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.

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.

Mary Anne Mohanraj’s excellent WisCon GOH speech about heroism. Her descriptions about the hardships of looking after a small baby, and balancing traditional women’s work with your own professional work, which can be struggle even with an enlightened feminist partner, hit home for me in particular. She also talks about educating people on the internet through 101 and RaceFail type discussions, and how hard and painful that can be to do.

An article about the parental leave payments in Sweden and how they are still working to enact social change. I wasn’t going to read this article when I first saw it widely linked because, let’s face it, do we need another article about how great parental support is in Sweden? I was glad I finally did, though, because it addresses some aspects I didn’t know about, and shows that yes, you can make social change that genuinely improves the life of both genders. Though as always, there is the question of choice, and I do wonder if the changes (potentially making up to 4 months of the 12 months parental leave payments compulsory for men to take) are going to reduce benefits for single women. There isn’t a mention of non-nuclear-families in the article at all. One thing that genuinely shocked me that I didn’t know about Sweden is that they also have a system for paid leave days for sick children – what a difference would that make to working parents around the world!

Finally, a great post at Tor.com about the importance of accepting criticism in order to improve your writing. This is of particular interest to me this week because, you guessed it, it’s editing time! My structural edit for Book 2 of the Creature Court (which will not now be called Cabaret of Monsters, though we don’t have an alternative yet) has arrived, I’ve discussed it with my editor, and as soon as the school holidays end, I’ll be digging into that for three weeks. The reward at the end of it will be a) a better book, obviously b) it next goes to my favourite freelance editor for the copy edit, she only being available in July and c) once it’s done I can go back to finishing Book 3! Hooray! My reward for work is more work!

In the mean time I have been utterly spoiled on Twitter by a whole bunch of my favourite people finding my book “in the wild” or indeed “in captivity” and sending me a series of pics of Power and Majesty on shelves across the country. Very exciting! Even nicer is to hear word of shops where it is already sold out. Still no word yet on anyone from outside the country managing a successful purchase. Where did you get YOUR copy?

I’ve been inhaling old episodes of Radio Free Skaro (Torchwood and children? That’ll never work. And why haven’t we seen the 456 on the promos? Have they not CGIed it yet?) in between current episodes of Radio Free Skaro, while drilling away on my manuscript formatting. Scrivener, it turns out, has all kinds of lovely features to allow you to compile a document for final submission, but it’s taken a while to iron all the bugs out, and even now that it exists in a single doc (120,000 words eeeee) I still have to go through the whole thing, page by page, to make my chapter headings and numbers and page breaks all – you know, be consistent and tidy and in some cases, bringing them into existence.

I got halfway through the ms in a few solid hours, but was struck by the desperate need to move around and be active – this, coupled with the incursion of ANTS ANTS into the dining room which I usually work in, led to a mass tidying of over and under the dining room table, in order to clear space for Robie the Robot to do his vacuuming thing.

The good news is that my cleaning frenzy did throw up the copy of Power of the Daleks (I am so obsessed with old Doctor Who right now, I know my everyday state is ‘mildly obsessed’ but I’m in an active state right now, I suppose the obsessive bookbuying had to go somewhere) I had borrowed from the library and promptly lost. Still haven’t found our much-renewed library copy of Maisie Eats Lunch or whatever the hell it’s called, though.

I took advantage of the lack of sunshine to play soccer with Raeli! As part of my plan to incorporate more activity into my daily life, I promised her blithely that I would play soccer with her “every evening” which, I’m sorry to say, has led to far more “but you promised!” moments this week than is healthy for our relationship. Though you know, I *did* promise, and when she says that, I do haul myself outside to kick some goals with her. I love sporty Raeli! She’s so gung ho! She didn’t even blink when I accidentally kicked her in the face with the ball (I’m not good at this! I’m trying!) but then sadly came a cropper, tripping flat on her face. I had told her pink gumboots weren’t the most appropriate footwear, but she insisted. Possibly the fact that my own soccer kit is bright pink pyjamas and black leather boots compromised my believability.

