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.

1. I have a guest post up at Justine Larbalestier’s blog, talking about how reading has become a luxury rather than a necessity. I may be trying to do more about that shortly, but my priority right now should not be reading, it is EDITING.

2. The hardest thing about revising this manuscript (Book 2 of the Creature Court, Cabaret of Monsters, for those of you who have lost track) has been that although I knew generally that there was lots to be done, there was no real way of marking my progress for several months. This is no longer true. I am at the flat out working stage, I have 180 scenes in the book, and I have to revise 7 each day in order to meet my deadline. It’s a struggle, but it really helps to have a quota to hit each day instead of just stabbing in the dark.

3. I saw the first glimpse of my cover yesterday. It’s still a work in progress, but I’m very happy with the direction it’s going in. The most important frock in the book is being pictured!!!

4. We had a map drama today – do you have any idea how hard it is to proof a map? There is just so much information going on in it! Today I realised in horror that one of those details I’d been taking for granted (and thus not checked on recent versions) was now in the wrong place, and had a major panic attack until my honey fixed it with magical computer handwaviness. He is still juggling a new computer’s quirks (he’s had it less than 24 hours) and ended up having to redo the correction several times after the application kept closing down unexpectedly! Much deep breathing on my part.

5. I had to open my Nano doc for the first time since November and realised when I saw it that – HEY I have 50,000 words of my next novel already written. How awesome is that?

6. I’m still reading at the Republic Bar in North Hobart this Sunday from 3pm. Come, listen to me talking about tentacles, buy a copy of Siren Beat. You may even have a beer if you are very good. I am taking antibiotics for my re-occurring throat infection so let’s hope I don’t sound too much like Marlene Dietrich… oh, wait. That would be a good thing, right?

7. My honey is taking Raeli off on a grandparently visitation for TWO NIGHTS starting tomorrow. Yes that means I’m at home by myself with the baby, but more importantly it meants EDIT BOOT CAMP.

Watch this space. I’m going to be busy.

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!

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My second day of Proof Camp didn’t go quite so well, as the lurking sore throat I’d had for days manifested as a raging virus of hoarseness, sleepiness and severe inner ear issues. I needed to use Jem’s first big nap of the day to catch up on my own sleep, having been up at 3am claiming to have a burst eardrum. (as it turned out, not technically true. But it HURT, I reserve the right to over-dramatise) By the time I got up and was staggering around like the walking dead, my inner ear issue had resolved into something akin to a Dalek voice modulator, which meant that any shrill noise (hello, have you met my daughters?) translated into an electronic bark.

Also, just when I was upright and almost ready to face the thought of work (despite continuing wooziness, dizziness and exhaustion) Raeli pulled the diabolical move of getting Daddy to put on the one disc of Justice League Unlimited that I had not yet seen. So a good chunk of the afternoon was spent sewing, watching Batman and Green Arrow being awesome, and complaining about my ear.

Then, after all that, I managed to get 100 pages of proofing done. HA. Authorwin. I was damned grateful I’d done so much the day before, though. I should be able to get the last of it knocked off tomorrow, and then we just have to deal with the latest map issue (they look great but the lettering is too small, damn it. Apparently people want maps in books they can actually read! Weirdos.)

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I decided to spend this weekend laying into my proofs for Power and Majesty – yes, more proofs! I’d already done my own painstaking proofread of the book, but more recently I was sent the pages from the two proofreaders, plus notes from the editor who worked on the book a little while ago, commenting on my extra scenes.

My job then is to go through and okay (or stet!) every correction or suggestion. And there are a lot of them! Even in a book you’ve gone over many times. Often I have to stop and figure out how to solve a problem that’s been flagged, or decide whether or not it’s something not worth worrying about.

The Proofs are the sort of job that can lurk at the back of your subconscious, a cause for stress, or you can pick away at it a little at a time and it will drag on forever – or, like any repetitive task, you can just leap in feet first and get the whole lot done. My honey whisked the eldest daughter off to Kids Bizz for the morning, and the baby was awesome enough to sleep for the nearly-three-hours they were gone, so in honour of Neil and Amanda Being Ridiculously Cute Day, I cranked up the Who Killed Amanda Palmer music and worked my little green pen to the nib.

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It’s been an odd sort of a day – stress and phone calls, mostly. Every time the phone rang, I lost a little bit more of my equilibrium. My iPod came to the rescue, and I had Radio Free Skaro podcasts running for most of the day. I finished a quilt top I’ve been working on for some time, and picked up a different quilting project that’s been abandoned for months, without even hesitating. Yay for podcasts.

I’ve been nibbling away at Cabaret of Monsters in Scrivener – labelling and rereading scenes, figuring out notes to myself about what editing has to be done, but not really getting any momentum up and running. I get like this, close to deadlines – it’s like I have to create extra pressure by not working on it until the time left to do it shrinks to the point that I can’t ignore it any more.

And then I have to work like I’m on fire.

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