Keziah Hill

Doing a consistent amount of writing so I haven’t been here much. And I’m also trying to cut down my time browsing the internet. There are, however, a lot of interesting blogs to read including Smart Bitches who’ve had a great series of posts and debates about what’s in the head of writers when they write.

I completely identified with what Laura Kinsale posted, experiencing the effect of the internet as often killing my writing. There is so much out there, so many opinions, beliefs, fallacies as well as useful, wise words. But all of those voices clamour in my head and sometimes paralyse me. I’ve vowed to control the amount of time I browse and have managed to cut it down, but not to a level I’m comfortable with.

My good news is that a short story of mine, “Gardening with Grace” will be appearing in the erotic ezine Oysters and Chocolate in July. I send it off months ago and didn’t hear anything so was thinking of sending somewhere else when they contacted me. I’m thrilled. I’ll have a story coming out in August in Cream: The Best of the Erotica Readers and Writers Association (here’s the cover below- isn’t it great?)and my story “Angel” will go into the Treasure Chest at ERWA in July which means it will be there permanently. So writing is ticking along.

I’m going to the Romance Writers of America conference in Atlanta in July this year. I’m not sure I’m a romance writer at the moment, but I’ve booked my ticket and paid for the conference, so off I go. I’ll be part of an Aussie contingent cheering on several local lassies both in the RITA (an award for published authors) and the Golden Heart (an award for unpublished authors).

Anne Gracie, Bronwyn Jameson, Liz Fielding, Marion Lennox and Lillian Darcy are in the RITAs and Christine Diehm and Karen Schwartz are in the Golden Heart.

We’ll scream like mad if they win, particularly if Christine and Karen win. I’ve read some of Karen’s work, although not the couple she’s in the Golden Heart with (yes Karen I was one of your judges in the First Kiss) and she’s a terrific writer. Very funny. She’s just got a contract with Avon, so luckily we’ll all get to read some more of her work.

Good luck to you all!

I’ve been beside myself with busy-ness lately. Paid work is busy, personal life is busy, writing is suffering, although not as badly as I thought it would. I’m plugging away at an odd story about a hooker with a heart of gold. Sounds like a dreadful cliche but she’s in my head so her story needs to be told. And another idea is brewing about sex and taboos. What if in a parallel world a lot of what we think of as sexually illicit (like having sex on the peak hour bus) was not only not illicit but required. Any form of privacy would be seen as a sin.

Lots of ideas spinning around in my head. Must have something to do with being busy.

I bought 100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda as a birthday present for a friend yesterday, but I couldn’t give it up. So I gave him Paris was Yesterday by Janet Flanner and got lost in words for a while.

Sonnet 52 by Pablo Neruda

You sing, and your voice peels the husk
of the day’s grain, your song with the sun and sky,
the pine trees speak with their green tongue:
all the birds of the winter whistle.

The sea fills its cellar with footfalls,
with bells, chains, whimpers,
the tools and the metals jangle,
wheels of the caravan creak.

But I hear only your voice, your voice
soars with the zing and precision of an arrow,
it drops with the gravity of rain,

your voice scatters the highest swords
and returns with its cargo of violets:
it accompanies me through the sky.

Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor for The New Republic, observes:

“Sex is a spiritual obligation. It makes up for the poverty of bourgeois experience. We’re too late for the Spanish Civil War. We missed the landing at Omaha Beach. But still we need to know what we’re capable of. So it is in the realm of private life that we have to risk ourselves, to disclose ourselves, to vindicate ourselves; and the more private, the more illuminating. Our theater of self-discovery is smaller. And in this lucky but shrunken theater, the bedroom looms very large. It is the front line, the foxhole.

The bedroom is where people who live otherwise safe lives can learn how cowardly or courageous they are, what their deepest and most dangerous desires are, whether they can follow the unreason within them to what it, too, can teach. Tolstoy said that modern tragedy should be set in the bedroom.”

Discuss.

I wrote 1,200 words this morning on an erotic story that had become a bit stalled. The key was changing my routine and writing long hand away from my computer. No internet distractions, no going back and editing.

It’s such a relief. Feels like the drought has been broken. I hope so anyway.

Here is a picture of the Jamison Valley with the Three Sisters on the left.

It’s only a few kilometers from where I live. I’m very lucky.

An update on the Spezi imprisonment situation in Italy from Sarah Weinman. I hope he writes a book about it, but then it might get him into more hot water with the Italian authorities …