It’s a while since I have checked in with myself about what I’m doing and how I do it, so it was kind of fascinating to me to roll out these answers.

“I usually have one primary and a couple of secondary projects. This is the first year in a very long time I have allowed myself to have multiple projects, none of which are headline acts. I can write half a chapter of a novel, or 200 words each across 5 short stories if I want. Later in the year, as my projects consolidate, I intend to be a bit firmer about prioritising certain novels, but right now I’m letting myself write quite freely which is – terrifying and enchanting at the same time.”

I knew I was doing something completely different this year, but it hadn’t sunk in quite how much I have changed the way I work for 2012. It could be scary, except that I’ve been doing this long enough to know that my methods are always fluid, always changing. What works for me now is not necessarily what will work even one book from now, let alone three.

The big thing looming in my life is that I have less than two years now before Jemima starts school, though her first year is likely to be more disruptive than constructive to my writing, as I’d be exchanging 2 daycare days of 8:30 am to 5:00 pm for 2 school days of 8:30 pm to 2:30 pm (the actual time available to me, not necessarily school hours) plus one extra of I think 8:30am to about 12-1pm, so I won’t be gaining net hours as such.

But the year after that… day after day of glorious empty house!

Not that I want to wish away her early childhood or anything, but it will definitely be the end of one era and the dawn of a greater productivity for me. That’s the point at which I will have to address things like ergonomics which I hand-wavy about now because I never get to spend more than an hour working on anything.

Yes, I should be writing. Instead, I am blogging. This is how I write.

Today is Pilates Day, an activity I took up when Justine Larbalestier started evangelising about how important it was for writers to start that kind of stuff BEFORE developing RSI or some other work related injury. When I started, it was amazing how many people were there to fix something awful they had done to their bodies. I would feel a bit abashed about being there pre-emptively, but it seems the thing to do.

Pilates is one of those things I had to circumvent a lot of guilt to allow myself to do – because it’s something that’s about ME and not the family. Especially when I was using household money to pay my way – but since our last big budget rehaul, I’ve been paying for it myself and buying less things on the internet in order to do so, which means I feel less like I have to justify This Thing.

(I know, by the way, that I shouldn’t have to justify it, and what’s good for me is good for the family and so on, but logic is logic and guilt is guilt)

Managing guilt is a huge aspect to being a working mother. Or a mother full stop, I guess. (it’s also one of the hardest aspects to reconcile with being a feminist – what works in theory often falls down in practice, and when the baby’s screaming, theory doesn’t help much!) I find it interesting when talking to other mothers that we all have different lines of guilt, those which we cross regularly and feel bad about, those which we try not to cross and feel AWFUL about, and those which we are okay with.

One of my lines is that I don’t use paid daycare for Pilates. I only have two days a week for the 2 year old in daycare, and I need those days for writing! I also use that time for shopping, housework, chores etc. but I’m well aware of how much writing and writing-related work I have to do that doesn’t quite fit into those days. Daycare days are my days where getting shit done is a lot easier than any other time.

I’m lucky that I have no guilt at all associated with daycare. But then, my kids have always loved daycare, and benefited from it. Our local centre is a really good one. And it constantly annoys me as a feminist that, when telling people that my daughter is in daycare, I always feel the need to tell them STRAIGHT AWAY how much she enjoys it, and the direct benefits she gets from going there, regardless of the whole ‘mummy needs to be sane, mummy needs to get her work done, no matter what’ issue. I shouldn’t justify myself, but… I guess there’s a hint of pre-emptive defensiveness sloshing around in there.

So lucky to have sociable children, though! I have witnessed the pain and stress of parents who have to fight their kids (and their own overwhelming guilt) to leave them at daycare, and it’s dreadful to see them go through that. I empathise deeply.

As we figured out on our last budget, it’s a bit dicey as to whether we can afford that second day. But one is NOT ENOUGH. Our compromise was that I would try to contribute the equivalent of that one day in my occasional income over the year (the kind that arrives in random cheques, fits and starts). I always knew daycare was worth it, so never really paid attention to quite how much it costs, but we’re talking $3000 over the year for each day. So, um, yes. There’s another level of guilt associated with those days – I always feel the pressure to make them REALLY REALLY PRODUCTIVE.

