But today I manage to hang out with the girls all morning (including a cranky teething baby), threw together a delicious lunch for me & my honey (leftover potato & cauliflower soup goes VERY WELL with added chorizo & bacon, served with hot cheesy muffins), put out some laundry, finished reading my 100th book for the year (a Joanna Russ, which seems appropriate), did a last minute podcast with Jonathan Strahan, got to the two-thirds mark of my copy edits, and played outside with the kids. I got to see Jem on a bike for the first time!

All this, and my honey is cooking dinner. Awesome!

Elsewhere in the world, Mary Robinette Kowal talks about how amateur writers should be given the same respect as hobbyists in other fields. I still can’t get over that Shades of Milk and Honey is a Nano novel! I had been meaning to lend it to  godiyeva already, but once I learned that, I practically forced it upon her, for inspiration.

John Scalzi puts his weight behind Nano being awesome rather than a waste of everyone’s time – I particularly enjoyed the comments on that one!

Ekaterina Sedia makes a great post about what you can say when men who don’t feel they’re sufficiently benefiting from the patriarchy derail a feminist conversation to talk about themselves.

Finally, some Bujoldy goodness. On Tor.com the very learned and well-read Jo Walton analyses the appeal of Aral Vorkosigan (lotsa spoilers) while on i09, Charlie Jane Anders asks whether Bujold writes “hard” science fiction, leading to many tangled comments as everyone tries to define what hard SF is. Sigh. At some point I am going to write my hard SF post. I think my philosophy comes down to “if Bujold isn’t it, and one of the best examples of it, then I don’t understand what it’s for.” Possibly I shouldn’t write that post.

I adore Nano. I love everything about it. I love the frantic pace of writing, the PRESSURE, the word wars, the playlists, the self-imposed deadline to end all self-imposed deadlines, the creativity, the pressure. I love making writing dates with my friends, those who write all year round (and I never get a chance to see otherwise) and those who only clock in with the writing thing at this time of year. I love carting my big fluffy monster laptop bag around to cafe after cafe and living room after living room and playing Lily Allen through my headphones on an endless loop because damn it that woman makes me write faster.

Last year, I wrote with a three month old baby on my lap. It was challenging, to say the least, but it was also an amazing step in proving to myself that I could juggle new motherhood and writing.

This year, the buzz is starting, and we’ve managed to lure new flies into the web (HEY MILLIE) which is super exciting. But… I won’t be old schooling it this year. It was a big admission for me to make to myself, that the full NaNoWriMo was not on the cards for me this time around. I’m looking at finishing the most intense book project I’ve ever worked on this Sunday, and even I am not crazy enough to launch into a 50K marathon the day after. A mad riot of new bookery is tempting, but it could burn me out for months. I’ve been swamped in deadlines all year, and this is finally a chance for me to breathe and catch up on other things. Including, um, some rather major copy edits for Book Two, which my editor was nice enough to postpone a few weeks to let me get the much-interrupted Book Three finally done.

On the other hand, it’s FREAKING NANO and there’s no way I want to be left out. Plus, I don’t want to miss the chance to harness the magical November vibe and get some serious work done before summer holidays hit me and I’m back to full time mummying. So…

I’m making a list and checking it twice. Instead of one big 50K project, I’m going to put several smaller projects together, covering different areas in my life that have been crying out for some serious attention. Call it the Month of Manic Multitaking Mama – MoMaMuMa! Heh okay, maybe we won’t give it a special name. But here’s my November plan:

TANSY’S NOVEMBER LIST [35]

PROFESSIONAL COMMITMENTS
Final prep & notes arrangement for writing workshop [1]
Teaching novel writing workshop, 6 November [1]
Copy edits, The Shattered City due 22 November [3]

WRITING ETC.
Proposal for Fury to send to agent – 3 chapters, synopsis, cover letter [5]
one short story [1]
4 chapters of Blueberry edited [4]

READING
5 books from my “archived to read” shelf [5]
10 children’s books for Aurealis Awards [10]

QUILTING/CRAFT
2 bookmarks [2]
squares for my Creature Court quilt [2]
finishing rocket quilt top [1]

Okay it looks like a lot, but apart from the professional commitments this is all stuff I have been desperately wanting to work on… pretty much all year. So I’m very excited about November!

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!

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.

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)

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?

When I am not dancing the Charleston, I will be cleaning the house and reading books. I have spent the last several weeks longing for a day in which I can just clean the house and read books.

Later in the week, I get to return to Book Three! Huzzah! The trick is to do it soon, before it stops becoming an illicit treat and starts feeling like a chore again. But not today.

TODAY IS NOT FOR WORK.

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.

Then I took a phone call from my editor (this is a major milestone, last time we kept missing each other for about a week and a half) and discussed the various emails full of titles for Book 2 I had been sending her throughout the whole edit. We came up with something we both liked (still mulling it over for a bit) and the second we hung up I ran to change the baby, cos there had been a very alarming smell through the whole conversation.

A little more writing and planning after that, and then it was off to the school pick up run. I seized my child and Inigo (not at random, I was supposed to pick him up too) and got talked into bringing them back here to play, which meant I got a chance to catch up on my doll business for the – let’s say day though really it was pretty much for the week. One of the tasks included a phone call with my Mum, which I used to book Raeli in for a sleepover (WRITING TIME) this weekend.

Jem is napping again, in preparation for the fun evening ahead, celebrating  godiyeva‘s birthday.

So basically it’s been a busy day but just short of hectic. The timing for everything has worked out pretty well perfectly, and I’ve managed to juggle current writing commitments, extra writing/publicity work, the mothering essentials and hey, I found time to write a blog entry. Of all the days this week, this is the one I’d hold up as an example of when the whole writer-mother-working-from-home thing actually works.

Of course, the house does look like a bomb has hit it, but you can’t have everything!

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.

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.

I did manage, in the earliest and latest hours of the weekend, to finish my book, the awesome The Privilege of the Sword, which I shall discuss more when I get a chance to do some recreational blogging, and I also finished the Guild comics as iApps which I loved. And there was a bit of socialising, including me getting to cook my own osso bucco recipe which I am very proud of. But, yeah. I am basically going to have to burn myself to a crisp this week. I am kind of shocked that when Raeli claimed sniffles and the need of a sick day today, I didn’t burst into tears.

But yes, I really hope that next time someone asks how on earth I do it, I actually do have the presence of mind to say ‘well it’s really hard’ as opposed to ‘oh, I manage.’ I love this work and I feel enormously privileged to be in this position, but it doesn’t help anyone – least of all me – to pretend that it’s easy to balance writing with motherhood. Writing requires bursts of steady work and bursts of super high energy Get Shit Done work, and I really do forget far too often that the steady work I do is actually at the top, not the middle, of my current work capacity.

My only comfort is that I am a better writer and editor than I was back when I was a childless twenty-something! And, you know, my family is very forgiving…

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.