So that was November, then…

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up in the New Year, I started editing Blueberry again, which is going to be my summer project, I read books which had been archived on my shelves far too long, and I sewed – bookmarks for a friend’s commission, finishing the top of a baby quilt, and the beginnings of a new crazy quilt.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.

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I’ve spent the last several weeks sinking into a slow swamp of rewrites, but I can finally see a glimpse of sunshine, and if you don’t record the good days, somehow they get forgotten faster than anything else.

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!

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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My big change to my writing/working routine that I made this year was actually taking weekends – which is to say, not heaping up lists of things I needed to get done on the weekend only to discover on Sunday night that I had failed to do so.

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.

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The school holidays are at an end, and that means I am officially back to work tomorrow. I’ve had two weeks of chasing my daughters around the house, reading library books and Wonder Woman comics with them, sewing, blogging and promoting my new release.

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.

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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Maggie Stiefvater blogged a little while back about time management, and particularly how it’s possible to juggle writing with parenthood. I never know what to say when people comment on how I write books while I have small children to look after. On the one hand, I’m constantly thinking of my failings, of the long gap between books, of how long it has taken me to get here. On the other, I don’t want to sound flippant, or imply that anyone can do it, that there’s anything particularly special about me. I don’t want to sound all judgy about anyone who does find it impossible. Some days it is impossible, and who am I to say what someone else’s possibility looks like?

What I should say, but never think of at the time, is this: it’s hard work. Raising children is hard work. Balancing any kind of paid work with raising children is bloody hard work. I’ve learned a lot about my writing over the last five years since my first child was born. I’ve learned not to be precious about how and where I write. I’ve learned how to get it done, one achievable goal at a time. I’ve made it to a really important rung on the ladder – selling books to publishers – and am working very hard on the next one – writing books to deadline.

As Maggie says, having children isn’t an excuse not to write. I’d like to add that it can be, however, a very valid reason, whether you’re talking about five years or two weeks. This is particularly pertinent to me because the school holidays started today.

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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

It’s all starting to happen.

I finalised the launch details today with the Hobart Bookshop, and came away with some pretty posters to stick up to advertise the event. The details of the event are here and I’m hoping those Hobart residents out there who read this blog will be coming along to say hi and join the party. Chris and Janet at the Hobart Bookshop always put on a good launch, and it should all be done just in time to go have dinner somewhere lovely in Salamanca, even if it is a Thursday night.

I was going to say it’s a school night, but apparently there are school holidays about to descend upon us (yes Melander, I know you warned me, but I thought it was late June, not the bit of June that is still barely clinging to May!) and so those of you with small children like me do not have to feel guilty about bringing them along. We may have to feel guilty about what wreckage our children perpetrate upon the kiddy corner of the bookshop, but let us not count our regrets before they happen…

Is it odd that I’m more concerned what my children wear to this event than what I wear? When I think about what to wear my brain goes all tunnel visiony and panic-ridden. I have a baby, I live in t-shirts and track pants these days, I’ve forgotten how to dress up! Raeli went as a mermaid to my last book launch, and I’m now kicking myself I didn’t buy little girl cloche hats from Etsy for this one. It’s probably a bit too close to the even to get them sent out now. Still, one never knows when a cloche hat will come in handy. I’ll just put flowers in Raeli’s hair and drape beads on her, and Jem can come dressed as a cat. Or a tiger. Or a wolf cub. All these things are appropriate to the story…

I’m delighted that Craig Wellington will be launching the book. I’ve known Craig since I was a wee child and now he’s terribly important – a theatre producer, performer, comedian, public speaker and writer among other things, and has become a bit of a local legend in Hobart circles. Having him on board brings a lovely sense of occasion to the event, and apparently this is the first time anyone’s ever asked him to launch a book, which is very surprising to me. Glad I could correct it now!

I’m also working away on a few little publicity projects which should come to light over the next week or two. Watch this space!

3rd of June, 5:30pm, Hobart Bookshop, Salamanca Square. Come along!

So April went pretty well, with me getting back into the pace of regular writing. The first week of May… well, I wrote 6800 words or so, which is not shabby at all, and yet falls short of the 7500 I was aiming for. 700 words, that’s not much, right? Except that these things are hard to catch up on and then you get left behind, and…

Looking back on the week I can see my errors. I did great for several days, not only knocking off the 1500 word target comfortably, but also burning through to do lists, which incorporate necessary tasks, housework, exercise, Pendlerook business, other writing/editing, and those things I’ve been putting off for weeks or months. I’ve discovered a few rules of thumb, like that if I don’t factor in exercise I don’t exercise, and that if I want to actually complete a day’s to do list, it has to be a) realistic and b) not have more than 10 items on it.

Things didn’t get problematic until Thursday, a day when I only have about 3 hours at home, and those hours with a baby, which means one naptime. Trying to pack a whole 10 item to do list into that day was a mistake. Deliberately cutting short the amount of writing I had to do that day, to make it up on my much friendlier Friday (in which I have five hours at home before the school pick up, with baby, and at least two naps) would have been fine if I didn’t also have to do items for Friday. 2000 word Fridays are possible if there is nothing else to get done. I was aiming for 2500… plus STUFF.

Btw in case it’s not obvious, ‘nap’ as a unit of measurement is roughly an hour to an hour & a half when the baby (not ME) is napping and I have time to do things without my attention having to be shared.

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