Thank you to whoever entered me in the Best Australian Blogs 2012! The People’s Choice Award is open right now and anyone can go and vote. I promise, it’s MUCH less complicated than voting in the Ditmars! The only tricky bit is that if you want to find me, because my blog title (Stitching Words) starts with S, you have to skip a few pages to get to the O – S one. I didn’t read through every eligible name, but I would love to hear from other people whose blogs are nominated – after all, you can vote for as many as you like, so we might as well cross-signal boost. For instance, my friend & colleague Alisa (some of you MAY have heard of her) over at Champagne and Socks is in the running too. And if you like us equally, you can vote for both of us, instead of having to pick one, which is probably a good thing cos the last thing we need is an interbloggery Galactic Suburbia war.

I’m hoping that being in the competition will help bring a few more readers my way, and give me some practice at non-obnoxious self-promotion! The competition hash tag is #bestblogs2012.

Elizabeth at the Australian Women’s Writing Challenge has listed blogs which are in the running, by people who have been active with #AWW reviews. If you or anyone you know has been likewise active with #aww reviews and are in the Best Australian Blogs 2012 competition, drop her a note and she’ll add you to the list!

Voting closes 9 May 2012 at 5.00 pm. Anyone can vote, including those in international borders – only the entrants have to be Australian!

I promise I won’t mention it too often.

My most popular blog posts of 2011:

Pratchett’s Women: The Boobs, The Bad and the Broomsticks
Tender Morsels: Not Bitchy Enough
Lunatic with Lethal Combat Skills [Xena Rewatch 3.1-3.4]

Blog series kicked off in 2011:

Agathon
DC Reboot Reviews
Friday Links
Pratchett’s Women
Rock the Romanpunk & Matrons of Awesome
Slapdash Blog Tour of Doom
Watching New Who

My personal favourites:

Science Fiction on the Radio
Strong Books Make Strong Girls
Ask Not What Your Library Can Do For You…
Remembering the Brigadier
Old Age and Treachery
“She Vanquished Me,” – Doctor Who: Battlefield
On Awards, At Length
How My Six Year Old Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Doctor Who (thanks to the Ood Cast)
Time to Write
The Social Habits of Forsytes
My Daughter’s Doctors
What Rowling Got Right: Worldbuilding as Plot
This is What Feminist SF Looks Like: Big Finish and Gallifrey
The Story of Cesc
Writing Fantasy: Finding the Words
Slash! Stab! A Lesson in Practical Queening
Wonder Woman’s Daddy Issues
Pratchett’s Women III: Werewolf Glamour & the Sexing of Dwarves
Australian Award-winning Women in SF and Fantasy
Lego For Girls

So we have… eight days to go! I’m getting so excited about this year’s Nano. I have a new book to start FROM SCRATCH (newbooknewbooknewbook) – Fury was a new book, but it came out of Siren Beat, and came with the baggage and negatives of writing a sequel without the benefits.

But this one is newwwwwww and even though I first got the spark about it a year or more ago (possibly two? I think Iz was badgering me to write it for Nano last year) I have not let myself write any of it down.

What I love about new new new new new book is that it’s a challenge in so many interesting ways – it contains stuff I’ve never done before, and a few aspects of it terrify me. But in many ways I think it will make a better follow up to Creature Court than Nancy Napoleon – it’s not the same kind of book in any real sense, but it has a few tonal aspects in common. It can certainly be described as dark fantasy rather than urban fantasy, and I can see it being marketed in the same sort of way.

BUT OMG SO DIFFERENT, HOORAY!

The other nice thing, once I have wrapped my head around the idea that I’m starting a new novel in just over a week, is that I feel like I can start blogging about writing again. There’s something about the middle and second half of a novel where it’s hard to think of anything to talk about – without massively spoilering everyone for a book that isn’t even contracted yet. I mean, do you want to know that Nancy is decapitated in the second last chapter?* No, you do not.

*This doesn’t happen. Unless workshopping it takes the book in a radically different direction…

So I imagine I’ll be talking a lot about writing. This happens when I nano.

Plus, did I mention?

NEW BOOK NEW BOOK NEW BOOK.

If you are Nanoing this year, you can find my profile at tansyrr.

For regular listeners/subscribers to Galactic Suburbia who listen through iTunes, this will make exactly no change at all (thank goodness!) but we’ve recently moved over to Podbean which allows us delicious crunchy stats, and also should make it easier for listeners who prefer to download directly. So check out our new Galactic Suburbia site! Kudos to our producer for spending a ridiculously long amount of time uploading every single episode to the new place and making it comfy for us. Still a few details to be ironed out, but it’s lovely to be there.

