We’ve been working away this week on CreatureCourt.com, a website for all things to do with my upcoming trilogy. There is a blog as part of it, but I’ll be using that mostly for news items, and anything overly exciting will likely be discussed here at great length. It’s more to have a googleable site for the books where the first thing people see isn’t me ranting about Doctor Who or the latest Arsenal results.

There will be a variety of content going up over the next few weeks as we run headlong towards OMG publication, depending on what I am inspired to add. If anyone has any particular questions about the books, or if there’s a particular kind of content you’d like to see me cover, drop me a comment and I’ll see what I can do! I’m hoping to podcast some excerpts from the book with a bit of chat from me about it so again – ask questions if you have any!

Right now the most exciting piece of content for me on the CreatureCourt.com website would be the maps which my Mother painstakingly drew and redrew and inked and reinked for me! You may remember some of the agony that created… but I am very happy with the results.

Check them out:
The World and the Country
The City
The Other City Which Is Under The First City

Since it’s Mother’s Day (mmmm, sleep in, chance to finish my book, croissants & smoked salmon in bed, homemade card & macaroni-glued photo frame, awesome day all around) it is very appropriate to mention how appreciative I am to have a mother who, faced with her adult daughter wailing that her publishers are requesting maps, responds calmly with: “Well? I can do that.”

And proceeded to do so, despite the fact that I really was a dreadful, dreadful client, who didn’t even know what the name of her river was, and panicked whenever she asked quite reasonable questions, like why I thought my city was based on Rome when it in fact was pointing in a completely different direction to any map of Rome she’d ever seen.

Mothers are wonderful.

1. I have a guest post up at Justine Larbalestier’s blog, talking about how reading has become a luxury rather than a necessity. I may be trying to do more about that shortly, but my priority right now should not be reading, it is EDITING.

2. The hardest thing about revising this manuscript (Book 2 of the Creature Court, Cabaret of Monsters, for those of you who have lost track) has been that although I knew generally that there was lots to be done, there was no real way of marking my progress for several months. This is no longer true. I am at the flat out working stage, I have 180 scenes in the book, and I have to revise 7 each day in order to meet my deadline. It’s a struggle, but it really helps to have a quota to hit each day instead of just stabbing in the dark.

3. I saw the first glimpse of my cover yesterday. It’s still a work in progress, but I’m very happy with the direction it’s going in. The most important frock in the book is being pictured!!!

4. We had a map drama today – do you have any idea how hard it is to proof a map? There is just so much information going on in it! Today I realised in horror that one of those details I’d been taking for granted (and thus not checked on recent versions) was now in the wrong place, and had a major panic attack until my honey fixed it with magical computer handwaviness. He is still juggling a new computer’s quirks (he’s had it less than 24 hours) and ended up having to redo the correction several times after the application kept closing down unexpectedly! Much deep breathing on my part.

5. I had to open my Nano doc for the first time since November and realised when I saw it that – HEY I have 50,000 words of my next novel already written. How awesome is that?

6. I’m still reading at the Republic Bar in North Hobart this Sunday from 3pm. Come, listen to me talking about tentacles, buy a copy of Siren Beat. You may even have a beer if you are very good. I am taking antibiotics for my re-occurring throat infection so let’s hope I don’t sound too much like Marlene Dietrich… oh, wait. That would be a good thing, right?

7. My honey is taking Raeli off on a grandparently visitation for TWO NIGHTS starting tomorrow. Yes that means I’m at home by myself with the baby, but more importantly it meants EDIT BOOT CAMP.

Watch this space. I’m going to be busy.

We seem to be on track for Christmas – only more house cleaning and food shopping to do. I woke up this morning with the excellent news that Arsenal beat Hull 3-0 and promptly demanded a celebratory sleep-in. Well more to the point I was up for too much in the middle of the night and needed a sleep-in, but whatever. I haven’t had one in a very very long time and Jemima was bizarrely compliant, allowing me to sleep for most of the morning. Raeli was less compliant, of course.

