It’s been an odd sort of a day – stress and phone calls, mostly. Every time the phone rang, I lost a little bit more of my equilibrium. My iPod came to the rescue, and I had Radio Free Skaro podcasts running for most of the day. I finished a quilt top I’ve been working on for some time, and picked up a different quilting project that’s been abandoned for months, without even hesitating. Yay for podcasts.

I’ve been nibbling away at Cabaret of Monsters in Scrivener – labelling and rereading scenes, figuring out notes to myself about what editing has to be done, but not really getting any momentum up and running. I get like this, close to deadlines – it’s like I have to create extra pressure by not working on it until the time left to do it shrinks to the point that I can’t ignore it any more.

And then I have to work like I’m on fire.

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A fun, chaotic weekend most definitely ensued.  flinthart arrived yesterday afternoon, bearing children and returning  girliejones to us in one piece. There followed a rollicking house party involving champagne, Seabreezes, limoncello, baked potatoes and merry, merry times. Raeli bonded tightly with the Mau Mau, and the other two junior Flintharts inhaled a whole season of Justice League Universe along with a treeful of plums, while the adults made up for a year’s worth of missing conversations. We also got to witness GJ updating her Facebook status to officially announce her relationship, which all felt very post-modern. Later, as the tweets became rather more drunken and raucous (and um not actually making sense) I stepped up as the most sober adult in the room and confiscated a laptop and an iPhone to prevent further ramblings. All were grateful in the morning…

Dirk blogs about the weekend here and Girlie Jones blogs about it here in the last of her blog series about the entire trip.

Raeli and the Mau Mau experience their first sleepover, not only together but at all, and I’m sure it’s the first of many for them both. Naturally they dissolved into near-hysteria at the prospect and spent hours giggling maniacally before finally losing consciousness. (I thereby won, my prediction that ‘they have to lose consciousness eventually’ beating out Flinthart’s prediction that ‘you know, they may not’)

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Confession time: I’ve been avoiding my novel. I finished it in a haze of sleeplessness, before the end of October. Then there was NaNo November, in which I very sensibly wrote the first 50,000 words of Book 3, including scads of backstory.

And then, you know, December hit and I fell over in a heap. When I recovered, peeping over the precipice, it was to catch up on Deepings Dolls work, neglected for over a month, to deal with Christmas and birthday responsibilities (Raeli’s birthday is in late Jan but during school holidays which meant invites had to out NOW) and to return to that short story I promised  girliejones I would submit to Sprawl. (I have an awesome set up, characters and theme, but they keep trying to wind the story up too soon, too soon!)

But I have a deadline looming on the horizon. The 19 February, to be exact. And what I don’t want to do is my usual trick of delaying the beginning of a project in order to create heated momentum and frantic pressure at the other end. I just don’t think I’m up to it. I have to get started now, before Christmas, or risk losing all of December.

I took steps today by using my NaNo discount to purchase Scrivener for peanuts. (heh well 23 shiny gold peanuts) Cabaret of Monsters is a big, sprawling novel with several subplots and crisscrossing narrative threads, and the first draft may be finished and largely unbroken, but there are some massive cracks spreading across the manuscript, from edge to edge.

So far I’ve just gone through the comprehensive tutorial of Scrivener and it looks like exactly what I need. I’ll update on how it works for me in the future, since I assume at least some of you have Macs and may be interested. I’ve never been a fancy software person, but the first book in this trilogy required 8 separate excel worksheets and a Zulupad glossary to keep it even vaguely straight – and with all the back and forthing I regularly tangled myself in knots of continuity. I’m hoping Scrivener can save my neck.

And I’m already thinking with interest of how I might write a novel differently if I composed it in Scrivener to start with. Ah well, maybe the one after next.