I became snappish and strange this weekend, every time someone asked me how the writing was going. It’s not their fault that the question makes me want to scream and jump out the nearest window. I can’t even roll my eyes and complain that they didn’t just check my blog, because I have been quite happily using the books meme to completely avoid blogging about what I have been doing lately.

There’s a simple reason for that. I’m being hammered. It has been deadline after deadline, many of them bleeding into each other, with little chance to take a break in between (at this point ‘break’ just means ‘loss of momentum meaning work is twice as hard when I start again). I don’t want to blog about it. I’m boring myself, let alone my audience!

The good thing is that I am marking progress. I’m currently in the middle of the structural edit to end all structural edits, and it’s doing amazing things for the book, but it feels like my head has been turned inside out and bashed with large pieces of furniture. Yes, this is still the best job in the world, but that doesn’t mean it’s not haaaard some days.

Today was my one full time work day, and it was great, hugely productive, but now I have a week of snatched hours ahead of me, and only one or two of those precious full days left before D-Day. I can’t just relax and say ‘oh, no daycare today, I guess I can’t be expected to get any work done.’ One of those deadlines is zooming up in front of me, and it’s the non-negotiable variety, so it’s all hands on deck, every hour counts.

I was expecting to be free of all current work commitments by Worldcon – and instead, that date is now November 1. Sometimes the further away deadlines are scarier than the close ones. At least the close ones mean that the end is in sight.

See, and now the whole thing has turned into one colossal whinge, which is exactly what I didn’t want to do. Back to talking about other people’s awesome books for another week, I think…

(at least I’m not still writing a PhD thesis or something crazy like that)

What a difference a weekend can make. Check that – what a difference a weekend in which one’s five-year-old is being entertained elsewhere can make!

I ripped through the last thirty chapters of edits on Saturday, and spent Sunday cleaning up the manuscript, checking & creating timelines, compiling & checking the final doc, etc. I emailed the whole thing back to the publishers early this morning, once my brain was together enough to compose an email.

The structural edits were due back this Tuesday, and given that I was so far behind that I thought I was going to be working right up to either 5pm or midnight, depending on how desperate things were (only a few days ago I was seriously considering asking for an extension, gah) I have ended up two days ahead of myself. And you know what that means?

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I’m at that stage of editing when you grasp desperately at everything to help you in the Herculean task of Make Book Better. I inhaled Ellen Kushner’s The Privilege of the Sword specifically to kick the ‘write good sentences’ part of my brain into gear, and found myself startled at just how good a book it was to inspire me to work on The Creature Court – far above my own skills, but sharing many similar themes and elements, enough to spur me on. Now I’m reading the Demon’s Covenant by Sarah Rees Brennan, simply because it turned up – I have been waiting for this book since the second I read the last page of The Demon’s Lexicon – only to realise, hang on, this is a second book! I am reading an awesome first chapter of a second book, and doesn’t it just show exactly how such a thing ought to be achieved?

I want to drench myself in 1920’s novels with lots of dialogue, and clever, witty court fantasy, and maybe a bit of Austen or Galsworthy just to be on the safe side, and then there’s the music, only the right kind of music, and maybe I should be immersing myself in vintage art… but I only have nine days. There are limits – muses should be carefully applied, not stacked on like the toppings at a pancake buffet.

Is there such a thing as a pancake buffet? There so should be.

All this is just one big distraction from the fact that there isn’t enough time in the day. I was working flat out from lunchtime until it was time to pick up the baby from daycare, and still came close to being one chapter short for the day. Sure, I wrote a new chapter that deeply excites me but – why are the days so short? Why?

Still, I plug on, making my characters hurt more and fancy each other more and dress prettier and possibly talk in longer sentences.

One week to go.

My big change to my writing/working routine that I made this year was actually taking weekends – which is to say, not heaping up lists of things I needed to get done on the weekend only to discover on Sunday night that I had failed to do so.

The current edits of Book Two are kicking my arse well and truly – I’m getting the work done, but it’s gone painfully slowly for the first nearly two weeks, and I only have 9 days now before they’re due. You know that thing where people keep asking me how on earth I write with a 5 year old and a baby and I wave my hand airily and say things like ‘oh, I just snatch moments where I can, somehow it all works out?’

Screw that! Obviously I have completely lost whatever knack I used to have for finding time. It doesn’t help that the baby has just moved into the developmental stage which means she needs a person interacting with her pretty much all the time she is awake. I could work in the evenings if I wasn’t already falling asleep by the time Masterchef ends (which coincidentally is about the time I find myself child-free for most of the rest of the evening, except when I don’t). Sometimes Jem will take up to 4 times being put down, screaming, got up again, etc. before she settles down for her night’s sleep, and by the end of it, I’m shattered.

The first week was mostly warming up, and getting to grips with what I had to do. The second was about pushing into a routine and writing new chapters. Now I’m stuck with having to edit 5 chapters a day minimum, no breaks, to get this done. And that means working weekends. No skipping days.

Sometimes it takes me 2 uninterrupted hours to get 5 chapters edited. Sometimes it’s closer to 4. Even that is a mythical number because in my life, there are no uninterrupted hours.

Add to that the general expectation by my children that weekends are times for fun, family, reading, playing, and Mummy not being cranky at them when they ask for things, and the weekend was very, very hard work. It also means I’ve had almost no time to myself – normally the hours snatched from my children on weekends are used to relax and regroup so I can face the week ahead without turning into a gorgon-like creature who tells her 10 month old to make her own damn toast.