I’m trying to finish up the last couple of work-ish things before I say to hell with it and just allow myself to be on holiday. I wrote a story for  girliejones‘s anthology of suburban fantasy, Sprawl, but I gave it to my honey to read and he agrees it needs another act. Damn it. Might have to work late tonight. At least another act means I don’t have to beg and plead for an exception to be made for her wordcount rules…

I sent the finished Creature Court maps off to the publisher today – I know it’s pointless because the chances of them still being in the office between now and January are next to nothing, but they are finished and that is the important thing. I really want to post some of the drafts and talk about the process that went into producing them – a fascinating collaboration with my mother, one of the most professional and efficient artists that I have ever met – but it feels a bit squicky to do that when a) the publisher hasn’t approved them yet and b) Mum might not actually like her early drafts being put on display. So if I do that it will be much closer to the publication date and with her permission.

Which means of course that anything I say about it will be without illustration and thus not nearly as interesting as it could be. Still, I wanted to state for the record that despite some of the stress and drama of our first couple of map meetings the process as a whole was incredibly cool.
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I’ve been the person who rolls my eyes at any book that features horses and maps.  As a creative writing teacher, I always warned wannabe fantasy writers about the dangers of getting so swept up in the detail of their worldbuilding that they never got around to writing the actual books.

I deliberately set the Creature Court trilogy in one city, with no travelling.  No horses.  Back in the Mocklore days I deliberately created a fantasy country small enough that people could reasonably walk everywhere, and promptly gave my heroine a magic ship to make sure there were no horses required, and no one would need a map to find their way around.

I’m still anti-horse.

Of course, even fantasy books without maps have maps.  The author needs something to keep track of their imaginary landscapes, to make sure they don’t accidentally end up with their characters walking in the wrong direction, or a city miraculously appearing on the wrong side of a continent.

Trust me, it happens.

With Mocklore, I had a nice little island sketched out in coloured textas.  It was rough, but no one was ever going to see it but me.  Likewise, when I was constructing the city of Aufleur for the Creature Court, I scrawled a general impression of what went where, for my own reference.  I used two colours of biro.  It – wasn’t good.  But hey, no one was going to see it but…

Yeah, so apparently the publishers want a real map.  My first reaction to this was to squee heartily because they were making me maps and obviously they would call upon the pet cartographers they kept on retainers for just such an occasion – ah, wait.  Apparently maps are not in the least like cover art, and it’s up to the author to provide them personally.  If I hadn’t had my very artistic mother present during the discovery of this information, I might well have hyperventilated.

The process is actually kind of exciting.  Mum managed to take my extremely dodgy map sketch and turned it into something that looks like a real city.  She even coped valiantly with the fact that Aufleur is based on Rome, not the Rome that exists in other books of maps, but the Rome that was lodged in my head after staying there for a month back in 2002.

(apparently that Rome does not actually exist, I know, it made me cry too)

We had a map meeting today which basically consisted of me panicking because my theatre is on the wrong side of the city, and hang on I think maybe it has to be on the district it shares a name with because that would make sense, right, only that means I have to change the actual text, and I don’t know where that street is at all, and oh god EVERY time I open the ms document I find some other reference to a map-related thing that bears no relation to the biro sketch I made a million years ago and I don’t actually KNOW how lakes work, why would anyone need to know how lakes work, and I have two different names for the gates of the city and can you have gates without actually having walls and maybe I do have walls, I don’t know because my characters have never walked past them, and OMG MY RIVER HAS NO NAME.

My mother at this point is giggling madly at me.  “How do you write a whole book and never name the river>?” she asked.

“THEY JUST CALL IT THE RIVER!”

Ahem.  Long story short.  Forget what I said before.  Get your map sorted long before you reach edit/proof stage of the manuscript.  Seriously.  The drawing it up and making it look pretty is not the part that takes the time.  It’s the failing to recognise that you’ve lost a road somewhere and you can’t remember what it was supposed to be called anyway and if you refer to docks then you should probably know where they are and TRAIN TRACKS ARE SUPPOSED TO GO SOMEWHERE!

*breathes*

Also, my mother is awesome.  That is all.