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!

The current edits of Book Two are kicking my arse well and truly – I’m getting the work done, but it’s gone painfully slowly for the first nearly two weeks, and I only have 9 days now before they’re due. You know that thing where people keep asking me how on earth I write with a 5 year old and a baby and I wave my hand airily and say things like ‘oh, I just snatch moments where I can, somehow it all works out?’

Screw that! Obviously I have completely lost whatever knack I used to have for finding time. It doesn’t help that the baby has just moved into the developmental stage which means she needs a person interacting with her pretty much all the time she is awake. I could work in the evenings if I wasn’t already falling asleep by the time Masterchef ends (which coincidentally is about the time I find myself child-free for most of the rest of the evening, except when I don’t). Sometimes Jem will take up to 4 times being put down, screaming, got up again, etc. before she settles down for her night’s sleep, and by the end of it, I’m shattered.

The first week was mostly warming up, and getting to grips with what I had to do. The second was about pushing into a routine and writing new chapters. Now I’m stuck with having to edit 5 chapters a day minimum, no breaks, to get this done. And that means working weekends. No skipping days.

Sometimes it takes me 2 uninterrupted hours to get 5 chapters edited. Sometimes it’s closer to 4. Even that is a mythical number because in my life, there are no uninterrupted hours.

Add to that the general expectation by my children that weekends are times for fun, family, reading, playing, and Mummy not being cranky at them when they ask for things, and the weekend was very, very hard work. It also means I’ve had almost no time to myself – normally the hours snatched from my children on weekends are used to relax and regroup so I can face the week ahead without turning into a gorgon-like creature who tells her 10 month old to make her own damn toast.

I did manage, in the earliest and latest hours of the weekend, to finish my book, the awesome The Privilege of the Sword, which I shall discuss more when I get a chance to do some recreational blogging, and I also finished the Guild comics as iApps which I loved. And there was a bit of socialising, including me getting to cook my own osso bucco recipe which I am very proud of. But, yeah. I am basically going to have to burn myself to a crisp this week. I am kind of shocked that when Raeli claimed sniffles and the need of a sick day today, I didn’t burst into tears.

But yes, I really hope that next time someone asks how on earth I do it, I actually do have the presence of mind to say ‘well it’s really hard’ as opposed to ‘oh, I manage.’ I love this work and I feel enormously privileged to be in this position, but it doesn’t help anyone – least of all me – to pretend that it’s easy to balance writing with motherhood. Writing requires bursts of steady work and bursts of super high energy Get Shit Done work, and I really do forget far too often that the steady work I do is actually at the top, not the middle, of my current work capacity.

My only comfort is that I am a better writer and editor than I was back when I was a childless twenty-something! And, you know, my family is very forgiving…

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.

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.

But promoting a business becomes a whole lot stickier when your business is in fact yourself. You do have a responsibility to yourself, your family, your publishers, and so on, to promote your work effectively. But when this collides with all the other things the internet does and is supposed to do – it’s such a balancing act! If the internet is where you play and chat and hang out with your friends, how do you transition into using it professionally as well without turning into Maureen’s “I AM A BRAND” author? Maureen is absolutely right that the concept of a person being a brand is quite creepy and weird but at the same time – she is speaking from the position of someone who is hugely successful, rather than someone just starting out. Much though she declares she isn’t a brand, there are, as Colleen pointed out, plenty of people who look at Maureen and want to copy what she is doing. Even though that wouldn’t work for anyone else – what Maureen does comes naturally to her, so it’s not something that can be faked.

Neil Gaiman is another example of an author whose brand is effectively that you can’t pin down what his brand is… and of course he is so hugely successful that no author can hope to replicate what he does, by design or by accident.

Part of the reason I have taken so comfortably to Twitter as a platform is that it allows for a certain amount of promotional content – it doesn’t feel bad or inappropriate to link to my own stuff or point people towards blog entries or what I’ve been doing, as long as I only have that as a small facet and also use it for small conversations, big conversations, idle observations, and of course linking to awesome things that other people have done/are doing. I feel supported there, rather than judged for being Obsessive Brandwoman.

I would happily drop Facebook altogether, except that I have lots of people on there for whom this is the only thread where we are connected, and I get the impression from comments that many of them are not serial blog readers, but like to drop in on the occasional post if a link catches their eye. Since was taught the error of my Facebook ways by Alisa, and incorporated a Facebook feed into Tweetdeck, I do enjoy getting into conversations with people that way, though I still prefer the back-and-forth of Twitter. And you know, I’m probably still getting it wrong. But I keep my foothold in there, for now, even as many people are jumping ship because of the Evilness of Facebook. It’s never been evil to me because I have provided it with very little information to work with, but I completely sympathise with those who feel they have to go.

