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!

A mixed weekend, many highs and lows. I ran away from my family on Saturday to do some work on my book at the State Library in Hobart (it stays open an hour and a half longer than my local on Saturdays) and worked up a storm. I haven’t been in there for years, and was pleased to see how gorgeous it is now! It was my childhood library and it was exciting to see what a nice space it is.

Then I swung by to vote before going home. No sausage sizzle! Either I was ripped off or it was over well before 2pm which seems a bit lacking in forethought. Sadly this proved to be an omen for how the rest of the election was going to go.

The family had breakfast for dinner and settled down to watch the election results unfold. Towards the end, the only thing that would have made me happier was if they had cut back to Kerry O’Brien and Stephen Smith and they were in their pyjamas, having a pillow fight.

I was glad to see how well the Greens did in the Senate, but otherwise the whole thing was extremely demoralising. Oh, the stress and lack of closure!

At least Arsenal came to the party by giving us a 6-0 win over Blackpool. Happymaking

Today there was more work. See how you haven’t been missing much by me not blogging about my daily activities? WORK IS DULL TO HEAR ABOUT. Five more days and my structural edit is done, done, dusted, leaving me a few days to plan, shop and prepare for Worldcon. I think maybe I need a new coat. We’re going to be tramming all over the place and mine has bits falling off it constantly.

I will post my Worldcon schedule separately. I’m excited about lots of the items (though unfortunately wasn’t able to make the ones I was programmed for on Thursday) and especially that we are doing a “live” Galactic Suburbia episode on Friday morning.

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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If I was to document the perfect day in the life of myself as a writer, it might very well be today. Not that it was a perfect PERFECT writing day, which would involve writing brilliant words in between sipping mint cocktails and lounging around afterwards doing “research” with piles of books without having to think about my children once, but it’s the perfect writing day for where I am right now in my life.

I started work once my honey left with Raeli on the school run, putting Jem down for a nap after not-too-long (and she WENT) and after weeks of struggling through every chapter it was brilliant to power my way through the chapters I had planned to work on today. I took a phone call from the local free newspaper, who were interested in doing an interview with me (thanks to  godiyeva who called them and dobbed me in for this, I’m sure I would have got around to it, but not any time soon).

I hit my editing milestone, got the baby up from her nap, took her around to the newspaper office for the interview (she was a total hit, and got into the photo they took and everything – I’m not entirely sure I had to be there). I then picked up a celebratory curry for our lunch and took it home – Jem approved of chicken korma and rice, and particularly liked the pakora and naan, but I think I misjudged the spice a bit (it’s bad when they smile with tears running down their faces, right?) and ended up shovelling pureed apple into her to balance things out.

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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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One birthday party down, one to go. I managed some work this afternoon, cranking up some Lucksmiths and eventually graduating to my actual edit playlist as I transitioned from footling with my first chapter to flat out writing an all new chapter 2.

I’m at that stage with the structural edit when the comments from the editor finally sink into the backbrain and instead of ‘yeahhh spose she has a point’ I’m completely at ‘how could I have POSSIBLY thought this was good enough, yeeHAH let’s do some digging at this ditch’ only possibly with a less bad Yankee accent.

Now we’re chilled out, watching yesterday’s Masterchef and waiting for Raeli to get into her pyjamas for bedtime stories. I am going to have to try and work in the evenings now instead of just chatting, watching tv and blogging – but that means convincing a different part of my brain to wake up after 9pm! Brains can be trained. If you have enough carrots (cough, Magnums) and sticks (deadline deadline deadline).

Since I want to kick the part of my brain that can write pretty sentences, I’m feeding it with the best books I can find. No Gossip Girl for me this week – well, no more Gossip Girl. Instead, I’m dipping into Dorothy Parker and immersing myself in Ellen Kushner’s The Privilege of the Sword, one of those books I’ve been meaning to read for a really long time. It’s gorgeous. And yes, it makes me want to lift my game. Damn it. Don’t you hate that?

EDIT: Forgot this – I was chided by Tehani on Twitter for not telling the world that the Guild comic #2 is out as an iApp. I didn’t know until she told me! But now I do and I read it and it is awesome. I am loving the Cyd backstory, and the how-she-met-the-gang encounters, plus actually seeing the visuals of how the game works, the aspect of the Guild that is (understandably) worked around/invisible in the actual episodes. I am sooooo hanging out for the new season to find out what happens between Cyd and you-know-who-and-if-you-don’t-what-are-you-waiting-for-watch-it-already-YES-I-SAID-SHOULD.

And that is all.

Kelly Link has been blogging all around the internet, popping up in all kinds of places and discussing a variety of topics, ostensibly to promote the paperback release of Pretty Monsters (which has made it all the way to Kingston, Tasmania – I spotted it in a bookshop today!). Over at i09 she talks about using your obsessions as fuel for short story writing, a technique I used to be quite evangelical back in my years of teaching creative writing. I called it ‘the list of awesome’ and suggested students construct a list of their most obscure and passionate interests in order to write stories that were uniquely theirs.

At some point this year I’m going to be writing a bunch of stories about or inspired by: the Shelley-Byron circle, the deified Livia and Drusilla, Brideshead Revisited, Robotech, iPod playlists and Julius Caesar. I’m really looking forward to them, as my treat for finishing Book 3. Assuming that thing happens.

Ahhh, short stories, how I miss you.

Jemima is growing and developing and doing all those amazing things that make my heart hurt, because every new stage is the end of an old stage, which is never coming back. In the last couple of weeks she has developed an amazing sense of balance (she still needs to hold on to furniture to stay upright but only just), has developed babble into something very close to a recognisable code (aka language) and refuses to be spoon fed because she wants to do it all herself, thank you very much.

We’ve leaped from mushed vegetables to whole bananas, noodles and toast, seemingly overnight. It’s a shock to the system. Just as I was congratulating myself on no longer having to spend quite so much time spooning food patiently into my baby, I discovered that actually she’s not happy puddling around on the floor with toys any more, she wants stimulation and interaction. During my writing time.

Which means I basically have to rethink everything I’ve been assuming about my own working habits.

The weekend is another festival of birthdays – two parties for Raeli to attend, at least on different days, but both at 10am. I had to break it to my honey tonight that there would be no weekend sleep ins, for any of us. He gets to stay home on baby duty while I venture into the wide world of pinatas, cake and musical chairs. Why do children have better social lives than us? I am exerting my vengeance by making her sit sweat-shop-style to produce handmade birthday cards.

My first editing week of three is half done already. The clock is ticking. Or maybe that’s just the caffeine-induced heart palpitations.

Lovely evening tonight, hosting for Donna and her work friend Alex, who were both a big hit with our girls. And not just because they got roped into reading bedtime stories…

My honey made his famous fish pie (local salmon and scallops in vintage cheese sauce) and I made salad and a lemon sour cream cake (great simple recipe, thank you internet! I left out the lemon rind though cos my honey has a thing about it) which we served with Valhalla vanilla icecream. Yummmm. The Tasmanian experience, on a plate!

The edits are continuing. I’m almost at the point where I know what it is I have to do with them. At this stage I’m concentrating mostly on the first ten chapters, because they seem to be the part that needs most work. I haven’t got my momentum up yet – I tried my kick ass playlist and it just sounded like noise! I have to work up to it. Right now I am finding The Guild League nice and calming as background music while I do my intensive thinking and planning.

I’m trying to get back into my routine with Raeli at school – including exercise and housework in my day as well as work and baby time. So far I’ve been great at the housework – a bit too good, its mindless repetition is so tempting in comparison to the trickiness of editing. But hey, the house is in great shape!

Onward and upward.