It’s getting pretty Christmassy around here.  Raeli and I had a mammoth shortbread baking session yesterday, producing not only shortbread daleks but also cats, bunnies, high heeled shoes and other ephemera.  Sadly the sheep, cows and rockets didn’t work out as I had hoped as it turns out those fancy cookie cutters I bought are crappy, and you can’t get the dough out of them without breaking it.

I have a jar of dried fruit marinating in rather a lot of brandy, ready to be turned into a cake this week.  Should I worry that most recipes say to soak the fruit in rum or brandy overnight?  My jar has been going since November!

My other baking plans for the season are icecream centric – I want to make a frozen pudding bombe and some moulded icecream “mince tarts.”  Ironically with all my icecreamy plans, the weather this week has been cooler than we’re used to in December.  Good baking weather, not so good for melting icecream.  Still, not complaining over here!

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My baby is one year old today. It’s been a mad, jam-packed year of broken nights and novel deadlines, of manuscript papers and dirty nappies and really, really hard work squeezed into impossibly tiny spaces.

It’s also been a year of great joy, of watching this new child grow into herself, of watching Raeli grow into being a big sister.

Jem, otherwise known as Jemimacakes, Babycakes, Jem-Jem, Mima, My Mima, Jemmels, La La and Bunny Girl, is one hell of a person. She is full of energy, a crawler and an intriguer where Raeli was a much gentler soul. Jem never met a power cable she didn’t want to chew, and my that gets old pretty fast. Her favourite trick is yanking out the ear buds of my iPod. Her colour is orange, which is something I never expected. (I kind of hope she does go through a pink stage when she’s 3 otherwise there’s a crate of handmedown clothes waiting for her that will make her very unhappy)

She is crawling, pulling herself up on furniture, and for a few floaty and exciting moments yesterday, was standing on her own.

She’s a Gooner girl through and through, and while she didn’t get much choice in being an Arsenal fan, she most certainly considers her fluffy soccer ball to be one of her favourite toys. She recently discovered the deep love of hitting an empty biscuit tin with a pair of chopsticks, and took to drumming with alarming vigour.

She can say Mama and Dadoo and Ra-ra or Rae. She can clap, just, and wave, almost.

When watching Xena with me, her hands move as if she’s trying to figure out the sword moves. That could be a problem later.

It’s important, as deadlines crunch together and I fight for every spare moment to work in, that I stop and relish the time I get to spend with this tiny precious person, who won’t be a baby much longer.

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I can tell the end of The Creature Court is on the horizon, because I’ve spent the day being hit in the head by other books. Important, exciting future books which are not yet. The trouble is, now I’ve answered the last questions about Book 3, my brain is telling me that the job is all done, which is patently not true.

Also both the books smacking me over the head today are the Wrong Books and in no way the one I planned to write next. For which I have sensibly been applying for grants, and planning to use to put a proposal together for Voyager in the second half of the year.

Damn it. Work’s not done. Work’s not done. Could someone inform my brain of this important fact? I don’t have time to construct a lavish Shakespearian alternate universe right this second.

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I’m about to abandon my family for the evening to dodge off to sewing, which is as good a time as any to do some show and tell about the sewing projects I’ve been working on lately. All presents, actually, which is a good way to ensure that your house doesn’t become entirely stuffed with quilts.

This is the lap quilt I sent to Kaia for her 30th birthday this month. It’s made up of handsewn hexagons in fabrics ranging through blues, creams & pinks, and oranges & browns.

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January’s over! Yikes. The end of the school holidays is fast approaching, which is good. I’m not nearly as far along with my rewrites as I wanted to be by this stage, but we can just call that another case of imaginary productivity.

There had better be nothing imaginary about my February productivity. I’m setting myself up for success the best way I can. When I haven’t been able to work, I’ve been building up anti-guilt points, playing with Raeli and setting up activities for her so I don’t feel so bad about disappearing into my laptop in the coming month. My honey is taking off the last week of the school holidays, which means he can entertain her and do the quality time thing while I indulge in reckless abandonment.

And of course there was the other work, the stuff with more immediate deadlines – proofs on proofs, and the last stages of correcting and redoing the maps. Not that I was actually doing the maps, but the last couple of weeks meant several meetings with Mum – the maps themselves were gorgeous but we’ve been juggling the sizing of text and my honey had to come to the party with electronic support and corrections too, managing to save Mum a lot of re-drawing time!

Meanwhile I’ve been reading my book 2 and notetaking and playing with Scrivener, and essentially pre-rewriting. The big work is all going to be done in the last month, though. I’ve worked through the fear and the paralysis stage (don’t know where to start! so much to do! make write better aargh!) and now there’s just the good stuff to do. I’m actually looking forward to it. I can see the shape of the book it’s going to be, and it helps that I’ve spent chunks of January immersed in the minutiae of book 1 – it’s amazing what themes and quirks you can slip into a book without realising it, and it’s only by being forced to read it line by line that you find those clever bits that really need to be elaborated on in later books.