As you might have guessed, I’ve been getting way into podcasts lately, both producing them and listening to them, and I love that as a creative format to play with. It fills me with delight to see so many people I know having a go at it too! I always cringe a bit about promoting my own stuff on Galactic Suburbia – because that’s not really what it’s about, it’s a fun project in which we comment on the industry, so it feels out of place to talk about me. But it helps to have fellow hosts who not only don’t mind, will actively push that into the conversation! One of my favourite things about the old Sofanauts format was the way Tony would always ask his panellists at the end what they had to plug – basically he was giving them permission to promote themselves, and their work, and expressing an interest. Which meant of course they didn’t have to find a way to drop mentions of their work into the conversation, a pet hate of mine when authors are appearing as panellists – it’s fine if it’s on topic, or if you’ve been asked to talk about your work, but it looks bad if you approach a general topic with only examples of your books as if there are no other books in the world! Much nicer to be invited to do a small plug to people who have been listening to you for a while and therefore are all primed to be interested in what you do.

Then there’s blogging, something I’ve been doing seriously since January 2005. It’s no coincidence that this was the month I had Raeli, and the first month I was officially “at home” rather than having an office full of people to hang out with every day. The internet became my tearoom, watercooler, etc. from the last month of my pregnancy onwards, and has done a fantastic job at keeping me company since then. For most of those five years, while I’ve had quite a few projects here and there, my professional writer aspect was still only a tiny part of what I blogged and read blogs about, and I would bore myself silly if I tried to get all reserved and impersonal now.

I actually fought against the idea of setting up a separate Creature Court blog – I don’t like the idea of having a blog for every project, and if you stretch yourself too thin then it’s hard to produce quality content. I kind of love having one single blog where I can talk about anything from writing to the kids, craft, football, reading, random obsessions, feminism, and so on. But it did make sense to have a focal point for people who are interested in those books first, and where I can put the supporting material and those necessary informational posts – while I am using a blog format, I think of it as more of a Googleable resource, and certainly wouldn’t expect people to subscribe to it as a source of regular entertainment.

None of that means that what I do on the internet is entirely without artifice. I try to always be aware that what I write here is permanent – yes, even Tweets! They might seem to disappear into the ether but they also appear on Google, so it’s something to be cautious about. My honey & I decided I wouldn’t post pictures of the children anymore, which I had been doing a lot of, and I found it so much harder than I had expected! As you saw recently, I couldn’t resist with the launch-related pics. But I was also aware that I was breaking a rule I had created for myself, and for good reason. I still blog about the kids a lot, because they’re an integral part of my life, and I know that many people following my blog are interested in the balance between writing and motherhood. It would feel irresponsible not to blog about that, as I dislike the idea of making what I do seem too easy, while at the same time I don’t want to bang on about it too much…

Heh. Yes. Artifice. Or, you know, responsibility is another word for it. Raeli is learning to read and I think we’re not too far off a point where I will be checking with her before I post anything about her online. I deliberately only use the girls’ nicknames on here so as not to tie up their legal names with my internet presence, but even that might be too much when she’s a bit older and her friends are also reading the Internet. Is it fair that her teen peers might be able to read about her childhood sleeping/eating/tantrum habits? Probably not. But it’s my story, too!

There are no easy answers and I don’t pretend that I’m any kind of expert on what authors should be doing about this stuff – I’m finding my own way through it by figuring out what I’m comfortable with, and what I enjoy. I don’t have time to spend hours turning the Internet into more work! The thought of an author sitting there, teeth gritted, thinking “how can I make this web thing work for me” makes me want to shudder. And pat them on the head, and make them a cup of tea. On the whole, if it’s too hard, you’re better off going back to working on that tricky next chapter instead.

Promotional platforms, internet friends and social networks are, after all, most effective when we use them to procrastinate! The best blog entries come about when you’re supposed to be doing something else.

Ha. This is a very long blog entry. But, you know. I’m waiting for a vital phone call. This was probably the most productive I could possibly have been for the last hour…

Oh, crap, I was supposed to be putting the dinner on. Oops.

And now the baby’s awake. Damn it!

Really didn’t mean to spend so much time here this afternoon…