That is what we call Useful Guilt.

This, by the way, is my own way of looking at the world. Other people can spend their daycare days however they like! Mother guilt is kind of a personal, specific thing. Like body image, it’s amazing how many women can be deeply critical of themselves and yet happily encourage others to not feel bad at all, without even noticing the disconnect.

I couldn’t attend my weekly Pilates class if not for the voluntary service of one of my parents. This is another common thread of modern motherhood – reliance on the next generation up for unpaid daycare and babysitting, in order for our own family to function. The upside of this is that my Mum and Jem get some time together weekly (and it’s an arrangement that doesn’t have to change during the school holidays, which is a major plus – she can just include Raeli in the morning’s plans). There are other direct benefits – Mum is flexible, so I can extend my Pilates class into getting other chores done, parcels posted, PO Box checked, and even having lunch occasionally with my honey. Plus she always does my washing up, and sometimes cleans the floor too. MY MOTHER IS AWESOME.

The key to making Tuesdays work for me is to not plan to get much of anything done. Which is fine except when I have a daily writing target I have to reach.

My Dad chips in with at least one Raeli pick up a week, which extends one of my paid daycare days to 7.5 hours entirely child free instead of having to do the school run with my older child hours before I have to pick up the younger one. Which is fine until soccer season starts. At least Raeli can occupy herself for a couple of hours – far more than when she was younger. She has discovered comics and (in the last fortnight) chapter books, so hooray!

A huge decision this year, which turned out to be more drama than I hoped, was to move Raeli’s after school gymnastics from a Jem daycare day to a NOT Jem daycare day. It means a hideous Wednesday now, as it turns out that the cute little cage full of toys to occupy stray children is busier than a traffic intersection, and Jem didn’t want a bar of it. She spent the whole gymnastics session clinging to me and eating potato chips pointedly. But the pay off is that Thursday now is calm and streamlined – last year we had Raeli after school activities on both daycare days which was a bit frustrating.

All dull details for my readers, I expect! But the upshot is that all this juggling means that time is incredibly valuable to me. My time is money – because a good chunk of my writing time is paid for, by me or by our household budget, and thus is money not paying off the mortgage. So that adds a certain pressure not only for me to be personally productive, but to get paid for my work. I think a lot harder now before doing favours for people, or volunteering time.

I didn’t do a single hour of classroom help last year, which I felt extremely bad about, because we’re supposed to have that time, aren’t we? Supposed to give that time to our school and our kids. Without parent help, for instance, the classroom is so pushed that kids don’t get tested on their spelling. So there was a bunch of guilt. But not enough guilt to give up my rare, precious paid-for hours.

All this is great but it makes for a lousy writing day – often I don’t get home until 12-1pm, and of course I have to leave the house at 2:30 to pick up Raeli from school. Luckily my mother is good at getting Jem down for her nap early – later naps are starting to become a drama for us, because if she doesn’t fall asleep until 1:30, dragging her up for the school run becomes miserable for everyone.

These are the things I think about when people say ‘how on earth do you get any writing done?’

My answers, given with suitable facial indications as to how serious I’m being:

“Well, I don’t, really. Have you seen how many books other writers can get done in a year?”
“Panic = adrenalin.”
“I’m a really bad housewife.” (true, though I make more effort since podcasts)
“Daycare helps.”
“My mum cleans my house.”
“I neglect my children.” (mostly not true, though it felt like that the day my toddler punched my laptop)
“Oh, well, you know.” (translation: if I don’t write, I won’t write, and that’s not an option, what do you people who don’t write novels do with all that time pouring out of your ears?)

Mostly when people ask how I get my writing done, I resist the urge to laugh bitterly in their faces, and then try to tactfully answer so as not to in any way imply that they are in no way at fault for not writing novels themselves in the spare time they don’t have. Which means I completely never take the credit for all the work I do, and the effort I put into that work.

