Jem turns two today! Sadly she has come down with a horrible virus and is not feeling very festive.
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As we while away the long wait for the second half of the next Matt Smith season, Raeli and I have been catching up on previous Doctors.

I find this rather surreal, because I remember watching Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant with her already, experiencing the show through her eyes… but she was three and four years old, and she doesn’t remember thim now that she is a big girl of six. For a little while there, Matt Smith was the only Doctor in her living memory, HER Doctor.

Something I have learned about my daughter over the last few weeks is that she is a) fickle and b) a true Doctor Who fan.

We’ve been making our way through seasons 3 and 4 (Martha and Donna) plus a few classic stories along the way, and she triumphantly announced a week ago that Matt Smith was no longer her favourite – it was now David Tennant! She had been holding out for Rose as her favourite companion, despite not remembering any of her appearances, so I let her watch season 1… and it’s been really fascinating seeing her watch one of my favourite seasons of Doctor Who, as if for the first time.

The big difference between 3 year old Raeli and 6 year old Raeli is that the smaller version of her was pretty fearless about anything she saw on TV. In the last several years, she has developed huge panicky fears about all sorts of things – she’s terrified of dogs and cats, gets freaked out by all manner of sounds, and in the last 18 months in particular developed a deep horror of Sontarans, Daleks and other Doctor Who monsters.

But she’s a determined little thing, and while we’ve had years of her completely collapsing into panic attacks, she’s now starting to take control of her fears and her boundaries. She declared a few months ago that she was no longer afraid of dogs, which was a huge deal (much like her claim not to like pink, it was a total lie, but one we don’t call her on, because it’s one we thoroughly approve of) and a sign that while she is still severely hampered by overwhelming fear and panic, she is actually starting to imagine a future when this won’t be the case. And lo, the Stubbornest of Daughters Made Progress.

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For a while there, I lost the ability to watch Doctor Who with my daughter.

When Raeli was tiny, Doctor Who was as familiar to her as the Wiggles. I often joked that the music she had heard most often in the womb was the classic theme tune – because when I was pregnant, the ABC were still on their ‘repeat all the classic eps in proper order’ kick. She was born early in 2005, a date forever associated (for some of us) with the launch of New Who.

When she was 2-3, Raeli adored Doctor Who, as did her friend Inigo, a year older – they were familiar enough with the show that when his mum and I discussed how to break it to the kids that Greg was leaving the Wiggles, the Doctor’s tendency to regenerate seemed like the easiest metaphor to grab! Our Christmas tradition was making gingerbread or shortbread daleks.

But while Inigo and his brothers stayed true to their Doctor Who obsession (if sometimes only peeking at it behind fingers) Raeli pulled away from it as she got older, as she found it quite scary and had developed a deep horror of Daleks as well as many other monsters. I couldn’t even show her The Sarah Jane Adventures because even her fear of Daleks was nothing to the shrieking meltdowns we had to deal with if she even caught sight of a picture of a Sontaran (AKA “the Humpty Dumpty men!”). K9 had worked for a while, but it was a pale imitation of the real thing, and she only remembered the show when I pushed it on her, though she and the boys did enjoy drawing multiple versions of K9.

By the time the Matt Smith era came along, Raeli was steadfast in her commitment to quite liking Doctor Who as long as she never ever EVER had to watch it. The only episode of the whole season she watched live was The Hungry Earth, because she was staying at Glammer’s house and anything Glammer likes is automatically awesome. It had scared her enough, however, that she absolutely refused to watch part 2, though she did ask me quietly for a summary as to how it ended. I seem to recall that in true parental cop-out style my version went something like “and then it all ended happily and they said goodbye and nothing bad at all happened, especially to Rory.”

That was when she was five.

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Apologies for the lateness of this report (I was getting to it, Thoraiya!) but suddenly I blinked and half a week had gone by. This happens to me a lot.

On Tuesday night, the ever wonderful and community-minded Hobart Bookshop hosted a launch for me and The Shattered City, Book Two of the Creature Court. As a delicious bonus, Love and Romanpunk was also available for sale. I had been a little uncertain about whether to launch this book – considering each volume of the trilogy are coming out so close together, I had fretted a bit about whether I was over egging the pudding, or expecting too much of my family and friends. But I was talked into it pretty easily, and as I said recently to someone else – you have to celebrate the wins. After several years of no book to launch, I absolutely need to mark the successes while they are happening.

