Who Am I:
I am The Hill and I look just like this:
Or this:
I will be a novelist. Currently I’m a… person who sits in their room all day, writing unpublished stories. The difference between those two is how embarrassed you are at school reunions.
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It’s a The Producers / Eerie,
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I started Hillesque to follow The Efforts in getting published and with writing in general. One day, all this will be fascinating to look back on. I don’t talk about writing all the time though. Just look to The Right and you’ll see a list of Things I Talk About A Lot. You can also read The One-Sentence Reviews of all The Films I’ve ever seen in the Film Thoughts tab above.
The Intention is for The Blog to remain upbeat most of the time, so it is something nice to escape to. This pretty much explains The Drawings. You may be able to tell that I am not an artist…
but I started adding pictures around about here because I thought it would make The Blog more interesting to read for everyone who isn’t me.
Oh, and I really like the word ‘The’ because I believe it is unfairly maligned*, and I enjoy randomly capitalising it in the middle of sentences. My name after all is ‘The Hill’, not ‘Hill, the’.
* I’m not sure ‘malign’ is the word I was looking for, but it is a fun word so I’ve decided to use it anyway.
Oh oh, and this is me on a bus:
If you’d still like to know more about me, then here is
The Life Story:
I spent The Childhood in a very small room, sitting on a brown carpet, reading.
The Three Great Loves as a child were for drawing, acting and writing (and animals—hence The Veganism—but that isn’t relevant to this story).
Trouble is I can’t draw (you may have noticed). The Art Teacher when I joined senior school thought I was a good artist who was slacking off, until The Mother corrected her—actually I was a terrible artist who was trying very hard.
People had always told me I could act, but The College Grades disagreed and the drama school brochures went out the window. I always hated reading scripts and taking direction anyway. I liked to improvise.
But no one ever mentioned The Writing. And I wrote a lot. A lot of complete crap. But still, in a bit of a last minute panic, I went to university and studied writing. And in the first week I learnt this: I was writing a lot of crap. But I also learnt that I had a basic talent that many people don’t. It needed hard work, focus, and to have all the crap wiped off, but I had…
And university was the first time in The Life that anyone noticed me, and praised me for what I could do. I wasn’t sitting on my own in a tiny room on a brown carpet any more. I was somebody.
Then came what I sometimes refer to as ‘The Epiphany’ or ‘Finding The Muse’. It was a moment of sudden and great inspiration. I finally got who I was and what I wanted to write and everything about The Life improved.
And somehow, someway, this happened because of Mel Brooks’ musical The Producers. This is why I always draw The Hill in a Homburg, as a nod to this bizarre turn of fortune.
Maybe it would have happened anyway. Maybe I had reached a turning point in The Life. A sort of emerging from The Chrysalis time. Maybe whatever I did at the start of 2005 would have become a symbol of revelation and change when I looked back.
But as it happens in this timeline, in January 2005, on a whim, an expensive-student-loan-fuelled-whim, I went to see Mel Brooks’ musical The Producers in The West End. I went purely to see Nathan Lane he Nathan Lane
Generally, I’m not a fan of Mel Brooks but something about this show spoke to me. I don’t know what exactly, I guess it just did everything right, somehow, for me, at that exact time.
It’s funny. So funny, I thought I would die. I couldn’t breathe, I was laughing so hard. And The Music is so jubilant and references The Greats. It just put me in a good mood, The Best Mood I had ever been in before. The rest of the year I laughed far more freely than ever before.
Down-and-out Max and cowardly Leo spoke to me on a personal level; didn’t I feel neglected, ignored, but with dreams inside? I knew outwardly I was Leo, and inwardly I was Max. The Words of We Can Do It resonated in The Mind, until I began to believe it. Max’s brazen deviousness spoke to The Inner Child, who had always wanted to be that kind of character.
And somehow expecting to be cheated by being stuck with The Understudy, and being oh so wrong, that too added something to The Experience. When I thought I was cheated, instead I was rewarded, and it meant that greatness can come from people you don’t expect.
It all built up. A good musical can be a magical experience because it’s so unlike anything else we see in normal life and this was some epic magic. I walked out of that theatre a different person. A person with confidence in myself.
I stopped writing crap and wrote what I loved. I let my confidence in my writing pour into my work.
I went back to university and got much better grades and responses to my work. ‘Hillesque’ became a term used in class. I graduated with a 1st Class Honours and I won that year’s prize for creative writing.
And I went out into The World.
And here I am.
P.S. Cory English became the official lead the following year, and I went to see The Show again and got his autograph. It didn’t go exactly according to plan.