When you love something, you make time for it. I chew pieces off the ends of other pieces of time, and jam them all together with sticky tape. I never really stop and smell the roses, because I’m too busy trying to squeeze my time dry, three times over. I have no hobbies that aren’t, somehow, also work. Sometimes I let my kids watch too much TV. I never do enough housework. I don’t get enough exercise. I expect a lot of my partner.

I write because I write because I write.

I’m not sure why that it – the process stuff I understand, because I’m so wrapped up in the -aargh- phase of finishing my new novel that I’m not ready to talk about it. And, you know, my kids are cute and all, but there’s only so many pictures I can post of them dressed as Doctor Who characters.

Still, I’d like to continue talking about home and domestic stuff, if only to continue my theme of – hey, writing and parenting, go together pretty well but it’s HARD sometimes.

I didn’t work this weekend at all. I often don’t – taking weekends has been a big and important step for me, and one I’ve only come to in recent years. Partly it was deprogramming from the PhD years, and partly a symptom of working from home – I’ve always been self-employed/freelance/creative and that means you never have a structured day off. You have to make one.

As a parent, the weekend is the time when I have a fellow parent home all day, and there’s a lovely decadence in that. Baby smells whiffy, there’s a 50-50 chance I don’t have to deal with it! But because of that, I regularly slip into the bad habit of assuming I will get more done on the weekend than I actually do, and feeling on Monday like I’m WAY BEHIND which is stressful and horrid.

Also there’s the thing where, during the precious Nap Hours that still occur most days (that’s when the 2 year old naps, not the rest of us), my seven year old daughter quite reasonably expects that sometimes we’ll do something together. Something Jem-free. I had no qualms about telling her to go read a comic or something, Mummy was busy, during the school holidays, but now she’s back at school, there are very few Mummy-Raeli-Jemfree hours.

So I try to keep my expectations of the weekend to a minimum, unless I have a dire deadline. This weekend, once I got the head’s up that we were going to have crazy 35 degree days with it not cooling down much at night (a rare occurrence in the Tassie summer) I decided that okay, I wasn’t going to try to get ANYTHING done this weekend at all, except for maybe catching up on my bookshelf reading.

Which was fine except that I forgot I do have a daily wordcount quota to reach – this is not a particular ‘writing this thing’ month for me, because of school holidays in the first half and working up to my big Fury revision (apparently I need to take a run up) but I had a bunch of small projects to work on so my plan was, starting from the 11th of the month, I would write 500 words a day on fiction.

My overall goal for the year is 200K of fiction, but that’s based on 25K a month from April to September (my sustainable active novel writing target) and then a successful Nanowrimo in November. However, writing 500 words a day from the 11th to the 29th (on things I had to write ANYWAY, chapters for a co-writing project and short stories, mainly) meant I could get a 10,000 word head start on my year.

And, this weekend, I fell down on it. Because 500 words is so small, I can manage it mostly with an hour or so (sometimes more, sometimes less) of concentration, or a whole bunch of 15 minute bursts of concentration, and there was no concentrating happening at all this last weekend. Mostly it was icypoles, Doctor Who Monopoly, and endless baths for the children to make up for the fact that they couldn’t go outside.

But with only a few days to go before the end of the month, and a hard deadline for one particular short story, I panicked yesterday evening and drilled out the 1000 words (on the right thing!) in a moment of adrenalin fuelled madness.

Sure, it doesn’t sound like much. It’s half a good Nanowrimo day. But I am out of practice, and it was hot enough to melt everything between my ears. So I take that as the victory it is.

I really need to finish that short story today.

But I don’t know yet whether my after school babysitting option is a go or not, and the difference that makes is an extra 2.5 hours in my day. 5 hours, or 7.5 hours. When you also need to clean the house, cook the dinner, catch up on a week’s worth of email and… and… and…

Really, I don’t have time to write this blog entry. But unlike everything else I have to do today, it’s finished!

I let my writing muscles atrophy.

