So it’s my 35th birthday! It was a pretty chilled out day. My presents so far have mostly included chocolate and tea which is most pleasing and appropriate, though I’ve also received a couple of rather lovely pieces of crockery for my new (super old) kitchen dresser: a gorgeous Persephone Books bowl featuring a pomegranate design from Alisa, and a TARDIS teapot from my honey.

Raeli gave me a beautiful piece of artwork – a sketch depicting our family in the Trojan War, playing Sparkly Monopoly, napping together (that is, me and the girls piled on top of each other reading books while their Daddy naps deeply beside us which is ENTIRELY ACCURATE), and a family portrait of us as fairies.

Lunch, some actual reading time (shock!) and I also probably spent more time than I should have working on a post about A Song of Ice and Fire. I got a single lovely child free hour thanks to my honey taking Jem for a walk to buy CAKE.

Jem went through a slightly frantic and stressful (for me) art period in the afternoon – MUST MAKE ART MUMMY – which involved clue and paper curls and cutting random bits of paper and oh gah, artistic children. Lovely but also messy and inconvenient. I am proud of her love of art but there are times when I just want her to go watch some nice tidy television instead.

But the really cool thing is that before dinner, my whole family gathered together and watched all 5 episodes of The Mind Robber (1968) with me! I’d always thought that the ‘books and fairy tales’ theme of this story would make it a Classic Who my girls were likely to enjoy despite the whole black and white thing, and I was right! Not only my three-year-old Hartnell fan Jem watched rapt but after one episode of casually playing Minecraft while glancing up occasionally, Raeli was hooked too.

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Okay, it’s two days later and I really should have blogged about my book launch by now. After a stressful week (most caused by couriers not getting books to the bookshop until the eleventh hour) we actually had a lovely day, leading up to a splendid if exhausting evening.

Many friends, family and general readers gathered at the Hobart Bookshop (as the rain started outside) for wine and book buying – the most common lament I heard was from people who haven’t been there for a while and were greatly distressed at how many beautiful, tempting books were on display. So yay, I’m pretty sure it was worth Chris and Janet’s while to work late that day… if nothing else, you can count on my people to be bibliophiles.

Tehani did a great job of MCing, and Stephanie Smith launched the book with a very sweet and heartfelt speech about the connections between fantasy and crime fiction, and her impressions of Tasmania when she moved here last year – in fact I only realised on the night that both of my support crew are very recent Tasmanians!

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A delightful package in the post today. Doctor Who convention Gallifrey One is legendary for its ribbon exchanges between fans, and I was completely squeeful when Erika and Deb of Verity! told me that they had organised a Verity ribbon for this year’s convention.

It says “Brilliantly Opinionated.”

“Make sure you save one for me,” I seem to remember saying, or something along those lines.

WELL.

What they did, those splendid women, along with our fellow podcasters Liz and Katrina, and Katrina’s fellow podcaster Nicholas (AKA THE RIBBON MULE) is they collected as many Gallifrey ribbons as they could, just for me. I was so excited that I kept the parcel un-opened until I had picked Raeli up from home (getting her in the right frame of mind first by playing her the section of the Ood Cast album Dirty Little Geeks in which Laura Sigma sings about going to Gallifrey and COLLECTING RIBBONS BABY, GIVE ME ONE MORE RIBBON UH-HUH).

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I bought the Lost In Time DVD (a bunch of orphaned black and white Doctor Who episodes from stories that no longer exist in full) entirely for this project, and then wrote up posts for 1963-1968 without even taking off the plastic.

Whoops!

So instead of writing a serious essay about the thematic significance of The War Games, I thought I’d better see what this set had to offer from 1969. Given that the final Troughton season is the one with the most existing stories (hooray!) there was only one Lost in Time episode that fit the bill – Episode 2 of the Space Pirates.

Not exactly inspiring. But I was ahead on my blog writing, I’d get around to it while I watched other episodes I was more invested in. Like the three extant episodes of the Daleks’ Master Plan!

The next day, three-year-old Jem found the DVD case lying out and insisted we watched one. Yes, really. I warned her that it was in black and white, remembering the mixed results of the experiment with The Chase.

“BLACK AND WHITE!” she replied in a ‘rock on’ tone of voice.

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Sometimes blogging about not writing feels like the most subversive thing I can possibly do. I had my annual meltdown last week as I faced what I was and wasn’t going to be able to achieve this year, and my brain exploded messily all over the house. Only JUST metaphorically, I might add.

Now I am breathing calmly, having accepted that, you know, that novel I was working on is not going to be finished by the end of the school holidays, so I don’t have to kill myself in order to get it “done” before my next deadline window (for the second Livia Day novel) takes over.

Not when I have proofs to correct and much-closer-to-finished projects to edit, and submissions to make. And a house to clean up for Christmas and a tree to decorate and an insane number of end of year assemblies/concerts to attend.

