I couldn’t sleep last night, which bugged the hell out of me. Serves me right for going to bed early in order to get up for Arsenal v. Barcelona, I think. I ended up getting up at 2am and writing, on the grounds that if I didn’t get any sleep, I would be too trashed to make the most of my one child-free afternoon for the week, so I might as well get some work done.

There are no children awake at 2am. I might have to remember this for the future.

I spent a couple of productive hours reading through my doc and figuring out the big middle section of my plot, and then tuned into the game which started out promisingly enough, and then collapsed in a big messy heap. Oh dear, I actually said that out loud, didn’t I? The heap was in fact constructed mostly of Messi. That man is horribly good at what he does – if he ever loses the mullet for a better haircut, he will be diabolical. Shame he felt the need for some show diving in the first half.

Where was I? Oh, that’s right, writing.

It occurred to me this morning that I really need to get this novel written fast, so as to get it set firm in my head how it ends before I start hearing responses to Book One that might divert me from my purpose. Also that it might be good to have a purpose.

Hmm I’m at the point of tiredness where the whole body starts to ache.

It further occurred to me that people are reading review copies right NOW, the book itself comes out some time in June, and really that’s not a lot of time to write 70,000 or so new words. And to find a purpose. Well actually I’m pretty sure I found the novel’s purpose around 4am, but that may have been a particularly strong yawn.

Why does it have to be school holidays… Mama wants her pillow…

Writing. Writing good. Must write more writing. I may have written the novel’s full capacity of sex scenes already. That’s a bit depressing. Also, pulling an all nighter just to produce 800 words is a touch depressing, even if they are awesome plot-heavy words and also the most I have written since last Thursday.

Zzzz

So, April has arrived. That means that Saturnalia: Creature Court Book Three needs to be well underway. My current plan is to write 20,000 words per month, which is my favourite sustainable level of writing – unlike Nano’s 50,000, it allows me to do some other things at the same time!

20,000 words a month means 1000 words a day on weekdays only. Factoring in weekends is still a new concept to me – it’s a little counter-intuitive when you have kids because your first thought is “oh, my honey is home then, this means tons of time to myself” which is of course entirely wrong. Weekends are nice. Having days when you don’t have to work makes for a better, more intensive working week.

Given that the 50,000 words I produced of this book during last Nano turn out to be actually pretty good (I KNOW, what were the odds?) I should have a half decent draft by the end of June.

Today, Raeli and I started bailing toys out of the playpen – Jem is going to need it stat, as she’s well and truly on the move. One of the essential writer’s accessories is a baby who is not currently choking herself on fabric scraps.

Tomorrow, I write again – I seem to have set myself up to do a sex scene next which is awesome- nothing writes up faster! I wasn’t going to have one that early in the book, but as Kaia said this morning, my characters have probably spent my entire “fallow month” in bed with each other anyway, so I might as well let them get on with it.

It’s done! That is, it’s not completely done – there are various tasks to be done, such as the arranging of scenes into chapters, the collation of the non-Scrivener doc (clings to Scrivener) and a final read through, all of which will happen over the weekend. But the scene by scene edit of The Creature Court Book Two: Cabaret of Monsters, the part that requires the absolute full on part of my brain, is done, finally.

I’m happy with the book. I’ve addressed all the things that I thought were a problem from the first draft, and it’s basically as good as I can get it on my own, which is exactly where you want to be when it comes to submitting an ms to the publisher. Hopefully my editor (please let them give me Nicola again!) will find a whole bunch of new things, and I’ll have a nice break between then and now so as to be open to the needs of the structural edit.

Not yet, though. Not yet!

This is a big deal for me. Looking back over old posts, I wrote 90K of the book during the latter half of my pregnancy, and hit the 100K mark before Jem was two months old. I finished the draft somewhere between her being 10 and 12 weeks old. (seriously?? I wrote a comment on Lauren McLaughlin’s guest post the other day claiming that I hadn’t done much in the way of writing for the first 3 months of my baby’s life – how can I have forgotten this so soon??)

This is the first time I have written anything with a 0-6 month old baby to take care of, let alone a novel with a real publisher deadline! When Raeli was a baby, I retired my novel for most of the year, and only started back on my thesis when she was 6 (cough, 9) months old.

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As the Snapshot 2010 interviews have been gathering steam, I’ve been working ferociously away at that other little side project of mine – the novel that’s due in to the publisher’s next week! Seven days to go and the family have all been struck down by some kind of lightning-swift stomach bug. I remain the only healthy one, which is in itself a terrible burden, but I also have a nasty taste in the back of my mouth…

All I can hope is that the insane numbers of antibiotics I am taking for the recurring throat infection from hell will be enough to keep the stomach bug at bay…

And oh yes, vomiting baby means one less daycare session this week than planned, possibly both if she’s still throwing up tomorrow.