It took me a while to realise and accept that this was what had happened. You see, for the last several years, pretty much since I signed on the line for the Creature Court trilogy, I have been leaping from deadline to deadline. There’s something sparkly and marvellous about a deadline imposed upon you from someone else – not only do they pay you, but there’s also a level of accountability in it that I find personally inspiring. I moved fairly seamlessly from being the queen of self-imposed deadlines to, well, being fairly competent at meeting other people’s deadlines. Having a baby in the middle of process meant that the deadlines grew harder and harder to reach, and I occasionally had to move one or two, but on the whole I think I did a pretty bloody good job of it, especially as the deadlines for different books started imposing on each other.

This year, the deadlines began to drift further and further apart, especially as the book slipped further back into the schedule than we had originally allowed for. I had time to write new things! This was especially important as one of those new things, a novel called Fury, had netted me two separate grants. Hooray, I had time to write it! Better yet, I could take the time I needed to make it rather good.

And that’s where the rot set in. I think ‘time to write’ must be one of the most misleading phrases in the English language. Because even though I now had two paid days of daycare a week, somehow I never quite found the time to write.

(“How do you do it all?” they ask. “You must be really disciplined,” they say. “I’d love to have time to write a book.”)

Oh, I wrote. I wrote myself in slow circles, trying to find the new book. I told myself it was hard because it was the first time I had started something new in five years (though “Siren Beat” was new, and that got itself written crazy fast, because I was so in love with the character voice… the same character voice I’m trying to find again, for Fury). I told myself that I had plenty of time.

‘Plenty of time’ is even worse than ‘time to write’.

When I wrote, I wrote fast, and I think well. I found my characters, and my story. I did all the things I wanted to do with the book. But… it wasn’t actually growing very fast. There was something wrong with the beginning, that had to be fixed. Then something wrong with chapter three. You can’t move ahead when chapter three isn’t perfect, right, right?

I used to be good at this. I used to be able to knock over 20K a month, easily. And somehow I had made it halfway through the year, and still couldn’t hit that first 20K mark, let alone a second, or a third. Somehow, I had bought into my own image of the kind of writer I was, and assumed somehow that That Person would get the book written. While I was getting the other stuff done.

When you only have two days of paid daycare a week, it’s horribly easily to over-estimate how much you can get done in those days. Like, your week’s worth of writing, AND catching up on the housework, AND taking your daughter to after school activities, AND picking up things from the post office, exercising, reading, sewing, planning dinner, shopping, etc.

Until you remember, hang on, it’s actually only five and a half hours, twice a week.

And… maybe you need to write more than that.

Maybe (this time in a very, very tiny voice), maybe you should be writing EVERY FREAKING DAY.

“Write every day” is one of the more controversial of Heinlein’s famous writing rules (the others being Finish Everything You Start and Submit Everything You Finish). Many pro writers are understandably scathing about the concept of writing every day because a) they are well practiced and disciplined enough not to need rules like that and b) they understand only too well that forcing yourself to write every freaking day is a good way to fill your novels up with timewasting crap, and a bunch of words that only existed because you guilted yourself into writing them.

On the other hand, ‘write every day’ is a terribly useful rule for people who have a tendency to faff about and get no writing done. Sometimes, imposing a rule on yourself like ‘write every day’ is the only way to get anything written at all. What I hadn’t realised was that, as soon as the external deadlines had dropped away, I relaxed far too much, and slid from being one of those professional ‘I can write regularly and produce the goods on time’ writers into one of those faffing about ‘oh I wish I had the time to write’ writers.

Holy crap.

So I decided to get my act together. I had let my writing muscles atrophy, to the point where even getting 200 words on the page was painful, and boring, and made me want to do housework instead. I had forgotten how to be a writer.

Take heed, this could happen to you.

Obviously the way to get your writing muscles back, as with any skill, is to exercise them. To practice. To pretend to be a writer hard enough, that I make it happen, all over again. That’s why I signed up for the Clarion Write-a-Thon (external deadlines are my friend!). My aim is to write 5000 words a week, ideally by writing 1000 for five days in a row, then collapsing for two, then doing it again.

The first day was agony. Every 200 hundred words made my head spin. Seriously, how had my writing attention span got so low? It used to be I could easily get to 800 or even 1200 before I started double checking my word count and admiring the weather out the window.

