I’m getting excited about being back in Brooklyn, concentrating on working towards another book. At the moment the book is about women and music, with the piano as its recurring motif. Having been honoured with a New Work grant for this project from the Literature Board of the Australia Council late last year, I’ve been planning a getaway for some dedicated writing time, for some time. I can’t seem to muster the necessary focus in Sydney, although I’ve completed a fair amount of research and have lots of thoughts about possible structure. But an idea is only as good as its implementation, so my main concern is with developing a strong storyline. I’ll be attending a fiction workshop at The Writer’s Studio during the Spring term in the hope that weekly classes will help me with the craft of storytelling, with discipline in a life suddenly free of its usual commitments, and with the professional networking that’s part and parcel of the contemporary world of writing.

Last night Paris-based US expatriate pianist Kirk Lightsey asked his audience at the Sound Lounge when exactly he had last been in Australia. “I don’t know why it’s been so long,” he said. “I LOVE this place!”

Lightsey is currently in Australia on a rare national jazz tour with the wonderful Bernie McGann (tenor saxophone), Brendan Clarke (bass) and Andrew Dickeson (drums). The Australian jazz community hasn’t always been known for its cross-border alliances, so the Artistic Director of the Sydney Improvised Music Association, Peter Rechniewski, must be congratulated on bringing this tour to fruition.

It’s to be expected that such a blended band will stick to the classics; in Lightsey’s case his standards repertoire contains a lot of Bill Evans tunes, but they are always music to my ears. On this occasion I must confess I felt the collective playing got much stronger towards the end of the night, with an extended treatment of Skylark and then a rocking Blue in Green to finish.

I’m not sure exactly how old Lightsey is, but I hope to have half his energy if and when I reach his age. He was up and down at the piano like a kid who’s swallowed too many sweets. Bernie’s undercooked facial expressions are always entertaining; how someone can play an ear-bending solo then shrug off our applause is beyond me. And with an all-too-rare clear line of sight from my seat to the keyboard, I enjoyed watching Lightsey’s fingers flash up and down the new Yamaha. His fingertips almost turn up at times, or so it seems, when he is playing at his most delicate; and then like one of those old Citroens his hands rise higher on the keyboard to power up some unexpected chord voicings or a flight of melodic fancy.

Along with the success of recent tours by Sonny Rollins and by Brad Mehldau and his trio, I am excited to see the resurgence of visits to Australian shores by improvising artists who are the real deal.

Being in-between homes at the moment, one thing I am particularly missing is my broadband internet connection. My laptop has become a pretty prison for all the information it contains, while I must use my hosts’ computer to access webmail using their connection. I could happily live without many of the emails and other notifications I receive, but online is where and how I do my work, so being connected is essential.

How much more global Sydney would be as a city if it had free wireless internet access in its central business district. If I can go into any cafe in my Brooklyn neighbourhood and instantly connect to the internet, but here I need to search Google just to find an out-of-date list of Sydney cafes with wireless access (for which I must pay, by the way), then this city is kidding itself about its sophistication.

I am sitting on a fold-out chair in front of a small rattan chest of drawers that’s doubling as my writing desk, on which my workhorse laptop wobbles. This is what happens when you denude your home of six years of its contents, put almost all of it into storage, and take yet another leap into the Great Unknown. After having lived, loved, lost and survived in this house - and let’s face it, having written an entire book about the process – I am moving on. It’s taken me years to reach this point, yet despite some tears yesterday at the sight of this beautiful shell suddenly empty, I am feeling rather sanguine at the change. After all the publicity for my book last year, I caught a horrible flu and suddenly realised I would eventually turn into Miss Havisham if I continued living under this roof, no matter how much “love and renovation” I had put into all it contained. Visions of dusty lace and darkened candlelit rooms, while melodramatic, swam in front of my eyes and prompted some thinking that led to making this irrevocable change.

The garden was eerily quiet of birds as my mother and I tidied up; the planes even stayed away, mocking my exasperation with them after so many six a.m. wake-up roars overhead.

Cover concepts for the paperback edition of The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement are underway for its release in the second half of 2009. Instead of a house, which so elegantly graced the hardback edition, the paper edition will feature a woman. Today, cleaning the empty house, this change of emphasis struck me as perfectly apt.

That Australian writer Harry Nicolaides is once again a free man is thanks in part to the efforts of many people he will never meet. Influential but largely invisible behind the work of his lawyer Mark Dean, his family in Melbourne, and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, were a band of volunteer letter-writers armed with nothing more than the tools of their trade and a passionate belief in freedom of expression. Since Nicolaides’ arrest in August 2008, friends and members of the Melbourne and Sydney chapters of International PEN wrote many letters to Stephen Smith’s department protesting Nicolaides’ arrest, his conviction of lese majeste (defaming or insulting the Thai King, Queen or the heir-apparent) and his imprisonment. Consistently we called for his unconditional release until soon after his sentencing, when Nicolaides’ family instructed us to lobby instead for a royal pardon. There was precedent for a royal pardon for a foreign national, but none for the overturning of a conviction of lese majeste. The Thai King granted the pardon, and Nicolaides flew home to Melbourne to embrace his mother, who recently suffered a severe stroke resulting in a sadly ironic loss of speech.

While we welcome and celebrate Harry Nicolaides’ freedom, the fact remains that it is only because Nicolaides is an Australian citizen that his conviction made headlines in this country.

This sorry episode is a timely reminder of the precarious nature of free speech, and of our obligation as citizens who enjoy its privileges to protest its absence elsewhere. From reading Australian newspapers you would hardly believe it, but currently there are more than 600 writers – journalists, bloggers, poets, and novelists – suffering imprisonment, harassment and detention around the world for writing an opinion or report of which their respective government disapproves.

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