For some reason I have ended up with several days for preparation for leaving for the convention, instead of the usual day-before or even morning-of frenzy. My honey likewise finished up work last Friday, and so has had four days prep time.

Which means of course we have spent the last four days in a constant state of packing!

Not actually packing the whole time, of course, but somewhere between beginning and ending the process. We’re still there!

Amazingly, we seem to have been able to compress clothes, entertainment and other necessities for 2 adults and 2 children into 2 suitcases, 1 handbag, 1 kid’s backpack, 1 iPad bag & 1 nappy bag (spot the carry-on luggage) with possibly one extra tote bag to hold a baby pouch & kids carseat.

That’s a whole lot of stuff.

The good thing about fretting so much about how we were going to manage this trip for oh, most of the last year, is that we seem to have got to the point of leaving all that behind us and just being all wheeeee anticipatory. Which usually I don’t get until we’re in the car on the way to the airport.

Reader, there is nothing better in the world than that feeling of getting on the plane and knowing it’s too late to go back for whatever it is you forgot. As long as that thing isn’t essential medicine or your iPod.

My travel reading: Death Most Definite by Trent Jamieson, The Uncrowned King by Rowena Cory Daniells, the latest Doctor Who Magazine and, should I actually get my hands on the iPad, Diana Comet & Other Improbable Stories.

My travel listening: the latest episodes of Boxcutters, Up For Grabs, and from Big Finish: City of Spires (6th Doctor and Jamie!), Home Truths (Sara Kingdom!) and the last two Tom Baker Hornet’s Nest plays. I also had Jubilee by Robert Shearman but totally listened to that already while packing.

Yes, Melbourne is only a 50 minute flight away and I’ll probably spend most of that wrangling children. What of it?

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee almost there! People are arriving in Melbourne already, and I almost gnawed my hands off with jealousy yesterday as the ROR gang met up without me. This is my first post-Twitter trip, and so far I LIKE IT. It will also be our first trip with the iPad which enables access to gmail, googledocs and tweetdeck. Ahhh living in the future. Isn’t it going to be fabulous, until we run out of fossil fuels?

This is one I’ve heard about a lot, though apart from the basic premise I had somehow manage to get to it without major spoilers. Result! The premise: each year, a boy and a girl from each District are selected by lot to fight to the death in the arena, for the entertainment viewing of the masses. Of twenty four children, only the winner is allowed to live.

Katniss is an extraordinary heroine. At sixteen, she lives in great poverty and is the protector and food-gatherer for her family. When her beloved little sister Prim is called up to the Hunger Games, Katniss does not hesitate to take her place. Joining her is Peeta, the son of the local baker, a boy who once showed kindness to Katniss when she was starving. The two of them go through the pre-preparations in the Capitol, all the while knowing that they will soon have to fight not only the other contestants, but also each other.

If she is going to survive, Katniss has to be ruthless, she has to be smart, and she has to be very careful who she trusts.

The tagline on this edition of the book is ’strategy is everything,’ and it’s this that really lifts the book into being a truly great story. Step by step, we follow Katniss into darkness, through thirst and starvation and the quite brutal reality of what she has to do. The combination of reality television with gladiatorial/deadly combat is hardly a new concept in science fiction – indeed, it was around long before reality television itself was established – and yet this feels fresh and authentic, with a cast of characters who are drawn vividly even when they only make brief appearances in the narrative.

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This is an experimental post, to see for myself how practical it is to blog from the iPad and thus to blog regularly from the convention. I’m surprised at how easy the virtual keyboard is! And the lack of apostrophes on the main keyboard is made up for by a fairly smart – what’s the word, the thing that fills in words for you.

So yes, assuming I get more than five minutes to myself each day and that these five minutes correspond to me getting to the front of the family iPad queue, there will be blogging.

Ooh, I wonder if they’ll let me take it to the Hugos…

Probably not since this is where the bedtime stories live.

I’ve spent a lot of the weekend so far reading the comments from this great blog post by Yarn Harlot, about the double standards inflicted on female vs. male parents, especially when it comes to travelling for work. It took me a little time to realise why I was particularly entranced by this feminist rant out of the many feminist rants I read each week – but of course, I have Aussiecon coming up, at which I will be trying to balance the needs of my family with the needs of my career, with an added bonus guilt portion that comes from the fact that the “needs of my career” also happens to be, you know, awesome fun times.

