Guest Post-Writing Compost

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Guest Post-Writing Compost

Her erotica has been published with Xcite Books, Mammoth, Cleis Press, Black Lace, Erotic Review, Ravenous Romance, and Scarlet Magazine.

Please welcome my guest, bestselling author—>

KD Grace

Most of my friends know I'm an avid veg gardener. I've even written a few sexy encounters that take place in veg gardens. Gardening is one of the topics I'm almost as enthusiastic about as I am writing. That's not terribly surprising since the two are so philosophically compatible. So today I'm blogging about writing compost.

My husband and I inherited our first composter from the people who owned our house before us. We were suspicious of it at first and more than a little intimidated by it. It looked like a Rubbermaid Dalek casting a long menacing shadow across our back lawn. We'd heard that if we put egg shells and fruit and veg peels, cardboard and tea and coffee grounds in the top that in a few months, we could open the little door at the bottom and the myriad resident worms would have magically transformed all that garbage into rich luscious soil. Then all we'd have to do was shovel that organic loveliness out into our garden.

I don't think we really believed it at first. Then one day we made the plunge, slid open the door and there it was, all dark and rich and soft and warm, and smelling vaguely of citrus. We filled a couple of planters. We were planning to put in geraniums, but never got around to it. Several weeks later I noticed there were tomato plants coming up in the compost we had excavated. My mother used to call plants that came up where they weren't planted volunteer, and sure enough, we had eight volunteer tomato plants, the result of seed not broken down in our strange compost-making dalek.

Our eight tomatoes yielded up their yummy fruit at the end of the summer, an unexpected, unintended gift from our predecessors. The next year we actually dug a bed and planted corn and beans and squash. After that there was no looking back. Our one lone composter has been joined by two others, and twice a year we open the doors at the bottom and marvel at what an army of invertebrates can make from our kitchen waste.

As my sister and I shoveled bucket after bucketful of rich, loamy soil from our original battered, smudged composter and spread it in anticipation of the veg I'll be planting in May, I thought about how much writing is like composting. There are times when my efforts truly seem inspired. Those are the fabulously heady times all writers live for and hope for, when every word shines the moment we write it down.

I would love it if everything I wrote would come forth fully formed and beautiful like Venus on the Half Shell, but more often than not my words are more like used teabags on an egg shell. More often than not, what I write is kitchen rubbish, the remnants of experiences already spent, the detritus of half-formed ideas that aren't quite what I fantasized when they appeared so perfectly shaped in my imagination. Somehow they've turned to apple cores and coffee grounds by the time I manage to get them into words.

My husband takes his lunch to the office, and he brings home his fruit peels and apple cores because he knows what they will become. He convinced the lady who works at the office canteen to save the coffee grounds for him because he knows what the worms will magic them into in a few months' time. It's true, what we dig out of our composters is just soil. Oh, but it's so rich, so fertile, so completely loaded with potential. My husband knows, as I know, what wonderfully succulent corn and tomatoes and runner beans we'll grow in that rich compost in a few months' time

Writing is no different. On the written page, the coffee grounds and apple cores of my everyday existence, the remnants of half formed thoughts, the grandiose ideas that didn't quite have the magic on paper that they did in my minds' eye will become compost, no matter how much they may seem like rubbish. Nothing can happen until I write those words, no fermentation, no agitation, no digestion, no chemistry.

But once the ideas are words on the written page, the real process begins. I turn them and twist them and break them down and reform them until they become the rich luscious medium of story, until they are just the right consistency to grow organically what my imagination couldn't quite birth into the world in one shining Eureka moment. It takes longer than Venus on the Half Shell, and it involves some hard work and some getting my hands dirty, and a whole lot of patience. But the end result is succulent and full bodied, organic and living. And my finger prints, my dirty mucky finger prints are all over it. It's intimately and deeply my own, seeded in the compost of what I put down in a hurry, raised up in the richness of what I then cultivate with sustained, deliberate, sometimes desperate, effort. The result is achingly slow magic that lives and breathes in ways I could have never brought about, ways I could have never experienced in a less messy, less composty sort of way.

*****

K D Grace was born with a writing obsession. It got worse once she actually learned HOW to write. There's no treatment for it. It's progressive and chronic and quite often interferes with normal, everyday functioning. She might actually be concerned if it wasn't so damned much fun most of the time.

K D's second novel, The Pet Shop, also published by Xcite Books, will be available in October 2011. Her erotic romance novel, The Initiation of Ms Holly, published by Xcite Books, is now available everywhere.

Blurb: Journalist, Rita Holly, never dreamed sex with the mysterious Edward in the dark of a malfunctioning train would lead to a blindfolded, champagne-drenched tango, a spanking by a butch waitress, and an offer of initiation into the exclusive mysteries of The Mount. Desperate to save her threatened job, she agrees, scheming secretly to write an inside exposé on the club that will make her career. But as she delves deeper into the intrigue of The Mount and the lives of its members, she soon discovers that her heart may have other plans.