die, but at the moment they’re a good recollection of daily life. Of how far I’ve come since I first left school. Of achievements and the lowest of lows. Of love and devastation and every emotion in between.

It’s one of the reasons I really like writing books. Because I’m a crime writer, I can kill people in those books. And I’ve killed many a real person. Then smiled sweetly as I handed said dead person the book I’ve killed them in and said: ‘I really think you’ll enjoy this book!’

Oh, the power of the pen!

I just want to let you all know that I’m writing a blog once a week. Hopefully it will be published on a Monday, but if not, as soon as I can afterwards. So, if you want some funny insights into my writing, or just to read what’s going on, don’t forget to pop back every Monday afternoon to see what’s happening here!