That, and I’ve been starting to think of the actual practicalities of going to Swancon next year on my own…

Anyway, the post is great but the comments are even better. I am delighted to hear so many women (and some men) being vocal about having “non-traditional” family and work arrangements, about the negotiations that go with balancing domestic and paid and family work, and acknowledging just how hard all this stuff is, even with partners who are pro-feminist and supportive.

Some other links that caught my eye over the last few days include Kate Elliott on Authoral Intent in which she sensibly lays out the role of the reader vs. the role of the writer in fiction, in a post which has sparked off some great recent conversations. I particularly enjoyed Sarah Rees Brennan’s response on Twitter a few days ago, where she laid out the various “stories” people read in her Demon series, depending on their priorities as a reader.

It reminded me very much of a dialogue that went around the blogs earlier in the year, about how the reader’s default vision of who characters are and what they look like can often outweigh not only the author’s intent, but the author’s own words. This is particularly the case where characters are often assumed to be white unless the author beats their non-whiteness over the heads of the readers – but I’m sure there are lots of other examples of this happening!

The “women authors speak out about male privilege in literary reviews” story continues to spread, with Jezebel doing a piece on it. Nicola Griffith weighs in with a post about Books and Girl Cooties, discussing how her own work has been packaged and marketed.

And finally, my mother Jilli made a rare appearance on the blogosphere this week, showing off her garden as part of the World Kitchen Garden Day held in the little town of Cygnet last weekend. Checkout her homemade milestone, a replica of the one that sits outside her home town in Lancashire, only with a lot more miles on the clock.

When I first saw this book described by the author as being the book Jane Austen might have written had she lived in a world with magic, I did think that was a bit much. Obviously I wanted to *read* such a book, but really, comparing yourself to Austen? Isn’t that reaching a tad high, especially for a debut novelist? Also, let’s face it, a lot of authors have jumped on the Austen bandwagon. I’ve been burned by a lot of bad sequels to Pride and Prejudice, and while I never actually got around to trying that novel with added zombies, I did read a page of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and I’m never getting that thirty seconds of my life back!

But then I read this book, and I realised what was going on here.

Shades of Milk and Honey is a novel so immersed in Austen and what for the purposes of this review I shall call Austenalia, that it seems impossible to read it any other way. It verges on parody, though the clever use of language and extreme authenticity of characters keeps it on the right side of that line. Which is not to say that there is not a hint of mockery about Austenian conventions in this book – but it’s the gentle kind of mockery that comes from someone who genuinely loves that author’s work, as opposed to, for example, the clumsy and appallingly offensive Red Dwarf episode written by Robert Llewellyn who had obviously never even watched a costume drama all the way through to the end…

Where was I?

I can’t speak to the reading experience of Shades of Milk and Honey if you are not familiar with Austen – I think it would still be a very enjoyable story, a pleasing combination of magic and historical romance with strong family relationships and much social detail. It fits very nicely into the current fashion for women’s historical fantasy, and while it differs a great deal from Alaya Johnson’s Moonshine and Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate series, I can see it sharing their reading audiences. There is a potential here for mass reading appeal among the non-spec-fic community, as with The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, the Naomi Novik novels about Temeraire, or the admittedly-not-genre The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler, and the book seems packaged to make the most of that potential readership. I hope it finds it!

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Mmmm coffee cake. I have just returned from Raeli’s Book Week parade. She dressed up as Rhapsody from the Fairies which isn’t overly literary (though she has several of their books!) but she came up with the idea herself, based on a trouble-free costume she already had, so who was I to argue? I was also delighted that her obsession with Cats the Musical has gone viral, as her friend Inigo insisted on going as Macavity. Not sure if he had a copy of TS Eliot with him.

The coffee cake came from the cake stall. Mmmm. Also from the Book Fair, I picked up a classic Alice in Wonderland colouring book and Egyptian sticker book for Raeli for our upcoming plane trip, and got myself a biography of Beatrix Potter purely because I adored the cover, plus she was heralded on it as a ‘Victorian genius’ which blew my mind. A female children’s author who drew slightly morbid pretty pictures (seriously, have you ever read Jemima Puddleduck, that book is MESSED UP) heralded as a genius! And a Victorian rebel, too. Had to buy it.

