Keziah Hill

I worked out how to do a slide show! Cool!

Winter Solstice means the Winter Magic Festival. The main street of Katoomba fills up with witches, warlocks, goblins and elfs to celebrate a great pagan tradition.

The belly dancers were so brave. It was pretty cold.

A bit of frivolity.

Who Should Paint You: Andy Warhol

You’ve got an interested edge that would be reflected in any portrait You don’t need any fancy paint techniques to stand out from the crowd!

Mel has a meme of the 100 Best Films as judged by the American Film Institute (I assume they mean the 100 best American films). In bold are the ones I’ve seen, in italics are my top ten of this list and the * around some are ones I didn’t think much of. As usual I can’t go past Hitchcock. What about you? What are your favourites?
1. Citizen Kane
2. The Godfather
3. Casablanca
4. Raging Bull
5. Singin’ in the Rain
6. Gone with the Wind
7. Lawrence of Arabia
8. Schindler’s List
9. Vertigo
10. The Wizard of Oz
11. City Lights
12. The Searchers
13. Star Wars
14. Psycho
15. 2001: A Space Odyssey
16. Sunset Boulevard
17. The Graduate
18. The General
19. On the Waterfront
20. It’s a Wonderful Life
21. Chinatown
22. Some Like It Hot
23. The Grapes of Wrath
24. E.T.
25. To Kill a Mockingbird
26. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
27. High Noon
28. All About Eve
29. Double Indemnity
30. Apocalypse Now
31.The Maltese Falcon
32. The Godfather Part II
33. One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest
34. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
35. Annie Hall
36. *The Bridge on the River Kwai*
37. The Best Years of Our Lives
38. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
39. Dr. Strangelove
40. The Sound of Music
41. King Kong
42. Bonnie and Clyde
43. Midnight Cowboy
44. The Philadelphia Story
45. *Shane*
46. It Happened One Night
47. A Streetcar Named Desire
48. Rear Window
49. Intolerance
50. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
51. West Side Story
52. Taxi Driver
53. The Deer Hunter
54. *M*A*S*H*
55. North by Northwest
56. Jaws
57. Rocky
58. The Gold Rush
59. Nashville
60. Duck Soup
61. Sullivan’s Travels
62. American Graffiti
63. Cabaret
64. Network
65. The African Queen
66. Raiders of the Lost Ark
67. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
68. Unforgiven
69. Tootsie
70. A Clockwork Orange
71. Saving Private Ryan
72. The Shawshank Redemption
73. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
74. The Silence of the Lambs
75. In the Heat of the Night
76. Forrest Gump
77. All the President’s Men
78. Modern Times
79. The Wild Bunch
80. The Apartment
81. Spartacus
82. Sunrise
83. *Titanic*
84. Easy Rider
85. A Night at the Opera
86. Platoon
87. 12 Angry Men
88. Bringing Up Baby
89. The Sixth Sense
90. Swing Time
91. Sophie’s Choice
92. Goodfellas
93. The French Connection
94. Pulp Fiction
95. The Last Picture Show
96. *Do the Right Thing*
97. Blade Runner
98. Yankee Doodle Dandy
99. Toy Story
100. Ben-Hur

Here’s a picture of my garden at dawn this morning. Why do we get so excited about snow? It only happens a couple of times a year and in the past couple of years hasn’t happened at all. The Blue Mountains used to experience a lot more snow, but global warming has really effected it. Australians on the whole go crazy about snow and don’t know what to do with it. Northern hemisphere friends sneer along the lines of “You think this is snow?” and can’t understand why everyone keeps their kids home from school.

Everyone starts building snowmen which lasts for all of an hour. As I’m typing the sun is out and it’s a glorious day. Sydney, which is about an hour and a half east of me, was supposed to get cyclonic winds and rain last night but it wasn’t too bad. There might be more to come. This feels like a real winter.

Reading Karen Robards, Harlen Corben and have started a new wip. Suspense has always been my favourite so I’m going to write what I love.

I’ve had a four day weekend which has been great. Not so the poor people living on the Central Coast of NSW where so far 9 people have died in floods.

Australia has always been a land of terrible contrasts. If we’re not in drought (which we have been for years) we’re in flood. I hadn’t experienced rain like that for a very long time. Where I lived doesn’t flood but the rain was relentless. The only thing to do was stay in doors in front of the fire and read or write. I did both.

The wip I’m working on is starting to burrow further into my mind. I like this stage, when a piece of work is always at the periphery of your thoughts and little scenes start bubbling up. Unfortunately, I seem to always get my best thoughts in that half awake stage in bed. I found myself at three in the morning scribbling a couple of nights ago, trying not to lose some insight I had into my heroines actions.

I like that sense of obsession. Here is a picture of a banksia in my garden. It’s one of the only plants in flower at the moment.

I think I’ve finally worked out how I want this website to look. Wordpress isn’t exactly user friendly but I’ve worked out bits and pieces. Now back to writing!

I’ve been doing a lot more reading of inspirational work, like Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love and Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run with the Wolves. My writing practice was suffering greatly from feeling like I had to produce, produce, produce and stay up-to-date with marketing and promotion.

Since I have no idea of how to effectively promote, I went into a tailspin because I really hate doing it. The pleasure of writing and how that makes my sense of beauty and creativity happy got lost. So reading the books above and work from other writers like Natalie Goldberg brings me back to a more grounded place where I remember the writing is the most important thing. Not that promotion isn’t important, but I need a plan, not a sense of panic.

But I feel like I’m back to some equilibrium and submitted a novella I’ve been working on for a while. And there are other projects in development I’m more positive about.