Anyway. Only halfway through the manuscript. I was hoping to finish today! But on the bright side I do have a tidy dining room, a tired daughter and sore feet. Hooray!

It’s done! That is, it’s not completely done – there are various tasks to be done, such as the arranging of scenes into chapters, the collation of the non-Scrivener doc (clings to Scrivener) and a final read through, all of which will happen over the weekend. But the scene by scene edit of The Creature Court Book Two: Cabaret of Monsters, the part that requires the absolute full on part of my brain, is done, finally.

I’m happy with the book. I’ve addressed all the things that I thought were a problem from the first draft, and it’s basically as good as I can get it on my own, which is exactly where you want to be when it comes to submitting an ms to the publisher. Hopefully my editor (please let them give me Nicola again!) will find a whole bunch of new things, and I’ll have a nice break between then and now so as to be open to the needs of the structural edit.

Not yet, though. Not yet!

This is a big deal for me. Looking back over old posts, I wrote 90K of the book during the latter half of my pregnancy, and hit the 100K mark before Jem was two months old. I finished the draft somewhere between her being 10 and 12 weeks old. (seriously?? I wrote a comment on Lauren McLaughlin’s guest post the other day claiming that I hadn’t done much in the way of writing for the first 3 months of my baby’s life – how can I have forgotten this so soon??)

This is the first time I have written anything with a 0-6 month old baby to take care of, let alone a novel with a real publisher deadline! When Raeli was a baby, I retired my novel for most of the year, and only started back on my thesis when she was 6 (cough, 9) months old.

(more…)

Nine scenes to go.

Nine scenes to edit, one document to collate, eleventy zillion chapter headings to create, one novel to proof, four days to go.

I can totally do this.

Also, so far, staving off stomach bug. Wobbly, but not beaten.

I’m up to the last few scenes, the ones I was most worried about, the ones that have been quite deliberately left until last. And I’m finding that leaving them until last was the best possible decision, as it is allowing me to seed earlier a pretty major revelation that only came upon me when I wrote the final scene of the first draft.

Themes, themes!

I’m starting to get enthusiastic about Book 3. There is obviously no hope for me at all!

While I am picking up my darling 6 month old from daycare, check out this great post by Lauren McLaughlin about the combination of babies and novel-writing, and how being a mother made her change her writing priorities.

As the Snapshot 2010 interviews have been gathering steam, I’ve been working ferociously away at that other little side project of mine – the novel that’s due in to the publisher’s next week! Seven days to go and the family have all been struck down by some kind of lightning-swift stomach bug. I remain the only healthy one, which is in itself a terrible burden, but I also have a nasty taste in the back of my mouth…

All I can hope is that the insane numbers of antibiotics I am taking for the recurring throat infection from hell will be enough to keep the stomach bug at bay…

And oh yes, vomiting baby means one less daycare session this week than planned, possibly both if she’s still throwing up tomorrow.

I have 26 scenes left to edit, half of one to write from scratch, and then it’s hitting the export button on Scrivener to turn the ms into a real girl again, and reading through to check that it all makes a vague kind of sense. It should be doable in the time. If I don’t get struck down and spend the next week throwing up…

The doctor, on my second visit to see about the recurring throat infection (which is, we have since figured out, more in the way of a vicious but sneaky throat infection that laughs in the face of antibiotics) asked me if I was working harder than usual, or over-tiring myself. I just sort of looked at him with my head tilted on one side. Honestly, how would I tell?

Nearly there, nearly there. March is a month of milk and honey, of podcasts and blueberries and novel-reading and quilting and resting my brain in preparation for the novel to come: the dread Book Three, which I will be attacking in April.

All I have to do is survive to the end of the week, and everything’s going to be Fine.

I’m working away at my scene-by-scene edit of Cabaret of Monsters. Reached the halfway point of this today, which very much puts me on track for submitting the book at the end of the month. I’m getting to that lovely point where I’m not only marking progress and feeling confident about getting the job done, but am having some genuine moments of inspiration. The books I’ve been reading lately are so good they have been pushing me to lift my game.