Anyway, getting distracted. On the way back I was listening to the latest Coode Street podcast in the car, and very pleased to get a shout out from some conversations I’ve had lately with Jonathan Strahan. Am totally working for my Feminist Advisory Committee t-shirt.

Once you get past the 10 or so minutes of discussion about what might or might not be happening with Gary’s microphone (SERIOUSLY, guys, learn to use the pause button!) I was interested to hear further discussion of the ongoing conversation they’ve been having about the core or centre of science fiction, and how that may or may not be the same thing.

Personally I really dislike the idea of science fiction having to have a core, mostly because I’m pretty sure the stuff I think should be in it is different to other people’s – I’ll have my own, core, thanks! And Jonathan acknowledged this, referring to a conversation we had when I pointed out that the younger you are, the more off-putting it is to be told (or have it implied) that you basically have to catch up on 60 or 70 (the younger you are the bigger the number gets) years worth of core material, before your opinion is worth something.

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I’ve spent the last several weeks sinking into a slow swamp of rewrites, but I can finally see a glimpse of sunshine, and if you don’t record the good days, somehow they get forgotten faster than anything else.

So today I:

edited seven chapters of Book 2, including three really tricky ones that needed New Writing, and one scene I’ve been planning to write for several months and only just got around to.

while also: shopping for baby food, doing laundry, ridding the kitchen of a scary large pile of washing up, cooking a beef casserole for dinner, baking a batch of cupcakes for Raeli to take for a school fundraiser tomorrow (Children’s Book Week means CAKE)

Partly I want to point out to myself that I can in fact do enough work to justify putting Jem in a full day of daycare a week (though she’ll be back to half days from next week – this was an emergency measure put in to help deal with a sudden extra workload.

And then I get worried that I’ll expect myself to achieve that level of domestic/professional awesomeness all the time, and fall in a heap.

Then I remember all the other things I should have done today – or, more properly, BEFORE today.

Then I tell myself not to be so hard on myself, because I had a good day, and the chances of a day available to work and a GOOD DAY’S WORK actually colliding are pretty rare, actually, and the very fact that I have only had a few full days of daycare in itself piles SO MUCH PRESSURE on that day that the fact that I get anything creative done is in itself a miracle.

So um yes. It was a good day, which is not something I take for granted. And I’m almost done with this book. Then I get a few days of leisure (ha!) to plan the trip to Melbourne, prepare for my panels, and hang out with my girls before I neglect them for a week.

Tomorrow I will take Raeli to school (the one day a week I do the drop off), take baby Jem in later to visit Raeli’s school for the Book Week Parade, take Jem to daycare in the afternoon, spend the next two hours doing a small amount of work such as editing two chapters and possibly posting some dolls, then pick up Raeli and take her to gymnastics.

Heh. Possibly all my days contain awesome achievements, just of different varieties. Thank goodness all my favourite podcasts have new episodes out. It makes the drudge work so very undrudgey. I look forward to housework now!

1.13 Athens City Academy of the Performing Bards
Gabrielle is tempted by a cute boy to enter a storytelling contest in the hopes of fulfilling her dream to attend Bard School. There are hijinks.

Oooh AND we find out how Xena and Gabrielle have been surviving. Xena might not sully herself with money, but Gabrielle earns a few dinars storytelling in a tavern.

Basically this is a clip show, but right from the beginning, the Xena production team (and later, Hercules) embraced the challenges of a clip show, making them more batty and ingenious each time, and I swear spending more money on them than any other episode. This one doesn’t quite reach those heights, but it uses clips from Steve Rees Hercules movies and Kirk Douglas in Spartacus (yes, Spartacus) to illustrate the stories that the boys tell, indispersed with Gabrielle’s own illustrated stories of her life with Xena, and is lightweight but enjoyable. The script cleverly uses bits and pieces from the Hercules episodes that introduced Xena’s character as well. Ultimately though, it’s a clip show, and nowhere near the brilliance that was to come only a season later to justify the format. But let’s move on, shall we…

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This wasn’t going to be a themed link post and then at the last minute I looked at the list of links and – well, yes!

NK Jemesin is interviewed for Locus.
This is only a taste of the full interview which I really enjoyed reading from the paper version of the magazine last week. The last pullquote on this page is particularly good but I liked the expanded version better where she discusses some of the amazing roles women and people of colour have had in history, that are often forgotten about by people reproducing “history” in their fantasy novels. This is a call to arms for better, more diverse fantasy and if you can get hold of the magazine, it’s well worth reading the whole thing. Makes me very excited to read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms which is currently climbing to the top of my To Read pile and waving a bunch of flags at me.