I have 26 scenes left to edit, half of one to write from scratch, and then it’s hitting the export button on Scrivener to turn the ms into a real girl again, and reading through to check that it all makes a vague kind of sense. It should be doable in the time. If I don’t get struck down and spend the next week throwing up…

The doctor, on my second visit to see about the recurring throat infection (which is, we have since figured out, more in the way of a vicious but sneaky throat infection that laughs in the face of antibiotics) asked me if I was working harder than usual, or over-tiring myself. I just sort of looked at him with my head tilted on one side. Honestly, how would I tell?

Nearly there, nearly there. March is a month of milk and honey, of podcasts and blueberries and novel-reading and quilting and resting my brain in preparation for the novel to come: the dread Book Three, which I will be attacking in April.

All I have to do is survive to the end of the week, and everything’s going to be Fine.

I’m working away at my scene-by-scene edit of Cabaret of Monsters. Reached the halfway point of this today, which very much puts me on track for submitting the book at the end of the month. I’m getting to that lovely point where I’m not only marking progress and feeling confident about getting the job done, but am having some genuine moments of inspiration. The books I’ve been reading lately are so good they have been pushing me to lift my game.

Raeli and I are constructing a paper theatre, themed around the Nutcracker Ballet. I have been taking pics for photoblogging later, but for right now it’s a fun activity that we have been doing in fits and starts all week. Her glueing skills are truly impressive – I have the answer to what they’ve been doing at that school! Despite Kaaron and Margo’s fears, we have not yet been eaten by the demon that lives inside the Nutcracker doll. Possibly because we haven’t cut him out yet. Actually I’m not sure where he is…

The dread school holidays are at an end, and we have entered a new era: Raeli the school girl. No longer flirting with two days a week of kindergarten, she is now doing it hardcore, 5 days a week. She started in her new class yesterday and as we hoped, took to it like a duck to water. Ask me again how awesome it is to have a daughter who thrives in social and structured settings. Believe me, I don’t take this windfall lightly.

Meanwhile Jem is likewise thriving on her two half days a week of daycare. The main carer is lovely and genuinely fond of our girl (she is so the best behaved baby in the group – high five! baby five!) and Jem not only loves the playtime she gets there with other babies, but also sleeps and feeds well there.

Yep. Not taking that one for granted either. My working mother’s guilt has been halved if not quartered by the fact that my kids obviously benefit from having time in structured surroundings that have nothing to do with me. Hooray!

For the first time since Jem was born and the whole ‘oh that’s right, babies are hard work’ bubble burst directly over our heads, it feels like we are approaching sustainable normality.

Of course, once she starts crawling, it’s going to be a whole different kettle of fish. And then there’s the stress that sets in every time she readjusts to needing one less nap per day… but for right now, work can be achieved during short, frequent bursts of activity between the hours of 8:30 and 2:30. I’ll take it.

(oh and in case anyone missed it, Arsenal beat Liverpool in a long, unpretty but successful game this morning. After a truly awful week of football, this was a very cheering thing. Man U’s draw and the losses of Chelsea and Spurs only make it the sweeter… when I announced, 70 torturous minutes into the game, that we finally had a goal, Raeli replied “hooray, you and me have a goal!” She’s such a fair weather fan. When we’re losing, she barracks for the ref)

There are people who at times express surprise at how much I manage to do. Looking after a small baby, a school-age daughter, writing books, blogging, running a small business, etc. Sometimes they ask my secret, and I say ‘well, I’m a really bad housewife.’

Jeff VanderMeer has cued up a discussion on women, writing, guilt, and domestic responsibility, both at the Booklife blog and on his own (the really good comments so far are on his own blog). Rachel Swirsky also comments on the issue at her own blog.

I’ve commented over on Jeff’s blog about my experience as the stay-at-home-parent-who-writes, and I know how lucky I am to have a partner who sees my writing as an investment in our future rather than something which takes away from time I should be spending on, you know, vacuuming. I’m sure he would prefer I spent a touch more time vacuuming, since we bought the robot vacuum cleaner and all, but he has always been remarkably non-judgemental about the whole thing, and shared the chores.

There are so many potential issues/problems/complications tangled up in the concepts of Guilt and Motherhood, Guilt and Writing Time, Balancing Paid Work and Writing, Balancing Unpaid Work and Writing, that I think it’s impossible for any person to sum it up in an all-encompassing way. I always find it interesting to read other people’s stories about how they handle that difficult balance, though, and how they deal with their own expectations, and the expectations of others, which often have a lot to do with gender.

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It’s been an odd sort of a day – stress and phone calls, mostly. Every time the phone rang, I lost a little bit more of my equilibrium. My iPod came to the rescue, and I had Radio Free Skaro podcasts running for most of the day. I finished a quilt top I’ve been working on for some time, and picked up a different quilting project that’s been abandoned for months, without even hesitating. Yay for podcasts.

