I have been domesticking up a storm this week, shopping, making things, cooking, and planning more cooking. Surely earned a Mother of the Year award this morning by entirely forgetting to take the baby to daycare – for her ONE full day this week, the one I had made many plans with Raeli for. At 10:30 (after a bad night’s sleep because someone had nightmares and had to climb in with us) I suddenly blinked, stared at the baby and said “we forgot to take Jem to daycare!”

Cue mass hilarity all around.

Once we had rectified that mistake, Raeli and I had brunch at the local cafe and then went down to Meredith’s Orchard to stock up on fruit and vegies for the Christmas weekend. Got a good deal on raspberries, picked today! Back home to rehabilitate her dolls house in return for putting away or chucking away a whole lot of old toys. And then it was icecream concoction construction (or possibly deconstruction). Using silicon cupcake cases & chocolate mould trays, we made vanilla penguins, turkish delight hearts, and mince pies, all by stirring interesting things into icecream. I also made the outside layer of the icecream pudding (Christmas Bombe!). I was going to have a Turkish Delight core but now I’m thinking raspberry-doctored vanilla.

Sadly I think the creativity overstretched practicality. The results were delicious but messy, and I don’t think the freezer is cold enough for the icecreams in the moulds to harden properly. The best results were the mince pies: brandied fruit stirred into vanilla icecream and scooped into star-shaped silicon cases to serve.

Oh, and I whipped up a lasagne too Though I managed to split the bechamel sauce like a bad hollandaise, leading to huge amounts of delicious but strangely lumpy cheeseness over the dish. Turns out that an extra large fruitcake pan is actually excellent for making lasagne in. Once again, messy but tasty. (actually that pretty much sums up most of what emerges from my kitchen)

Raeli and I alternated between bonding beautifully and grouching at each other, largely because her vocabulary seems to have reduced sharply to ‘BUT MUUUUUUM’ which drives me wild with irritation, especially when she follows up ‘don’t say that to me again’ with “BUUUUUT MUUUUUUUUUM.” There were times when I thought my head would explode!

She’s still only five, right? Not fifteen?

Tomorrow’s plan is to make it to Pilates for the first time in a month (a succession of disasters and babysitting letdowns have prevented me), to pick up a few groceries (no big pre-Christmas shop for me, I can’t face the queues), check the postbox and then come HOME and pretty much stay here until the holiday hits. Still need to finish the Christmas Bombe, bake a gingerbread cake, and probably make christmas muffins with Raeli because she desperately wants to.

Sigh. Baking with children is fun, but takes FIVE TIMES LONGER.

I should really wrap presents.

Kind of sleepy, actually.

Today was a baking day! I’d declared to Raeli that we would make a cake this weekend to use up any leftover Easter chocolate (damn there’s a lot of it, even if you try to keep things restrained). We also had some pretty funky new cupcake silicon moulds to try out.

I’d also been craving red velvet cupcakes all week which is weird, because I’ve never tried them before! One of the cupcake sets we bought were shaped like roses and I couldn’t help thinking how awesome they would look with those dark red cakes. So a bit of internet research and – voila!

We made two kinds of cake in the end – smashed bunny chocolate cake in insectoid shapes, and red velvet in the roses and stars. I was pleased with how they all turned out, though we did lose a few tentacles at the turning out stage.

Did you know red velvet cupcakes are basically chocolate cakes with red food colouring? The traditional method was with a particular kind of cocoa that turns reddish, and there was a brief period in which people experimented with beets, but basically it’s the red food colouring. Also, buttermilk! The buttermilk worried me until I found out you could create a good alternative by adding a spoonful of lemon juice to ordinary milk.

Baking on Sunday has many good things going for it – a fun activity with my daughter, the ability to chuck her in for her bath straight after, and if that means having gorgeous funky cupcakes to munch on while watching the Biggest Loser finale then all the better… mmmm, cake.

January’s over! Yikes. The end of the school holidays is fast approaching, which is good. I’m not nearly as far along with my rewrites as I wanted to be by this stage, but we can just call that another case of imaginary productivity.

There had better be nothing imaginary about my February productivity. I’m setting myself up for success the best way I can. When I haven’t been able to work, I’ve been building up anti-guilt points, playing with Raeli and setting up activities for her so I don’t feel so bad about disappearing into my laptop in the coming month. My honey is taking off the last week of the school holidays, which means he can entertain her and do the quality time thing while I indulge in reckless abandonment.