Karen Healey, meanwhile, is guestblogging at The Book Smugglers, a blog with I have to say the best header banner ever! Karen is talking about awesome female characters, and why she prefers that phrase to “strong female characters” and why cheerleaders are particularly excellent. Karen also talks about Teal Sherer, the actress who plays the fabulously evil Venom in The Guild and yes, does use a wheelchair in real life. (but hopefully is less SCARY MEAN than Venom in real life). As if that isn’t enough for a blog post, Karen also recs a whole bunch of cool girl books, some of which I agree with wholeheartedly (The Demon’s Covenant, Moonshine & Princess Ben), some I’ve been meaning to read (Girl Overboard) and many, many, many I have never even heard of but now am piling on to my Buy After Worldcon list.

Also, over on Alas! A Blog which reposted my Joanna Russ review, I was pointed towards this article about women of the Literature genre complaining publicly about the difference in review coverage between male and female authors in the field. I really don’t approve of the title because “all the sad young literary women” sounds awfully weak and disempowering when the article is really about some literary powerhouses such as Jodi Picoult getting vocal on Twitter about some really important issues of gender imbalance. They’re not being sad, they’re being ANGRY.

Over here, Margaret Atwood discusses her latest spec fic novel, “The Year of the Flood” and talks about science fiction, climate change and some other things, generally managing to sound about 10 times smarter than whoever it is interviewing her.

The whole provisional programme for Aussiecon is up here, but it is very much subject to change. I wasn’t available for the two panels I am listed for on Thursday, sadly.

But you will be able to find me here:

Friday 1000 (Room 204)
Galactic Suburbia
Alisa, Alex and Tansy record a “live” episode of their SF discussion
podcast, Galactic Suburbia. On the menu for this episode: regular
segments SF News and What We’ve Been Reading, plus Worldcon gossip and
highlights. Pet Subject: our Favourite Female Heroes of SF/F.
Alisa Krasnostein, Alexandra Pierce, Tansy Rayner Roberts

Friday 1200 (Room 207)
Non-traditional publishing in YA spec fic
A discussion of the opportunities beyond traditional print-based
publishing and the challenges that lie ahead.
Peta Freestone, Kate Eltham (chair),Tansy Rayner Roberts, Patrick
Nielsen Hayden

Friday 1500 [30 mins] (Rm 207)
Reading
Probably from Power & Majesty!

Saturday 1100 (Room 211)
Capes and skirts: The plight of female superheroes
Superman has starred in six feature films. Batman has starred in
seven. Wonder Woman has starred in none. The female superhero has been
a constant presence through the history of American comic books, but
yet has never managed to reach the traction of their male
counterparts. Who are the super heroines who succeed? Which ones fail?
Why can’t theyfind as big an audience, and what needs to be done to change that?
Why haven’t we seen a Wonder Woman movie?
Tansy Rayner Roberts, Karen Healey, Peter V. Brett, Seanan McGuire

Saturday 1700 (Rm 203)
Academic Panel: Fantastic females: reworking feminism in women’s fantasy
Is fantasy the new vanguard of feminist politics in specfic?
Fantasy authors discuss the role of gender issues in their work
Delia Sherman (mod), Catherynne M Valente, Gail Carriger, Alaya Johnson,
Glenda Larke, Tansy Rayner Roberts

Sunday 1200 (Room 204)
The case for a female Doctor
He’s transformed from an old man into a young one, so why not from a
man into a woman? Doctor Who remains one of the most imaginative and
open-ended science fiction programmes ever produced, but can the
format extend to include a female Doctor? What other elements of the
series are necessary? Does he/she have to have a TARDIS? Does there
need to be a companion? Must the series be British? An examination of
how far you can stretch the world’s most stretchable science fiction series.
Tansy Rayner Roberts, Carolina Gomez, Kerrie Dougherty,
Catherynne M. Valente, Paul Cornell

Monday 1300 (Room 213)
The world of YA spec fic reviewing
Those who know will share their experiences of reviewing YA
Speculative Fiction – and might make some suggestions.
Lili Wilkinson, Ian Nichols, Tansy Rayner Roberts,
Megan Burke (chair)