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I went by my post box today to pick up the June issue of Locus and to hope vainly that maybe my just-shipped copy of The Demon’s Covenant by Sarah Rees Brennan might have miraculously arrived already (it hadn’t).

What I found instead was even more exciting – a box full of my very own bookplates!

These were designed for me by the marvellous and multi-talented Rowena Cory Daniells (whose own trilogy King Rolen’s Kin is due out from Solaris in a month or so) – I like particularly that it reflects the colours and style of my Creature Court website, but of course also the black cat who represents Ashiol, one of Power and Majesty’s many anti-heroes.

If anyone would like a signed book plate to personalise their copy of Power and Majesty, and/or for a friend, or if they have a use for a larger number of bookplates – like if you work for a bookshop – please send me an email at creaturecourt@gmail.com, or DM/tweet me on Twitter at @tansyrr to let me know how many you need/what names to sign them to if any, and also a postal address (apparently you can’t DM me unless I follow you, so email may be best option for most).

I’m happy to post bookplates anywhere in the world, though I’m not sure if any actual copies of the book have made it outside Australasia yet – let me know if you’re a non Aussie/New Zealander who has managed to secure a copy and let me know how you did it! I haven’t heard of any successful purchases from online booksellers yet and would love to be able to recommend some that can provide actual copies to o/s readers.

The school holidays are at an end, and that means I am officially back to work tomorrow. I’ve had two weeks of chasing my daughters around the house, reading library books and Wonder Woman comics with them, sewing, blogging and promoting my new release.

What I haven’t been doing, apart from a couple of lapses, is writing Book 3. I have been reading parts of the manuscript, and nutting away at titles, but I just know that when I go back to write Book 3, I want to build up crazy momentum and just blaze away until I get to the end.

Unfortunately that won’t be tomorrow, because my structural edit letter arrived in the mean time, and that means three weeks of frantic rewriting before the manuscript is sent to the copy editor. Editing is all about the frantic, for me.

Over at Ripping Ozzie Reads, I’ve blogged the playlist I constructed today which will hopefully help me build up the momentum I need and get the work done in the pieces of the day I can snatch for myself.

Now, with a couple of hours left of the “holiday” and my daughters asleep, I can put my feet up and watch Robin Van Persie v. Nicklas Bendtner on SBS. (possibly other people from Denmark and the Netherlands are playing, but who really cares about them?) Best case scenario, both boys get hat tricks and get carried around on their respective teams’ shoulders. Worst case scenario, RVP accidentally beheads Nicky B while breaking his own legs. Hey, they’re Arsenal, it’s not that unlikely.

It’s funny, you can be keyed up and preparing for a big event like, oh I don’t know, a book launch, for weeks and weeks, and then suddenly it’s over in under two hours. Blink blink blink. I’m pretty sure it was good, because we came home, got the kids to bed and then promptly collapsed in a heap of exhaustion.

That might have something to do with the cold meds I’m on.

The Hobart Bookshop put on a lovely, cruisy book event. New authors, I recommend you fling yourself on their mercy! They give good launch. The bookshop started filling up slowly with lots of people I love and quite a few people I don’t even know. The former is lovely and comforting and heartwarming and all those things, and the latter is rather startling.

I didn’t do a head count but my honey thinks there were about 50 or so people there – I know I signed around 30 books!

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It’s Book Release Day! Let there be ribbons and honeycakes and rioting in the street. In the mean time – well, I never got my act together enough to write a proper acknowledgement page in time to get it into the book. I told myself I’d save it for the final volume – much as I refused to go to my first two graduation ceremonies on the grounds that I’d be getting my PhD sooner or later and it’s the sort of thing you should only do once. Or some other excuse for being slack.

But Power and Majesty is the cumulative result of many years of work, and I have many people to thank for their contribution in making it happen:

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Episode 2 of the CreatureCourtCast is up at the Creature Court website. (use the second link if you want to play it on the site instead of downloading). You can also find it over in iTunes.

The theme for this episode is ‘fantasy with frocks.’ Because yes, this is one of those books where clothes get described, a lot. One of my protagonists is a dressmaker, and that means that she sees the world through clothes. When she struggles for metaphors and similes to describe the strange world she is slowly becoming aware of, she uses crafting terms to do so. As she learns about the mysterious Creature Court, and is introduced to them, one of the aspects that stands out for her is the way that they dress: to make statements, to impress each other, to show off.

They are, after all, part-animal, and as I mention in the podcast, we have a long cultural tradition of anthropomorphising animals and putting clothes on them. Puss in Boots with his floppy hat and awesome footwear! Jemima Puddleduck in her bonnet. Cat from Red Dwarf in his tailored space suits.

Clothes also form plot points in Power and Majesty. The dress pictured on the cover represents a turning point in the story, and I read one of the key scenes for that dress aloud in this episode of the CreatureCourtCast. Ashiol and the Creature Court find out about Velody’s existence because of the dress, and it also introduces the idea that a person’s magic (though the word ‘magic’ is never used in the books) can bleed out into things they make. This will be important later…

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I can tell the end of The Creature Court is on the horizon, because I’ve spent the day being hit in the head by other books. Important, exciting future books which are not yet. The trouble is, now I’ve answered the last questions about Book 3, my brain is telling me that the job is all done, which is patently not true.

Also both the books smacking me over the head today are the Wrong Books and in no way the one I planned to write next. For which I have sensibly been applying for grants, and planning to use to put a proposal together for Voyager in the second half of the year.

Damn it. Work’s not done. Work’s not done. Could someone inform my brain of this important fact? I don’t have time to construct a lavish Shakespearian alternate universe right this second.

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