My baby is one year old today. It’s been a mad, jam-packed year of broken nights and novel deadlines, of manuscript papers and dirty nappies and really, really hard work squeezed into impossibly tiny spaces.

It’s also been a year of great joy, of watching this new child grow into herself, of watching Raeli grow into being a big sister.

Jem, otherwise known as Jemimacakes, Babycakes, Jem-Jem, Mima, My Mima, Jemmels, La La and Bunny Girl, is one hell of a person. She is full of energy, a crawler and an intriguer where Raeli was a much gentler soul. Jem never met a power cable she didn’t want to chew, and my that gets old pretty fast. Her favourite trick is yanking out the ear buds of my iPod. Her colour is orange, which is something I never expected. (I kind of hope she does go through a pink stage when she’s 3 otherwise there’s a crate of handmedown clothes waiting for her that will make her very unhappy)

She is crawling, pulling herself up on furniture, and for a few floaty and exciting moments yesterday, was standing on her own.

She’s a Gooner girl through and through, and while she didn’t get much choice in being an Arsenal fan, she most certainly considers her fluffy soccer ball to be one of her favourite toys. She recently discovered the deep love of hitting an empty biscuit tin with a pair of chopsticks, and took to drumming with alarming vigour.

She can say Mama and Dadoo and Ra-ra or Rae. She can clap, just, and wave, almost.

When watching Xena with me, her hands move as if she’s trying to figure out the sword moves. That could be a problem later.

It’s important, as deadlines crunch together and I fight for every spare moment to work in, that I stop and relish the time I get to spend with this tiny precious person, who won’t be a baby much longer.

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I linked yesterday to Tehani Wessely’s reading of my story “Relentless Adaptations” from the upcoming Twelfth Planet Press anthology Sprawl. Only commented on it in passing, because I hadn’t actually listened to it yet! But I did today, on my way to and from a baby playgroup (very appropriate) and it was so lovely to hear it!

This is a story I am especially proud of because it’s the first piece of new writing I produced after Jem was born, and like my story “The Scent of Milk” was for Raeli, it’s a story that sums up the very specific feelings of having a new baby in your life. In both cases I deliberately tried to infuse the story with as much of the crazy that was whirling in my head at the time, in order to capture the moment.

With “Scent of Milk” I was overwhelmed by the closeness with my new baby, and how quickly she seemed to change day to day. I was late in my pregnancy when the “baby Montana” kidnapping hit the news, and while the story resolved happily, I found myself obsessing about what it must be like to miss out on a few days, let alone weeks, of your baby at that age. That turned of course into a story about changelings, and a mother’s hunt to get her baby back no matter what.

This time around, my thoughts were mostly about just coping with it all: with sleep deprivation, the great sibling balancing act, and trying to get back to work. There’s also that deep suspicion that everyone else is somehow doing better at the whole parenting gig than you are… and mixed in with that was books, writing, reading, and the business. I wanted to write a near future science fiction story that predicted what bookshops might look like in five years time, once the Espresso Book Machine and print-on-demand became more readily available, while at the same time “predicting” a rather alarming result from the current literary trend of mashing up classic books with supernatural movie tropes.

It was so lovely to hear the story read today and realise that actually, it’s exactly what I wanted to do with that story, and to top it off it’s read by Tehani, who is not only a good friend, but a suburban mum who, like me, had a new baby in the last year and understands a lot of what the story is trying to do.

Books and babies, babies and books. Luckily we were born with two arms, so we can juggle both.

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“Relentless Adaptations” can be heard here, and will be published in Sprawl, an anthology of suburban fantasy, edited by Alisa Krasnostein, due out in time for Aussiecon in September 2010.

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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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.

Maureen Johnson has written a great manifesto about how she is not and never intended to become a brand – she elaborates on what’s wrong with that way of thinking (which is ultimately self-defeating, authors who get too obsessive about Branding Themselves tend to put potential readers off) and how the best way to promote yourself on the internet is to be genuinely having fun with the platforms you use. Not a new concept – this is something that Jeff VanderMeer among others has written about – but Maureen being Maureen, the message here is not only loud and clear but extremely entertaining to read.

Colleen Mondor at Chasing Ray follows up this post with the deeply ironic story of an author who had been told to brand herself “just like Maureen Johnson” and looks a bit more at the actual issue of promotions in a world where over-branding labels you as insincere.

Branding and marketing are things that authors tend to worry about a lot! How do you promote yourself without coming across as too promote-y?

Maureen’s example of an author so busy trying to sell herself and her message that she’s missed out on a chance to join a conversation is a good lesson to writers, I think – something to try to avoid in ourselves, like reciting “don’t be Anne Rice on Amazon” as a mantra when dealing with critical/inaccurate reviews. Or is that just me?

I think it’s tricky in particular because the internet has changed what many readers want to see from authors. The “professional, flawless demeanour” that many authors display on shiny websites (and perhaps used to display on TV chat shows) can appear hopelessly old-fashioned, and indeed there’s a new generation of authors whose web presence revolves entirely around a tell-all personal blog or a handful of other social media. And of course, many shades in between. I know that I am genuinely startled to discover that an author I am searching for information about doesn’t have a website or blog at all – and it still happens!