Also, as it turns out, my family & friends have been developing a bit of a taste for book launches. Bonus attendee points to Isabel, who since the last launch has bobbed her hair, acquired a pink flapper dress, and on the day itself scored herself a cloche hat as an early mother’s day present. Now that’s commitment!

The reliable and mighty-voiced Dirk Flinthart drove for three hours to launch my book, and I was startled to realise afterwards that he had never done so before (the launching thing, not the driving thing) – what with Craig Wellington last year, it looks like I have a habit of giving people their launcher debut! Dirk gave a lovely speech, showing how long we have known each other (TEN YEARS) and how familiar he is with the development of my work, as well as his utter faith in where I’m going next. It was exactly what you’d want from such a speech, and considering that the majority of people in the bookshop knew me, it was nice to have something so personal.

There was wine and book chat, and general loveliness. I am terribly grateful for my rent-a-crowd, who can comfortably fill a bookshop, but are also willing to buy books – not only the pile of The Shattered City, but the pile of Love and Romanpunk was beautifully eroded, and I got to sign many, many books. Thanks to Mel A for giving me a head’s up reminder beforehand that I was going to have to think of new clever things to write in the books! Being witty on cue is terribly stressful.

Then of course there was what has become a family tradition – the dressing up of the children! After several experiments, Jem proved to be less than keen on a costume, so I put her in a jungle t-shirt and a tutu. Raeli meanwhile had known for ages what she wanted to be: having dressed up as a mermaid for Seacastle and a black cat for Power and Majesty, she had her heart set on a lion costume. Unfortunately, what with one thing and another. I ended up having to source the costume on the day itself, and was faced with very limited choices. Luckily she is a creative little thing and was happy to think outside the box for her lion-y look.

I was also excited that there were a few (only a few, admittedly!) people there who I didn’t even know personally! Who also bought books! Bless their little cotton socks. There was even a committed future reader from the US who contacted the bookshop to order Power and Majesty and The Shattered City ahead of time, so I could sign them for him! With so much love & support, it’s no wonder that I’ve been feeling terribly inspired to get on with writing the new book this week…

I’d got the days mixed up, as often happens when you’re in a country half a day ahead of your football team, and didn’t realise until I got up this morning that the game was on right now. I could only really keep half an eye on it as I got the girls ready for their day.

It didn’t really matter. It’s Barca, after all – the best we could hope for was not humiliating ourselves, and getting out of the Champions League nice and early so we could concentrate on that other trophy, the one that maybe, MAYBE this year, we might have a chance at.

I found a feed briefly and saw a rather dull ten minutes of the game before it crapped out on me, so I didn’t bother. Twitter kept me informed. Like when they got their first goal…

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So school is back! I’ve been lucky enough to be able to shift most of my workload to, well, now, so that the last several weeks of the summer holiday were all Mummying all the time. Now, of course, I have to go from nought to typing maniac in 60 seconds, and I’m not *entirely* sure I remember how to do it. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, here is a delicious mix of tidbits from the internet over the last week or so and some great things I’ve been listening to while catching up on the housework, supervising trampoline time, and sewing an Alice in Wonderland wallhanging.

Ben Peek wrote a post which completely blindsided me, about an author who embodies perseverance, “the one who to me sucked up the bad times and pushed through them, and the one who should stand as an example for new authors…“ The twist is, it’s me!

N.K. Jemisin writes about gender assumptions/associations surrounding epic fantasy, and why anything that deviates from the masculine norms of the genre are seen as suspect. There are some brilliant, intelligent comments about gender, romance and the male gaze. Lovely stuff.

Alisa posts about Twelfth Planet Press award eligibilities for the coming awards season. Have you nominated for the stuff you can nominate for yet? Don’t forget that all of us who were at Aussiecon can nominate for the Hugos this year. Would be lovely to have some Aussie names on that ballot.