I’ve been nibbling away at Cabaret of Monsters in Scrivener – labelling and rereading scenes, figuring out notes to myself about what editing has to be done, but not really getting any momentum up and running. I get like this, close to deadlines – it’s like I have to create extra pressure by not working on it until the time left to do it shrinks to the point that I can’t ignore it any more.

And then I have to work like I’m on fire.

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I thought I was mostly done with Christmas shopping, but it turns out there’s quite a gap between ‘mostly’ and ‘actually’ and I still haven’t closed it after facing sunny & hectic Salamanca today.

Shopping was a bonus anyway, as the trip was mainly a bribe/reward to Raeli, who wanted to re-enact her wistful memories of the years when she and I went to Salamanca every Friday, to have babycinos with Toto (my dad), restock the shelves at the “dollie” shop (Artefacts, the artist’s co-op that stocks many of the Deepings Dolls) and visit her favourite bookshop, the Hobart Bookshop run by Chris and Janet, who hadn’t seen her for a long time.

We haven’t been doing that particular routine for most of this year, because I started driving and thus didn’t need to juggle lifts to make it to Salamanca, I could do the business part of it when she wasn’t around, and then the combination of my mother retiring from her dayjob and my advancing pregnancy meant she took over the restocking duties altogether.

I love the fact that Raeli is old enough to be nostalgic about something we haven’t done together for maybe ten months. She’s going to school full time next year, and I’m losing my Friday of having her at home. Admittedly those Fridays are often curses as much as blessings – we have been known to get dreadfully on each other’s nerves, and it’s a long time till the next day we have free of each other – but for the most part we hang out, do our own thing, and are at home to a slew of regular visitors who know that Friday’s not a work day for me.

Weirdly, I’m looking forward to January. Normally school holidays and indeed daycare holidays are a source of panic for me. I have SO MUCH TO DO, and a Raeli-free house makes so many things easier. I have a major book deadline on February 19, I think only about a week or so after school starts. But… for once I’m not desperately looking out for babysitting and daycare alternatives. I’m not even going to try to get ‘bridging’ daycare between New Year and the start of school. Once she leaves for Christmas, she’s gone. Oh sure, I’ll be happy to have the grandparents help out and take Raeli on excursions – and Jem is starting daycare of her own, a couple of afternoons a week, in January.

So much to do. Deadline. Maybe this is just another form of procrastination, Lintilla from Hitchhiker’s Guide breaking her arm to make her work more efficiently in compensation and all that, but I’m quite happy to have Raeli at home, getting a proper break, not having to hassle about uniforms and library books and getting out of the house at 8:30 every morning.

And yeah. Maybe if she’s home, and I have less time to work in, I might actually get this rewrite done efficiently instead of poking aimlessly at it. Like the way I’m currently working on a short story in between blogging, hurling dried noodles at one daughter, and breastfeeding/rocking to sleep the other.

Maybe I’ve just forgotten how distracting it is to have my girl home with me full time. Hmm. That one seems the most likely explanation…

Big day today – had horde of ravening NaNoites at my place from 10-2, munching biscuits and chocolates and grapes, drinking endless cups of tea and typing like maniacs. Special shout out goes to Melandering Abbott, who rid herself of her own children for the day and came along to be a support person and babywrangler.

I managed 2000 words.

After that we decamped to Mures for a further writing session, bolstered by fish, chips, salad, coffee and ice cream.  godieva hit 50K first, with me and Zarisson hot on her heels. With Clare Renshaw &  looneymoth happy with their not-trying-for-50K-that’s-crazytalk totals for the day, we all downed tools, ate celebratory treats and basked in general smugness.

I made 1000 words at Mures to reach the 50K which brings today in at 3000 words, by far the most productive writing day since baby Jem was born. It can, apparently, be done. Thanks to a great group of people. it was also one of the most fun writing days I can remember.

YAY US, AND YAY NANOWRIMO!

Every now and then I have to stop and remind myself “…with a three month old baby.”

For everything. It used to be “…with a newborn” and then we were counting week by week, but somehow now we’re at “…with a three month old baby.” (she’s three and a half now, but who’s counting)

In the last month and a half or so I have completed major edits for Power and Majesty, my first adult book with a major publishing house in, um, ten years. (I was busy!) I wrote several new scenes for said book. I finished the draft of book 2. I have written nearly (tomorrow!) 40,000 words. I am (ha, just barely) keeping up with the demands of a small business.

“…with a three month old baby.”

When I express frustration about how I’m not writing as fast as I’m used to, or not getting enough done, or dropping any of the dozen balls I have in the air at any one time, someone whether it be my honey or one of my very good friends, reminds me that, you know, there’s a baby there. And she’s entirely dependent on me.

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