Breathe, Tansy, breathe!

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A friend of mine likes to point out to her children when they are having idyllic childhoods. Picnics by the river, cuddling piles of squealing kids on a trampoline, gingerbread daleks at Christmas. IDYLLIC CHILDHOOD. Of course, they never do stop and appreciate the moment for what it is – but maybe, maybe pointing it out to them will freeze a photograph style image in their head that they can pull out as an adult.

It also gives us a chance to let the usual layers of maternal guilt slide away for a few minutes and appreciate that, sure, we do so many things wrong, and so many other things just to get by, and there’s no such thing as perfect parents or perfect children, but right this second, we’re doing a good job and they are good kids, and these are the bits we want to remember when they’re glued to Playstation 2020s and grunting unintelligibly at us.

There are many days of their childhood that are so far from idyllic, with the TV blaring and the kids wanting (or actively trying) to kill each other, the days when the lack of a cup of tea can be the difference between making it to 6 o clock or everybody falling in a heap.

“Look, idyllic childhood moment, over there! You go run after it while Mummy has a sit down and breathes into this brown paper bag.”

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We have survived Jemima’s birthday! I wanted to do something special for her because she missed out on a party last year, as the whole family was sick, and ever since January when half the people she knew had birthday parties, she has been wondering where hers is. A year is a long time between two and three…

The Alice in Wonderland theme was, admittedly, my plan because I figured it was one of the last birthdays where I would get to decide the theme instead of having to incorporate whatever crazymadawesome ideas my daughter thought up for herself.

I think I made the right call.

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I have a new story out! “Please Look After This Angel” is the piece that was read in the marvellous theatrical performance at MONA the other week – now Island Magazine have put in online for you to read. Yes, you. It’s my first ever angel story (I THINK) which does not include clockwork. Keep an eye out for the others – I particularly enjoyed Michael Blake’s “Breathless” on the night, and thought that Melissa Howard’s “The Watchers” felt very Margo Lanaganesque – I will be interested to see how reading the stories on the page changes my opinions after experiencing them for the first time as a dramatic reading!

Also, my littlest daughter turned 3 yesterday which has come as a shock to all of us but did mean I could finally find an owner for the Astronaut Barbie I found on sale nearly a year ago. She also received a Cupcake Kitchen, a Wonder Woman board book, and an Alice in Wonderland costume. Love you, Jem!

But you’re not here for me talking about me, you’re here for linky links. Let us proceed!

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Home for the second day in a row with a flu-sick seven year old. It’s not fun. Poor thing has high temperatures and even higher misery levels. At least yesterday, Jem was at daycare, but today she’s home, she’s cranky and bored because her sister is a whole lot of no fun, and she feels ripped off because she was expecting a fun day of Glammer adventures today (I told my mum to stay away from the quarantine zone).

All this, and Raeli missed school pictures today too! We’re all pretty blah.

So the house is on full sick day mode – the freezer is full of homemade icy poles, the larder is overflowing with croissants and jelly beans (essential supplies, along with lemon squash and butter menthols) and I’ve cracked out the new Young Justice DVD I picked up from Big W the other day. It’s pretty good so far, though… gender issues ahoy! I look forward to when their lineup gets a bit more balance in it. One girl is not enough, especially when she isn’t introduced until after ALL the boys.

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Doctor Who, especially the classic show, has a reputation for being a bit sexist. Which is hardly surprising, considering that it is a product of its time across so many different decades. We lucked out in the late sixties when a classic battle of the sexes episode (including a scene where Jamie spanks Zoe, Taming of the Shrew style) failed to be made. But with such a paternal structure, whereby the Doctor is male and also the character who knows most about everything most of the time, and the employment of such strategic companion costumes as the mini-skirt and, in the 80′s, the mini-skirt AND boob tube combination (not to mention poor Peri in her leotard and shorts) it certainly doesn’t escape that taint. Even the female characters allowed to be close to the Doctor’s intellectual equal, such as Liz and Romana, are regularly taken down a peg or two because the entire premise of the show is that the Doctor is more capable at what he does (even when being comedically bad at what he does) than anyone else.

There’s a reason that more action figures have been made of Leela in her leathers and Peri in her leotard-with-shorts than any other Doctor Who companions. And let’s not get into the recent revelations that Jon Pertwee insisted on a recast of the role of Sarah Jane Smith, because the actress cast before Elisabeth Sladen was too tall, and he liked to perform against a physically small woman, one he could be seen to physically protect. Ahem.

But there’s one sexist trope that, narratively, Doctor Who almost never used, and looking back over some of the rather dodgy decisions made by the show and its almost all-male writing tradition, it’s quite impressive that they didn’t. They almost never killed the girl.

[Spoilers follow for a bunch of Classic & New Who]
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