As an author myself, especially with a book to promote, I am often super self-conscious at how I am using the internet to promote myself – is it too much, am I being obnoxious, am I saying too much, am I not saying enough? Everyone does it differently. While I don’t go in for the ‘brand’ concept myself(anyone who reads my blog regularly knows that consistency is not my superpower) it’s more because I would be no good at it than because I disapprove of the concept. The word ‘brand’ gets thrown around a lot when I’m talking to Alisa about Twelfth Planet Press because she literally is creating a brand, she’s trying to establish a business which is distinct from herself as a person: it’s about connecting her publishing house in people’s minds with quality fiction, with well-made books, and anything else is just decoration on top of that. Branding makes sense in that context.

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It’s funny, you can be keyed up and preparing for a big event like, oh I don’t know, a book launch, for weeks and weeks, and then suddenly it’s over in under two hours. Blink blink blink. I’m pretty sure it was good, because we came home, got the kids to bed and then promptly collapsed in a heap of exhaustion.

That might have something to do with the cold meds I’m on.

The Hobart Bookshop put on a lovely, cruisy book event. New authors, I recommend you fling yourself on their mercy! They give good launch. The bookshop started filling up slowly with lots of people I love and quite a few people I don’t even know. The former is lovely and comforting and heartwarming and all those things, and the latter is rather startling.

I didn’t do a head count but my honey thinks there were about 50 or so people there – I know I signed around 30 books!

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Power and Majesty is officially released tomorrow. In case, you know, you missed the memo. I feel like I’m in a surreal kind of bubble at the moment. Raeli and I seem to have spent the last three days in our pyjamas, watching TV, baking cupcakes and playing maths games on the computer. Both my girls have been sick all weekend and now I’ve come down with it too, nursing a cold all day.

My honey, when I reported this to him, responded with alarm. “But what about your VOICE?” Hehehe, good to know he appreciates my attempts to make myself the queen of podcasts. I’m due to be interviewed by Annie Warburton tomorrow on the Real Radio, so his concerns are valid, but still. I think my voice will hold up, and if my nose is bright red only Annie will know the truth.

No reports yet of the book actually in bookshops! Does it really exist? I’m starting to get that edge of nervousness now.

At least I know what I’m wearing for the launch. Probably.

Did I mention that Jem is upright now? Not precisely walking, but pulling herself up on furniture at any opportunity. Why yes, that extends her reach quite a bit. Why yes, I am very proud and very afraid all at the same time. The dollhouse really has to go away, and many other of Raeli’s beloved toys-with-small-pieces.

I suspect this may be a veeeeery long week. And by week, I mean the less than three days between now and the book launch, when I get to see lots of you! And hopefully big piles of my books. Boy, it would be embarrassing if they didn’t turn up from the publisher in time, wouldn’t it? Not that I’m worried. At all.

I think I need more cupcakes.

Bought today:
3 black garments to be worn under red velvet jacket [note to self, check that red velvet jacket still exists]
1 black (non-nursing) bra to be worn under black garments [note to self, provide snacks for baby at launch]
1 red satin snood for hair
1 pearl hair tie
4 assorted animal masks/ear and nose sets, to adorn one picky five-year-old and a baby
1 toy dragon to entertain baby during shopping expedition

Still to buy:
Bobby pins
Eyebrow pencil for the drawing-on of whiskers

Still to make:
A tail (lion) at five-year-old’s request, presumably to go with the mouse ears.

Sound of my daughter purring, wearing cat’s ears with her school uniform and a black furry bowtie:
Priceless

I am now 32. The day has been celebrated by much and varying kinds of cake. It started out pretty badly after Jem pulled her becoming-traditional-Friday-night-teething-from-hell which meant basically I had to wake up every 1-2 hours to feed her or daub Bonjela on her gums and then feed her, and I woke up feeling wrung out and gnawed-upon. My honey and I horse traded for recovery naps and I won on account of being the one who had been chewed all night, plus the fact that I was the one closest to homicidal.

All in all, it meant that my lazy morning baking cupcakes with my eldest daughter turned into a dash to the finish line with green food colouring and cream cheese icing everywhere.

Food colouring. Just say no. Your carpet will thank you. On an unrelated note, why do icing nozzles not have freaking lids?

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A double birthday party weekend is always something to be trepidatious about. Ours started badly, with Jem pretty much screaming the whole night on Friday and continuing to wake up every hour or so through Saturday morning, when we were already wrecked. I pled ‘too wobbly to drive’ and sent my honey off to escort Raeli to her first party of the season, and stayed home to cuddle the screamy baby and watch Becoming Jane.

I enjoyed the movie, especially for an angst-ridden James McAvoy, (and Jack Harkness’ daughter playing a widowed countess! And the lovely grizzled Joe Anderson as the disreputable Austen brother! Also Anne Hathaway was not at all bad, I always forget she is the least annoying and most capable of the current breed of starlets) though it is very strange to watch a Jane Austen pastiche which is not allowed to have a happy ending. It was like watching Austen’s narratives battle with real history, because you could tell the movie really wanted to give Jane the traditional ending, everything was straining towards it, and at one point I was pretty much convinced that it was going severely AU… in any case, it took my mind off the screamy baby.

We have pretty much decided that the screaming was down to fangs rather than intestinal complaints, though it is not unlikely that it was indeed both. Anyway, after a very unpleasant 24 hours she seems mostly back to normal, which is a huge relief.

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