It’s the last day of my honey’s holidays, which means the last day of having a second parent at home to help with the girls. I’m on my own for the rest of the school holidays! (apart from, you know, grandparently help, baby daycare, and weekends)

I’ve been slugging away at my page proofs, which are due back on the 10th – not quite as bad as some of my writerly peeps who have Jan 4th deadlines! I feel for you, my darlings. One of those secrets about the publishing industry you probably wouldn’t think about unless you are on the inside is that editors clear their desks before Christmas by sending edits and proofs to writers, which means if you’re working under contract, you’re probably working over the holidays!

Still, ‘under contract’ is totally not old yet, so no complaining here

I just finished reading the January issue of Locus as a digital epub on the family iPad – it’s brilliant! After years of sadly reading 1-2 month old news and updates in the magazine, it feels a lot more current. It took us (which is to say, my honey) some squiggling around to figure out the best ways to download, transfer and set up the file, but now we have it sorted and it’s SO NICE to read.

I’ve been subscribing to Locus for years now, even with the postal time delay, (much of the news like books sold was stuff I wouldn’t read anywhere else anyway) and with the proliferation of news blogs and the like, there really is nothing to match it for explaining the industry we work in. Only recently, I psyched myself up to turf out a decade or so of the magazines, to clear out space, and have been trying to throw them out as I read them, but it’s a wrench each time.

I’m really impressed that the Locus crew were smart enough to offer the digital download free to international print subscribers – as well as getting our news earlier (and can if we choose save the more substantial articles and reviews to read later when the print version arrives) it’s a fantastic way to audition the format, and make the choice as to whether we go fully digital when the subscription is due.

Subscribing to Locus is a pretty major expense for those outside the US – it’s something I try to do when I get in a big writing cheque, so I don’t notice it (often subscribing for two years in those instances) – and I’ve tried to quit it in the past only to resubscribe in a panic. I’m sure there are plenty of Australians who have balked at the expense – however worthy a magazine it is (and it really is), it’s a major investment and international postage is only getting more and more expensive…

I am a little askance at subscribers only getting a month (later 2 weeks) to download the issue, as I would have thought one of the benefits of being a subscriber would be getting a chance to re-download past issues that you ‘own’ – if you accidentally delete it, or need it for a different platform, for instance. I think letting past issues disappear is a bit of a holdover from print publication – one of the things I love about buying audios directly from Big Finish rather than getting a slightly cheaper price somewhere like Book Depository is that I often get the digital version too, on an electronic bookshelf, and can get hold of it again.

But, hey, that’s a minor niggle compared to the glory that is Digital Locus – I may have to wrestle with my own nostalgia about tiny print and red bordered covers, but this might finally be the thing which weans me off the paper subscription. I suspect quite a few Aussies will be following me, and many more might take the plunge now that postage is out of the equation.

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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