This amazing, powerful post by Juliet Jacques about being a trans woman and a football fan really affected me, to the point where I read through her whole year’s worth of columns about transition. I can really recommend these for anyone looking to educate and inform themselves about some of the issues affecting people trying to transition. I found it a real eye opener, and she’s an entertaining and funny writer with it. Plus, football fan!

Jim Hines had some pointed things to say about the ‘self publishing ebooks is totally the way to make a career sing like a canary’ people and the way that ‘ebooks are the future’ so often gets turned into a bashing of commercial publishers and their methods.

So that’s the links done. Now for the listening…

The latest Salon Futura podcast has a great round table discussion about small press publishing featuring our own Alisa Krasnostein (plus Sean Wallace and L. Timmel Duchamp) – those of you mourning the lack of a Galactic Suburbia episode this week (sorry, we’ll be back with all guns blazing next week!) may like to check it out. There’s also a cool interview with Ann VanderMeer about her editorship of Weird Tales which was great to hear, especially the bit where they both start talking about Peter M Ball and unicorns.

My Big Finish obsession has been continuing apace. I have been relistening to all my Ace and Hex plays, and really enjoying the first two seasons of the 8th Doctor and Lucie Miller, which were designed to fit the tone of New Who a bit more firmly than the monthly series. They’re fast paced, funny and character-crunchy 50 minute episodes, with some fantastic casting. The whole first season is great, though the quirky Horror of Glam Rock (featuring Bernard Cribbins before he joined RTD’s Who crew) by Paul Magrs is a stand out, as is the exceptional two part finale, Human Resources.

I’m currently on the finale of the second season, which features a return of the Sisterhood of Karn and (quite possibly) Morbius, though I haven’t yet heard him with my own ears. The standouts for this season were Max Warp, a quite stunningly outrageous Top Gear parody with spaceships and Graeme Garden, and the comedy-romance-tragedy of The Zygon Who Fell To Earth (featuring Tim Brooke Taylor and Steven Pacey), but I also really loved the creative anachronisms of Dead London and the splendid historical heist story Grand Theft Cosmos. The return of the Headhunter, who is officially my favourite female villain of Doctor Who’s history, was a cause for much glee.

Elsewhere, I also discovered the Big Finish Comedy Podcast, which was released fairly recently as a limited series of 5 minute episodes to promote the Mervyn Stone mystery novels by Nev Fountain, which revolve around a script editor of a defunct cult sci-fi show of the late 80′s, who also solves crimes. The podcast is a great introduction to the character and his world, and over the course of about half an hour of bite sized, highly entertaining interviews (the conceit is that this is a DVD extra for “Vixens from the Void”) presents and solves the mystery of who killed the actor who played the quirky translator robot Babel J. It’s very funny, featuring among other things the note-perfect tones of Nicola Bryant, and absolutely free.

There is more, I expect, but I’m sleepy, and it’s school tomorrow!

I’ve been watching with a sickening feeling the fight to keep Britain’s libraries intact as the conservative government hacks and slashes their funding. It’s just awful. And maybe ours in Australia aren’t under current threat, but who’s to say that next time the Liberals get in we won’t be in the same situation?

Libraries are so important, and those of us lucky enough to live in countries that have a thriving library system need to remember that.

Tasmania has a fantastic crop of state libraries, all linked by computer so you can order a book from their wider catalogue and have it sent to your local library. I use this service a lot, as I don’t have the leisure to browse shelves with two children – I discovered last week that my now-walking-with-confidence toddler Jem is a right library rampager, and was shocked to be overwhelmed with the memory of chasing Raeli around the same aisles, something I had completely forgotten.

So yes, I order books or CDs I want, and pick them up when they come in.

Both my girls love the local library. It was one of my regular haunts with Raeli when she was tiny – we often went to the Rock n Rhyme baby sessions together, and she had her own library card from the time she was six weeks old. Okay yes, I often take my own stuff out on her fee-free card, I’m only human!

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Raeli had her birthday a few days ago! We’ve had what feels like a whole week of birthday/holiday activities, culminating in the Big Superhero Party which felt like a crazed, sugary blur at the time, but people seemed to enjoy. Raeli informed me that it was even better than last year, largely because of the pinata (which from our POV was a dismal failure redeemed only by the fact that no one was actually hurt during the whole excruciating procedure). At the end, there were lollies, so no complaints from the kids.