My honey actually watched me on the second day, as he was home from work with a cold, and he was horrified. It was, admittedly, gruesome. 60 words in, I was whining for a cup of tea and coming up with excuses to, in fact, skip the day altogether. “What the hell happened to you?” he demanded.

What indeed.

Today, Day Three, was better. I went to Pilates in the morning and spent most of the hour (when not whining about how tired my inner thighs were, or squeaking with alarm at the new stretch I was being challenged with) dealing with the novel that had not only completely taken over my brain, was demanding I re-structure it from scratch.

I will, I told it, but only after I’ve written my 1000 words for the day. And, after Pilates, I came home and did exactly that.

The moral of the story is simpler than any rule Heinlein ever coined. It’s Move It, Or Lose It. If you don’t write regularly, it gets harder to write. Or, to be more specific, if *I* don’t write regularly, it gets harder to write. Right now, I can’t be trusted to do anything but follow a set of rules, as slavishly as possible, in the hopes that I get my skills back in record time, and remember how this book writing thing works.

One word in front of the other. Rinse, repeat, until done.

Then do it again.

====

If you would like to encourage me as I retrain myself as a writer, you can sponsor me at the Clarion Write-a-Thon. No amount too small, but do let me know if you are sponsoring me! I also accept encouraging comments, attagirls and anecdotes about your own times of writerfail.

I’ve been having trouble joining my friends in their enthusiasm and excitement about Swancon this year. Not because I’m not looking forward to it – it’s a CON, and I always have an awesome time. The reason my feelings are so mixed is because I am completely fixated on the fact that I have to say goodbye to my girls for four days. And um. Haven’t *entirely* managed to wean my 19 month old yet. So basically whenever I think about Swancon, I think GUILT GUILT GUILT GUILTY GUILT.

We experimented last night with my honey comforting the baby in the night, offering her a drink of water and a cuddle that was not boobie-related. She was unimpressed.

So, you know. GUILT GUILT GUILT GUILT.

Worldcon was wonderful in many ways, but hard, and there was just as much guilt from all the small goodbyes than there will be this time from one big one. I know in my heart that as soon as I’m on the plane and away, I will be able to enjoy the freakish luxury of four days in which the only person I have to look after in myself.

(secretly, I’m looking forward to the 5 hour plane trip – so many hours on my OWN to listen to stories and read books without someone jumping on me or needing a drink of water. Possibly *I* will be the one receiving drinks of water from someone else. UNTOLD LUXURY)

But then I think about the fact that my girls may well be having the annual Easter Egg hunt at Glammer’s house without me and I crumple, just a little…

I haven’t paid much attention to what is actually happening at Swancon – a bunch of my friends are going to be there and I’ll get to talk non-stop about books, science fiction, publishing, and podcasting. Not on panels or anything – I have no idea what my programme will look like – but to a crowd of my favourite people. Really, I just heard ‘con’ and I was there – plus I get to share a room with Alex, and we’ll be working hard to kidnap Alisa from her duties as chair from time to time, just so we get a chance to hang out with her too. Did I mention that I still haven’t *met* Amanda or Cranky Nick or Chris in person yet? Virtual will become reality!

But it’s probably time I looked at what the convention has to offer.

Swancon 36 – Natcon 50!

*swish, fancy hotel with actual room for all the stuff a convention needs
*Guests of Honour Sean Williams, Justina Robson, Ellen Datlow, Sarah Xu and many more invited guests.
*Writerstream – a whole stream of programming on Saturday 23 April, devoted to writers trying to break into the industry, with workshops/presentations as well as panels and discussions.
*Romancing the West – a SECOND stream of programming for writers, this time with a focus on romance, paranormals, etc.
*Edustream – on the Friday, a series of professional development workshops and panels with a focus on the uses of SF in schools for teachers and librarians as well as those with an interest in YA.
*Future Imperfect Art Show, various Awards ceremonies, everything else you expect from a Natcon

Okay. Now I’m getting a teeny bit excited. ROLL ON EASTER.