It’s a trilogy I’m writing here, not three books, and it really is the first time I’ve done that – Mocklore was three standalone books, only becoming a trilogy of sorts in the final hour (and besides the wench is dead). I always wanted each book to expand on the previous one, making the story bigger and wider and sometimes changing the way you read the early books – but I’ve lived with Book One for so long now that it’s hard to let it go.

Final proofs are final. It’s gone. No changing it now. Further in, further in!

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Wow, so this domestic thing. People do this every day? I’ve been spending the last 3 days predominantly on housework, and I’m definitely over it. Still, the house is clean and tidy for Christmas, we’re way better organised than we were last year, and apart from the tree randomly falling over and the second batch of shortbread being sniffed at suspiciously by my daughter, there have been no catastrophes.

(ah, the gingerbread house fail of… too many years to count, ahh the Christmas I was 8 months pregnant and decided to make my own puddings but in my exuberance failed to read the recipe and ended up going to bed while my honey stayed up until 1am watching a boiling pot… ahh)

The guest room is really pretty, though, and I’m leaving in under an hour to pick up anything (apart from maybe paper towels, grumble mumble) which means for once I can have a relaxing Christmas Eve. Oh, and my obsessive podcast-habit means that from now on, baking shortbread and gingerbread daleks will always remind me of the Radio Free Skaro boys.

I’ve done ridiculously well with gifts received already this year. The latest is the most beautiful leather-cover edition of Room with a View, a book I love greatly, and have been meaning to replace my battered orange paperback with a shiny new orange paper back for some time.

I can’t tell you how gorgeous this book is – not only lovely in its own right, but wrapped in Penguin-stamped tissue paper and placed in an elegant cardboard book. It’s a lovely object I can’t stop looking at and, oh yes, I’ll be re-reading this book very soon. How can I not?

It occurs to me that this was possibly the last beloved classic novel that I didn’t have a really nice edition of – a friend once gifted me with a gorgeous set of ancient hardback copies of The Forsyte Saga that he found in an aunt’s attic, I have a lovely old green edition of Wuthering Heights (and matching Jane Eyre, bah, but I keep it cos it matches) that dates from my mother’s brief ‘old books’ hobby phase, and I bought myself a proper hardback of Pride & Prejudice from a uni bookshop. Now Room with a View.

Yep, those are the important ones. Which books do you love so much that, even if you already have a copy, a lovely hardback edition would be an awesome present for you?

Last night we had a Christmas gathering for our usual Thursday night horde. We finished up Battlestar Galactica a couple of weeks ago, so it seemed oddly appropriate to watch the new Doctor Who (Waters of Mars) as our interim ‘episode of the week.’ A DVD set of the Tudors was gifted, so that will be our next show that we try to watch while small children are wandering in and out, shrieking randomly and dismantling each other’s bedrooms.

I made gingerbread! Dairy and gluten free gingerbread, thank you very much. The recipe, largely created and altered by me, was sadly not viewed at its best because I did the stupid thing of leaving the biscuits in the oven after they had finished baking, so they dried out to a consistency of dog biscuits. But hey, the kids (ha well, the boys, but I knew going in Raeli wasn’t a gingerbread fan) seemed to like them and they did look cool. I sent  godiyeva home with a ball of leftover dough and hopefully her competence will at least reveal if the recipe was any good. If not – she can always spray paint the biscuits silver and hang them on the Christmas tree.

The baking process was convoluted not because of the recipe but because of the complex machinations required to allow three children between the ages of 4 and 6 to have an equal share of the adding ingredients, stirring, rolling and stamping out shapes. Phew! We all survived.

The important thing is gingerbread daleks! Sure it would be nice if they tasted any good, but at least they are there. Kind of like dwarf bread. They’ll last all through Christmas! (luckily I had made some decent shortbread earlier in the week which the adults & Raeli were able to enjoy)
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This post from Penni Russon about her eldest child figuring out the Santa thing made my heart hurt a little bit.

Ah, the Santa quandary. To lie, or not to lie?

Our only defence is that we never told Raeli that Santa is a real person who flies around giving out Christmas presents. But when she came home from daycare and informed us about that fact – we copped out and smiled and didn’t deny it. It was easy to let other people spread the story, and to let her believe it. (cough, likewise I didn’t disabuse her from her latest theory, that all the dead people in the world especially Tigey the budgie and Kassia the cat and her great-grandparents who died before she was born are coming back some day – it makes her happy and less panicky, and I don’t have any coherent religious concepts to share with her, so I’m going lalalala and ignoring it)

I’ve regretted the Santa myth a few times. Quite frankly when I go to so much trouble to pick out lovely thoughtful perfect presents for her, I want the damn credit. I’ve almost put my foot in my mouth several times over, when bitching to friends about the sheer effort it takes, for instance, to source a Beauty and the Beast DVD without paying more than anyone should pay for a single movie.

That, and I really hate lying to my child. It makes me feel icky inside. We talk about story a lot, how they work and adapt and change, and I’m hoping that we can segue into Santa being ‘a nice story’ without any trauma, some year really soon. Hope. Of course by then Raeli will have passed the Santa myth on to Jem and we’ll smile and buy into it… sigh.

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