Meanwhile, I’ve been beetling around my blog, creating a Guide to the various series of posts I have published or have recently been publishing, because sometimes the tags system doesn’t quite cut it. I may have missed some out, but it’s a good start!

Also, though I feel a little embarrassed doing this again so soon, another feminist icon has been saying awesome things about my book Love & Romanpunk on the internet, and I would be remiss if I did not point you towards the stirring words of L. Timmel Duchamp of the fabulous Aqueduct Press. [and speaking of Aqueduct Press, does this not sound like the most intriguing and fun set of submission guidelines?]

Finally, in case you missed it, I guest posted on my Indie Press journey over at Tehani’s Fablecroft blog.

I’ve always liked the idea of a blog tour, but cringed a little away from the formality of it all. And, you know, despite knowing for nine months or so that this book was coming, I turned out to be completely unready to launch any kind of publicity about it. (cough, this is sounding familiar, she said, remembering the lack of birth announcements for both babies)

At the last minute I decided to do something casual and fun and utterly slapdash. I called out on Twitter and Facebook for anyone with a blog who wanted a guest post from me (they get to pick the topic!), and got back a lovely collection of volunteers. Now, of course, I have a week’s work of writing said posts ahead of me, but I’m having a lot of fun tearing through them all.

Some of them have cookies (or, well, crumblets) from the new book, to tantalise new readers. Hope you enjoy! And while we’re at it, I’d love to hear from anyone who has seen or bought The Shattered City in the wild.

Here are the first few:

“The Long and Short of It,” over at Reading Adventures, who were nice enough to make mine their launch post for Aussie Author Month.

Hoyden About Town asked me to provide a geeky Friday Hoyden for them, and after discovering to my dismay that they had already done one on Nanny Ogg and the Witches of Lancre, I decided on the extremely awesome Jean Marsh

Julia B, who is currently embarking on a goal of writing a million words in two years (omg!) asked me to talk about how I got to where I am, which turned out to be a crazy long post about the ups and downs of my writing career so far.

Also, in case you missed it, (though not technically part of the tour) I posted recently at the Voyager blog about the portrayal of craft in fantasy and my own sewing background, with a sneak peek at a piece of my current work-in-progress, a Creature Court crazy quilt.

Today I spent a very pleasant hour chatting to Helen Merrick (esteemed author of The Secret Feminist Cabal and 50% of the much-missed-and-anticipated-to-return podcast The PanGalactic Interwebs) in an interview-lecture on the topic of author blogging for a creative writing course at Curtin University.

Definitely the most fun lecture of my academic career, and a big wave hello to any Curtin creative writing students who have followed me over here!

I had planned out in my head a discussion about different authors and the choices they make as to content, boundaries, etc. and hadn’t realised until just before the interview that in fact Helen wanted a far more direct approach, the subject being ME. So we had a lovely hour pretty much analysing and dissecting my relationship with my blog, the choices that I make, and my views on social media. It was a delicious, crunchy conversation and I am very sorry that I can’t share it with all of you! Except those of you who are taking creative writing at Curtin University, of course.

It did have the effect of making me look back on my blogging history – I hadn’t really taken in until saying it out loud how much my bloggery is tied to my parenthood. But I remember checking the overview of my LJ history and discovering that I signed up for my journal on the day I brought Raeli home from hospital as a baby. I had spent that last month before she was born on the couch, bonding with my first laptop (it was January and I was very pregnant, it was what I did instead of nesting!) and reading blogs. So I signed up for LJ in my sleep deprived haze, and started actually writing in it a few months later.

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Have been doing the Mama half of Mama Writering all day, with none of the writering. Jemima and I had a reasonably fun morning together as I slowly come to terms with her only having one nap, and that after lunch (sniff sniff to loss of previous productive minutes between 10:30 and 12) though she did rather make up for it by TAKING HER FIRST STEP UNAIDED. And then of course mocked me by failing to repeat the trick for the camera, so that nicely filled in some time. (she did it later to show Daddy but only when I wasn’t looking)

Then it was the haze of sugar-dipped items and bouncy castles that is the school fair, dragging several children around for hours (including some borrowed from other people) and occasionally sitting down with tea and homemade cake because seriously, school fair cake is the best cake. I even did my stint of parent volunteering and made pancakes for 45 minutes! I’m pushing my comfort zone to the limit!

But then as I wended my weary way back to the car, with a bouncy sugared-up five year old dragging her heels because I wouldn’t let her bounce on the bouncy castle again (not for four dollars!) I found that some arsehole had smashed my wing mirror to kingdom come. Either for kicks or because he couldn’t be bothered to slow down on a road with cars parked on both sides. Bah. BAH. I love my car, and this is the second time it has happened to me in less than two years.