Raeli and I are constructing a paper theatre, themed around the Nutcracker Ballet. I have been taking pics for photoblogging later, but for right now it’s a fun activity that we have been doing in fits and starts all week. Her glueing skills are truly impressive – I have the answer to what they’ve been doing at that school! Despite Kaaron and Margo’s fears, we have not yet been eaten by the demon that lives inside the Nutcracker doll. Possibly because we haven’t cut him out yet. Actually I’m not sure where he is…

The dread school holidays are at an end, and we have entered a new era: Raeli the school girl. No longer flirting with two days a week of kindergarten, she is now doing it hardcore, 5 days a week. She started in her new class yesterday and as we hoped, took to it like a duck to water. Ask me again how awesome it is to have a daughter who thrives in social and structured settings. Believe me, I don’t take this windfall lightly.

Meanwhile Jem is likewise thriving on her two half days a week of daycare. The main carer is lovely and genuinely fond of our girl (she is so the best behaved baby in the group – high five! baby five!) and Jem not only loves the playtime she gets there with other babies, but also sleeps and feeds well there.

Yep. Not taking that one for granted either. My working mother’s guilt has been halved if not quartered by the fact that my kids obviously benefit from having time in structured surroundings that have nothing to do with me. Hooray!

For the first time since Jem was born and the whole ‘oh that’s right, babies are hard work’ bubble burst directly over our heads, it feels like we are approaching sustainable normality.

Of course, once she starts crawling, it’s going to be a whole different kettle of fish. And then there’s the stress that sets in every time she readjusts to needing one less nap per day… but for right now, work can be achieved during short, frequent bursts of activity between the hours of 8:30 and 2:30. I’ll take it.

(oh and in case anyone missed it, Arsenal beat Liverpool in a long, unpretty but successful game this morning. After a truly awful week of football, this was a very cheering thing. Man U’s draw and the losses of Chelsea and Spurs only make it the sweeter… when I announced, 70 torturous minutes into the game, that we finally had a goal, Raeli replied “hooray, you and me have a goal!” She’s such a fair weather fan. When we’re losing, she barracks for the ref)

Feeling wrecked at the end of a long day, and a longer weekend. My honey and I have both dabbled in the life of a solo parent and found it not to our liking. Soooo much better to be able to swap out when the children are driving you crazy. I’m definitely happy to have my family under the one roof again.

(I ate an entire schnitzel lunch one-handed today, because Jem wanted joggling. This is what the second parent is for!!)

Meanwhile, Edit Boot Camp brought me 46 scenes edited in 3 days (yes, the 46 shortest scenes, that’s not the point) as well as several new ones written. The total so far for Get Book Finished month is:

Not bad at all.

I read a chunk of Siren Beat at the Republic Bar today. It went well, though it was a smaller crowd than usual – the poets spurned us for a fancier gig! The girls held up remarkably well – Raeli had just got in from a four hour drive from her Nanna and Poppa’s house on the north west coast, and Jem is, well, a six month old baby. There were no screaming fits from either of them. Bonus.

I enjoyed reading the story – I’ve tried before (for a podcast) but felt overly selfconscious trying to find Nancy Napoleon’s voice. And then, you know, three weeks of throat infections. Today it just seemed to work, the right amount of deadpan, sarcasm and pathos. I managed to stop reading before I got to any of the smutty parts, which was a good call because blushing is embarrassing. Still, it was fun – maybe I can have another go at that podcast.

My favourite part was, after all my loving detail of teenage corpses, kraken invasion and character deaths, when I walked away from the microphone, Raeli announced in a loud clear voice: “That was a lovely story, Mummy.”

Yeah, it’s probably time I stopped assuming she’s not paying attention to grown up stuff, isn’t it…

We couldn’t stay for the second half of readings at the Republic, because my well-behaved baby was on the verge of falling apart, and there’s only so much luck-pushing one can, well, push. But it was a good afternoon.