Apart from the change in theme, from fairies to superheroes, I had planned to run the party the same as last year: simple food involving opening packets, I don’t make anything myself except the cake and fairy bread, sausages on the barbie for kids & parents alike, my Mum madly running the games (everyone needs a Glammer come birthday season) and no fuss. Naturally it got far more complicated than that, not least because, well, do we remember how last year I had a little 5 month old baby? THIS YEAR she’s a running, jumping, bouncing, psyched up little dynamo, and it took the 15 or so adults at the party to keep track of her. I’m not used to a feisty baby. Raeli was energetic but not one for hurling herself off furniture. Jem topped off the party by eating everything. Seriously. All the things. Once the big kids had abandoned the picnic cloths and gone to play games, she plonked herself down and ate more than her own body weight in chips, cheezels, biscuits, watermelon and… oh, I don’t even know. Hear that? That’s the kind of mother I am. I have no idea what she ate. I just know that she looked really, really smug about it.

(Jem’s costume for the party, incidentally, was a black size 7 t-shirt with the Batman logo on it, which I picked up at Target and Raeli refused to wear because of her sixth sense that it was in fact a boy’s t-shirt. Sigh. Still, it made an awesome mini-dress on my baby)

From my point of view, the highlight and most successful moment was the icecream cake, which I had made with minor help from Raeli. It was topped with a rice paper Justice League picture acquired from eBay, and had two litres of peppermint choc chip icecream and two of vanilla. Awesome. My honey was in charge of cutting the cake in question (in our household he is put in charge of anything I can categorise under “physics” which is a surprising amount actually) and did very well with managing the hungry hordes of children, and the select group among them who had very firm preferences as to which superhero they wanted to take a bite out of.

Raeli got the bit with Wonder Woman on it, which involved quite complicated physics (SEE!) and meant she had to wait nearly to the end, thanks to WW being front and centre on the cake. She was very patient.

I have been delighted by how she has bonded with her rather lovely Wonder Woman costume, since receiving it as a Christmas present. She often wears it just because, and I love that she will happily go off to the shops dressed as a superhero. I had thought all that random dressing up stuff was behind us, as she hadn’t worn a fairy or mermaid outfit out in public for years, except for school events, parties and of course, Mummy’s book launches.

She also got a trampoline for Christmas and I associate the Wonder Woman costume with all the bouncing. I particularly love that when asked to pose for a photograph, she will do a strong superhero stance, gauntlets crossed and biceps flexed.

Oh, I love my girl.

Can’t believe she’s six, really. Obviously we got here by the long route, and her sixness comes as less of a surprise to me than to those of our friends who don’t see her every day. But she’s so big now, and so formed. She has such strong opinions and preferences. She can delight and frustrate me within the span of thirty seconds or so. She has some incredibly powerful fears that have at times proven quite debilitating. But then I turn around, and she is displaying great strength, or caring, or even a little courage here and there.

She is very smart, especially with language, and picks up phrases and words to mull over. She is constantly asking me what things mean, and how things work (if it’s Physics related she gets to wait for Daddy to come home!) and this year, this year is the year she really put together the whole reading thing, to the point that she can actually read whole books by herself. The gift she was most delighted by this year, amongst all the bling and furry animals and sparkly goodness, was a reading light shaped like a penguin, which aids her in her quest to Secretly Read Books After Lights Out. We are pretending to be very disapproving of this, which makes it even better!

Raeli has taken to the whole sister thing like a duck to water. She adores her Jem-Jem, and takes great pleasure in teaching her things, or discovering new things about her. Though she also appreciates the days when Jem goes off to daycare, and Raeli gets Mummy time to herself.

Which is WHY I was so delighted today when I tried to suggest to my editor that I take to the end of February for my Book 3 edits, which would give me a whole fortnight after school goes back to lay into them substantially, and she insisted I should take more time. So my deadline is 15 March, which means I actually get to spend the next few weeks of school holiday not feeling wracked with guilt about balancing work and motherhood. I get to play with my girls!

SCHOOL’S OUT FOR SUMMER!

I’ve blogged a lot about the juggling act of mothering and writing (mostly under my Mama Writer tag), but new mum Diana Peterfreund has summed the topic up beautifully in a blog post entitled “Two Professions.” She’s absolutely right about the similarity of unhelpful/constraining/overly specific advice that new mothers and new writers receive, and the filters you have to develop to find what will work for you.