But then I came home and found this!

The Copywrite list of top Aussie blogs has always been of interest to me – though I can’t understand a word of his system. I’m just delighted to have scraped into the very very bottom of the list. I think this is a great resource and an interesting way to find out about different writing blogs – we do rather stay in our own corners, so it’s cool to see many spec fic names mixed in with all those literary darlings. Hopefully it will lead to some new discoveries!

Anyway, after my VERY LONG DAY I am totally taking this cookie.

I have been meaning to check all week on what date I actually started this blog because I had some idea that it was a year or so – and hooray, it was in fact a year today! I’m terribly comfy over here at WordPress, though I am also happy to have a foot in LJ and to continue having great conversations in the comments.

This is my 440th post since I moved to the new blog, which is… okay, that’s a LOT, isn’t it? You’d think considering how much time I spend on Twitter, I’d be posting less than once a day.

By this time next year I should have two more novels on the shelves, and have finished the first Nancy Napoleon novel, FURY (I just like writing it in capitals). My girls will be 6 3/4 and 2, respectively. And, quite possibly, I’ll have written another 440 posts…

Here are my Top 20 posts from Year One of Stitching Words:

October – Ten Roman Festivals That Are Weirder Than Halloween
November – Myths of Nanowrimo
Women are Small, Men are Universal
Writing Doesn’t Have to Be Your Job… unless it does
December – Why I Read Women
Lone Princesses and Girly Books
January – Writing While the House is Messy
February – Other People’s Sons and the Gendered Shopping Experience
March – My Top Ten Super-Solo-Unsequelled-Standalone Fantasy Novels
Ruining Young Men’s Lives
April – Because Trilogies Are Awesome
On Reading Bad Books
May – My First Favourite Female Fantasy Heroes
A Question of Canon-Building
June - You Should Read This Right Now, I’ll Wait
July – Blyton Lite Easy Meals ™
On Court Fantasy
10 Greatest TV Characters of All Time
August – How to Read Big Fat Fantasy
September – Relentless Adaptations and Seamonsters and Vampires and a Latte Please

Angela Slatter includes me in her drive-by interview series.

New Power and Majesty reviews at ASiF and Fangtastic Fiction.

The recently relaunched Galaxy Bookshop blog asks me some crunchy questions about books and hosts a guest post from me about the writing of Power and Majesty.

I also wrote a post for the Voyager blog, about how I created the place names for my fantasy city.

One last reminder about the Tansy podcast goodness for this month: I read “Fleshy” for TISF, Tehani Wessely reads my story “Relentless Adaptations” from the upcoming suburban fantasy anthology “Sprawl,” and I chat with Alisa and Alex about boots and many many et ceteras over at Galactic Suburbia Episode 12.

One of the nice things about my work-free (ha) month is the taking of weekends. Now, I’ve always been pretty bad about weekends. Between my various years of studenting, writing, etc. I have come to view weekends as that time when you get things done. Once I became a Mum, it was ‘the time when the other parent is here, so you can get things done.’ It means I’ve ended up with a screwed up kind of sensibility where all time is potential work time…

Last year, I got into a great routine where I discovered that 20,000 words a month is my optimum novel writing pace, and that it allows me weekends. Actual time when I can not achieve things, without guilt! As opposed to failing to do all the things I thought I could do in that “free time” and starting the week out feeling behind and stressed.

Freelancers! Factoring in time off is kind of important!

Of course when things have to be done at a more frenetic pace, like my editing early this year, weekends go out the window… which is fine, as long as it doesn’t last. I am actually learning from my errors!

So this weekend – well, yesterday there was a lot of lying around complaining that I didn’t get a sleep in (another weekend tradition – complaining, that is. Before I had children I used to get sleep ins) and in the afternoon the whole family packed up in the car and went off to a lovely little French cafe I’d never heard of to celebrate M’s birthday. I had made her a handbag which I have entirely failed to photograph (will try to nab her to get a snap this week – it’s so pretty!) and a group of us sat around eating tiny french cakes, drinking highly chocolatey hot chocolates, and passing the baby around on various laps. Raeli got to practice ‘being a lady.’

As a sidenote, I am trying to deal with my hangups about gender stereotypes that whack me between the eyes everytime I caution her to act ‘like a lady.’ Because, you know, it has whole different connotations to when you caution a boy to mind his manners, and I don’t want her to think she has to be some prissy little damsel in white gloves (which, given her druthers, she might actually turn into, heaven help us all). I settled this time for telling her that she didn’t have to be ladylike all the time, but it was a good thing to do in cafes. Possibly I need to work on that one.

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