'I am being diminished, whittled away piece by piece, great chunks of my past detaching themselves like melting icebergs.'

News of Ruth Rendell's death on Saturday morning (UK time) did not come as a surprise after her stroke in January, but it hit me very hard. I have read her novels and short stories for half my life and drawn the kind of inspiration from them that no other author ever offered me. Her insights into damaged psyches and fractured, unhealthy relationships encouraged my fictional obsession with same and explains the frequent presence of both in my clumsy attempts at writing. I still have Val McDermid, Minette Walters and countless other favourites, but a world with no more Inspector Wexford mysteries, stand alone psychological thrillers or labyrinthine Barbara Vine novels where a secret past casts long shadows over the present will take some getting used to.

In 1997, as an angry young man of twenty, I devoted half of a misbegotten Honours thesis to Rendell's work. What a wasted opportunity that turned out to be. No-one explained to me that I needed to include some elements of the theoretical studies I mocked so relentlessly. If they had, and if my supervisor had been any use at all, I might have dug deeper into the minds of Freud, Jung and Adler and traced their influence on the young Rendell. A psychoanalytical interperation, even from an amateur, would have been a far worthier response than the glorified book review I eventually submitted.

My fondness for Rendell's writing endured in spite of this, and each new or hitherto unread novel or volume of short stories soon found a place in my collection. They became family affairs too. Between stretches in hospital when she could do little else but sit in her armchair and read, Nanna would devour the books at a rate of knots, often guessing whodunit within a few chapters. Later on Mum asked me for a few recommendations to read in bed and, in those rare moments when she could tear herself away from the radio, we discussed my choices over dinner. There was never any shortage of Rendell material around the house. Most birthdays and Christmases brought with them either a new release or a reprint of an old favourite I'd borrowed from the library but never owned.

All of those books, and many more, are now piled on the floor of what was once my bedroom. I cleared out my bookshelf so it could be moved into my present sleeping quarters. Sometime between now and doomsday, I need to decide which ones to keep, which to sell and which to donate to St Philip's next Autumn Fair or book sale. Parting with Ruth Rendell's near complete body of work won't be easy because each story has a memory attached to it, even if the twists and turns of the plots have long since blurred into each other.

The most treasured of all those memories is the author's signature inside the front cover of The Rottweiler.  I went to see Ruth Rendell at Adelaide Writers' Week in 2004, and it was a privilege to be in the presence of one of my most important role models if only for a few minutes. She was quite reserved and didn't talk to readers individually in the signing queue, but getting her autograph was and is a very big deal.

I have smaller but no less significant memories of my other Rendell books. Inscriptions like 'To Stephen, Love Mum 22/9___' or 'To Stephen, Love From Nanna 25/12___' carry more weight today than they did at the time, and that's not the sort of thing you can transfer over when you get all the ebooks and put them on your iPad.

I'd like to finish on a lighter note in the words of Baroness Rendell of Babergh herself, who once said she overcame her fear of getting police procedure wrong 'largely by leaving it out'. I think there's a good lesson in that for all of us who sweat blood over the finer details of who does what at a crime scene.

      
  

'Can you help me occupy my brain?'

I've been doing some pretty intensive physio sessions over the last few weeks, with the aim of building confidence and improving my wheelchair skills. Today I completed a pivot transfer from wheelchair to standing position to standard chair in twenty seconds. I then wheeled around to the other side of the parallel bars and tried the same thing from a different angle. I couldn't do it without help, a few false starts and much bad language.

For the rest of today I have inwardly fumed about my failure instead of being happy with my success. Like a stone thrown into a river, that thought pattern created ripples and I came to understand I've been doing this my whole life. Instead of feeling satisfied and acknowledging opportunities for improvement, I think of things only as I believe they should be and punish myself long and hard because I think I've fallen short. I can't begin a piece of writing just to see where it goes and enjoy the ride. I hone and polish every word in search of some impossible and unknowable ideal. In doing that I choke the life and soul out of it, and rob myself of any joy that may come from the act of creating.

Rather than reflect on the last eighteen months and acknowledge all the progress I've made since my mother died, I dwell on the reason why I had to make those changes and feel miserable and alone. I would like to think of myself as a phoenix rising from the ashes of a life altering tragedy, but that's hard to do after nearly forty years of looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I can do things today that would have seemed impossible to me a year ago, but I rarely celebrate or give thanks for that because I'm too busy obsessing over what I haven't yet done, or believe I can't.

To flog a not quite dead but not at all well horse, I'm convinced that if I ever let anyone outside my family get close enough to love me, I'd spend so much time taking the relationship apart to see how it works that I wouldn't be able to enjoy it for what it was or give my all in return for the affection offered. My old buddy Socrates is reputed to have said 'the unexamined life is not worth living', and I'm beginning to realise the same could be said of a life that's both overexamined and underappreciated.

Because it's human nature to categorise and to label, I've given my tendency to dissect and examine every little thing a name. I call it 'writer brain', and its most obvious symptom is a chronic inability to live in the moment. Seldom can I relax and let myself take pleasure, or any emotion, in anything because there's always a corner of my mind that demands ''what am I thinking right now? What am I feeling? How would I describe this? What would character X, Y or Z do in the same situation? Why?' On and on it goes. Questions without number and self-criticism without end.

I need, as the prayer says, serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and wisdom enough to know the difference. I would also benefit from talking with someone in a professional capacity about this, but the only person I ever trusted enough to do that has moved on and I no longer know where to reach her. A fellow Metallica fan, she once told me 'no matter how bad you think what you've written is, it will always be better than St Anger.' It's hard to argue with that.