And of course there was the other work, the stuff with more immediate deadlines – proofs on proofs, and the last stages of correcting and redoing the maps. Not that I was actually doing the maps, but the last couple of weeks meant several meetings with Mum – the maps themselves were gorgeous but we’ve been juggling the sizing of text and my honey had to come to the party with electronic support and corrections too, managing to save Mum a lot of re-drawing time!

Meanwhile I’ve been reading my book 2 and notetaking and playing with Scrivener, and essentially pre-rewriting. The big work is all going to be done in the last month, though. I’ve worked through the fear and the paralysis stage (don’t know where to start! so much to do! make write better aargh!) and now there’s just the good stuff to do. I’m actually looking forward to it. I can see the shape of the book it’s going to be, and it helps that I’ve spent chunks of January immersed in the minutiae of book 1 – it’s amazing what themes and quirks you can slip into a book without realising it, and it’s only by being forced to read it line by line that you find those clever bits that really need to be elaborated on in later books.

It’s a trilogy I’m writing here, not three books, and it really is the first time I’ve done that – Mocklore was three standalone books, only becoming a trilogy of sorts in the final hour (and besides the wench is dead). I always wanted each book to expand on the previous one, making the story bigger and wider and sometimes changing the way you read the early books – but I’ve lived with Book One for so long now that it’s hard to let it go.

Final proofs are final. It’s gone. No changing it now. Further in, further in!

(more…)

A random shopping trip earlier in the week resulted in an abridged copy of The Jungle Book – and even more unusually, Raeli has been happy to listen to it three nights in a row. I’m enjoying it, because it’s so oddly relevant to what I’m writing right now. Also, I’ve never actually read the thing. There’s beautiful language going on even in this abridged copy – I may have to get hold of the real thing for inspirational purposes. I mean, it’s a book about a panther, wolves, a bear, a lion, a snake, a boy… animal politics, oh yeah. Very appropriate.

Speaking of inspiration, I’ve been getting the urge to podcast again (it’s weird, it’s like baking, the desire comes over me in November every year and washes away again by February).  girliejones has given me permission to do a full podcast version of Siren Beat, and I’ve been plotting it out in my head, ready to start playing once NaNo releases me from its maw. I’d also love to do one next year of early chapters of P&M, but that depends on lots of factors like time, energy, and whether the publisher is supportive of the concept.

So far my work on the project has entirely composed of me searching for Creative Commons music tracks. Possibly my brain melted a while back and I failed to notice. Music good.

Oooh speaking of music being good, did everyone else get that a film like Whip It would also have a great soundtrack that would be available on itunes? This obvious fact did not sink in for me until today when I started reading Derby Girl, the book that Whip It was based on and found myself listening to the soundtrack from Juno at the same time… anyway, long story short, I have new writing music, hooray!

It also occurs to me that by the time we reach book 3, my love triangle has turned into a love polygon. So glad I don’t have to think about the third act until, you know, April or so. Maybe I’ll have figured out how to resolve it by then.

I had a lovely ego boost today, when my editor at Voyager sent me the text for their 2010 catalogue, so I could check it over for errors. This wasn’t the blurb text that I’ve actually been part of creating, but the text to sell the book to booksellers and – wow, it’s kind of amazing to see your own book all blurbed up and fancy. Also to hear other people describe it, when it’s only existed in your own head for so long.

Mentioned to my honey that they were emphasising the romance elements of the story and he said ‘Duh,’ which made me laugh.

In other news, I started practicing for my annual ‘let’s cook experimental things at Christmas and ooh, catering for a vegetarian this year’ phase by teaching myself to make stuffed eggplant and hurling said eggplants at the Thursday night Horde (6 adults, 5 kids, always need vegetarian, gluten & dairy free options). The breadcrumb, herb and cheese stuffing was awesome. The gluten & dairy free mushroom-and-goat-feta one was less so, but I think it was because they didn’t cook as long – I extra-cooked what didn’t get eaten and reheated it for my lunch today and it was so yum. I forsee many eggplants in my future. I’ve never cooked one before because I was all scared, but they are beautiful and now I can be brave.

Now I’m craving eggplant. Mmmm.