There’s a great post here on ten of the best female comics creators of the year – referencing some stuff I know about and an awful lot I don’t. Including, omg, second collected volume of Castle Waiting? Let me at it!

Meanwhile, the first piece of promotion for upcoming ABC “gay geek sitcom” Outland, written by Boxcutters’ own John Richards, was on i09 of all places! I have been fascinated to listen to John’s updates on the podcast on getting a show made, including such gems as how to rewrite scripts about a Star Trek fan club without actually mentioning Star Trek because it makes the lawyers nervous, or how to stage an entire gay pride parade for a day’s filming (hint: Twitter!)

I raised my eyebrows a bit about the whole Big Bang Theory comparison, mostly because I find that show quite alienating as a woman (I am coming around to it but the first episode I saw was so offensive to my feminist sensibilities that I bounced off HARD and it’s difficult to recover from something like that) and I am trusting John to do a better job of making a show I want to watch! Though for his sake obviously it would be awesome if the show did as well as Big Bang Theory… I think it’s vaguely promising at least that while there is only one female main character in the show, she is gay and a geek as well as the male cast, which includes her in the premise rather than the weird ‘smart people to the left, pretty people to the right’ vibe that Big Bang Theory gives off.

Also I don’t remember if I linked to this already, but Rowena has done a huge interview with me (possibly it wasn’t that huge before I got my hands on the questions, but I talk a LOT) over at the Ripping Ozzie Reads blog, and if you can make it to the end I am giving away a free copy of Power and Majesty and Siren Beat.

I was pleased that I managed to make the month so productive, despite the urge to collapse in a heap in the wake of finally, finally, finally finishing the draft of book 3 (which it appears is most likely to be titled Reign of Beasts). Thanks to my List of Doom, I kept writing, putting together a draft of a publishing proposal for Fury to be polished up in the New Year, I started editing Blueberry again, which is going to be my summer project, I read books which had been archived on my shelves far too long, and I sewed – bookmarks for a friend’s commission, finishing the top of a baby quilt, and the beginnings of a new crazy quilt.

And you know, in the midst of all that I pushed through my copy edits for The Shattered City (Book 2), and prepared for & taught a one day course on writing fantasy novels.

One of the items on my list was to write a short story. Originally I had another plan for that, but then Alisa went and rejected two stories from a project we were doing together, which left me having to start from scratch! (In a good way. I am hugely excited now about what I’m doing, and she was totally right to kick those stories to the curb. Good enough is totally not good enough.) One of those stories is now done thanks to the List of Doom, and I have to write the other as soon as I can. I’m in a weird in-between-professional-deadlines space right now, where I don’t know where the next deadline is coming from. I will receive proofs for Book 2 and structural edits for Book 3 at SOME point, and everything will have to be dropped to do them, but I don’t know when. All the more reason to polish off my other necessary jobs ASAP, especially as I only have another fortnight or so before the school holidays hit, and there’s no such thing as a truly productive work day until late February.

But in any case, I did my not-Nano November, and while I never got up the high energy equivalent to writing 50K (as it turned out, writing about 5-6000 words as part of smaller projects was my limit) I managed to complete 34/35 items, and that last one was a crazy quilt square that I could have polished off at the last day if I’d dropped everything to do it, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to prioritise that way.

Once I get this last story done, which I have been plotting and replotting in my head so it’s just about ready to burn up the page, I am officially free of commitments, and I would love to have a little of that freedom before I get publisher deadlines again – one thing I have learned this year is that you can’t use ALL the time you have until the end of a deadline, as other things are always turning up to compete, usually in the last two weeks. I’ve always been one to start slowly and build up momentum to rip through the work at a high pace in those last couple of weeks, and so the stop-start-stop-start work pace this year has thrown me for a loop more than once.

I honestly thought I would never get to the end of Book 3. I seemed to be constantly one month from getting it done, and every time I had to stop and start again, I lost momentum and had to “waste” time scrabbling around and getting my zone back, only to be interrupted with a new urgent task as soon as I got up a decent head of steam.

The best decision I made all year was when those copy edits for book 2 arrived in October and I begged to put them off three weeks or so, so I could get book 3 DONE. Even though technically Book 2 should always be prioritised over Book 3, I had been doing that all year and honestly thought if I stopped writing Book 3 one more time, I wouldn’t be able to get started again. Luckily thanks to the prior rescheduling of Book 2′s publishing date, there was plenty of time to be able to shuffle things that way, and I will always be grateful that my editor let me do things that way. As it turned out, once I sent off Book 3, I was able to get through the copy edits a week earlier than my revised deadline, because they were so surprisingly light – the second structural edit that had so thrown off my schedule earlier in the year had, it seemed, saved time and work at this end. Hooray!

Last year I was writing, writing, trying to get well ahead of my official deadlines because I had my own little bundle of distractions due to be born in August and throw my life into delightful disarray. This year, instead of fighting to get ahead, I was fighting to keep up, because there was this adorable little baby here, cuting for my attention. Plus that big girl, who was nicely packed off at school 5 days a week, but who came crashing back into my life at 2:30 every day unless I had negotiated for someone else to distract her for an hour or two.

Here I am, nearly at the end of the year, nearly able to draw a line under my year’s professional commitments, with two (cough, possibly three) books coming out in 2011. I made it! And yet my biggest achievement for the year feels like it is making friendships with the other parents at school, and my biggest regret is that I didn’t do more in the way of parent help, paying attention to what was going on in Raeli’s classroom. It’s been a hugely disruptive year, thanks to the constant shifting of teachers in and out of their class, and while I have been able to pick up on a lot of the potential problems and issues thanks to communication with other parents, I can see the value now in being inside the classroom and forming a relationship with my daughter’s teacher early on in the year – because you really can’t guarantee that the communication they offer is going to be remotely sufficient.

I think I’ve done a pretty good job of balancing everything, all in all. I’ve made a few assemblies over the year, and turned up to the essential events, the athletics carnival and book week parade, while also dodging out of several (excursions, the cross country, and so on) but I’m really glad that I was able to take some of the pressure off myself in the last few weeks about making the most of every-single-child-free-hour, going along to Raeli’s swimming classes, taking the baby to meet Raeli and her class at recess in the middle of their museum excursio, and volunteering to go in next week to help them bake shortbread while Jem is in daycare.

I really didn’t expect there to be so much expectation about parent participation in the school, and while I don’t think it’s fair to expect quite so much from parents, I can also see the value that the class reaps directly from some parents being able to volunteer and help out. I do have work commitments and can’t afford to get too guilty about what I’m not doing, but I can see it makes a difference to my daughter when I am able to give what time I can, so I want to do more of that next year.

I am regularly reminded of John Howard suggesting that all mothers should be back in full time work the second that their children turn 5 which is why family allowance should stop at that point, and I kind of want to punch him retrospectively – without parental volunteering, fundraising and behind the scenes admin, our lovely little community school would not have well tended grounds, sports equipment, a canteen, a uniform shop, or a good half the current artistic, crafty, cooking & excursion-type activities. Parents also help with reading practice every week. There are an awful lot of school costs which the government is not helping with at all, and it’s the participation of the community that makes Raeli’s school such an awesome one.

Hmm, I think I got sidetracked there. But ultimately, my big discovery for this year was that balancing mothering and professional writing was not just about snatching time from my 24 hour mothering to work, but also snatching time from my work routine in order to value-add to my mothering.

This is not intended to be a slight on any of the hard working parents who don’t or can’t volunteer to participate in school activities – I would be the absolutely last to criticise any parent for making the most of those precious, precious child-free school hours. But I am lucky in that I have more flexibility than most in my work routine, and I have got to a point where I feel I need to train myself out of dropping my children and running away every time I get a chance to do so. They’re only going to be young for so many years, and much though I want to have a huge shelf of books with my name on to mark my progress through the next decade, that’s not all I want.

And I can have it all, right?

[yes, yes, Alisa, going to write that short story now...]

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!

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!