Apart from the change in theme, from fairies to superheroes, I had planned to run the party the same as last year: simple food involving opening packets, I don’t make anything myself except the cake and fairy bread, sausages on the barbie for kids & parents alike, my Mum madly running the games (everyone needs a Glammer come birthday season) and no fuss. Naturally it got far more complicated than that, not least because, well, do we remember how last year I had a little 5 month old baby? THIS YEAR she’s a running, jumping, bouncing, psyched up little dynamo, and it took the 15 or so adults at the party to keep track of her. I’m not used to a feisty baby. Raeli was energetic but not one for hurling herself off furniture. Jem topped off the party by eating everything. Seriously. All the things. Once the big kids had abandoned the picnic cloths and gone to play games, she plonked herself down and ate more than her own body weight in chips, cheezels, biscuits, watermelon and… oh, I don’t even know. Hear that? That’s the kind of mother I am. I have no idea what she ate. I just know that she looked really, really smug about it.

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So this loosely was my plan for 2010, presented with comments:

1. Finish Cabaret of Monsters (book 2) and Saturnalia (book 3) and submit them on deadline.
They’re now called Shattered City and Reign of Beasts, and the deadlines ended up being extended a time or two, but done and done.
2. Complete a first draft of one other novel
This I didn’t manage, thanks to more editing and a lot less writing time than I was hoping for.
3. Decide on what project I want to work on after Creature Court and put a proposal together.
I haven’t finished the proposal for my publishers yet, but I wrote early chapters and a synopsis for Fury when I applied for my grants, WHICH I GOT.
4. Get Raeli through her first year of full time school. To this end, institute earlier tea & earlier bedtime for Raeli (starting the bedtime process at 8pm results in a good night going to sleep at 9pm, it’s not good enough)
This worked out really well. While part of me thinks it’s a bad idea to dumb down Raeli’s food and getting into the habit of a kids meal and an adult meal… yeah. I can’t have a family meal on the table by 6pm, but I can manage a nursery tea. Also it’s nice to not be fighting with Raeli about food. She eats vegetables, even if only under certain circumstances, and she even went through a few adventurous phases with her food this year. It’s summer so we’ve let the bedtime blow out again but come school time, I’ll be going back to this habit.
5. Get Jem into her own room and reorganise study at other end of house.
Done marvellously. What I wasn’t expecting was that instead of a study I would build myself a library! Complete with queen sized bed… I love that I got the best of both worlds, a spare room for guests and a room that is MINE where my books live. Sure, I don’t have a desk, but this is me, let’s face it, a desk would just be somewhere to pile up papers and all kinds of crap. Not having a desk forces me to file things occasionally. I’ve finally got my armchair, and I continue to work from my laptop on the dining table. I may need a small desk in the library eventually but for right now, I’m happy, and get an extra thrill of happiness whenever I refer to my Library Bed. Which currently is covered with page proofs for Shattered City…
6. Complete two quilts (you know who you are)
I really have to be more specific! The first must have been the Felix Rupert Bear quilt, which I was being discreet about because I was keeping it secret from Isabel. I had to check back for the second which was of course Kaia’s Comfort Fruit quilt, for her 30th birthday.
7. Launch Power and Majesty in June, and do my best to contribute to & support the publicity for the book.
Done! With publicity you always feel like you should have done more, but I think I managed my time effectively. Time to start gearing up for Book 2…
8. Aussiecon in September!
Done! It wasn’t easy taking the family to the convention, but my honey worked hard to free up as much time as possible for me to do my convention thing, and I loved getting to hang out with friends and sharing both my worlds. Also, live Boxcutters!
9. Launch Cabaret of Monsters in December (subject to publishing dates staying the same) and do my best to contribute to & support the publicity for the book.
Heh well the publishing dates didn’t stay the same, so this one can be rolled over to 2011.
10. Read 120 books throughout 2010.
Hooray, I scraped under the wire with this one! Separate reading overview to follow.

EDIT: A couple of projects/challenges I forgot about: to podcast Siren Beat, and to read all of Joanna Russ’s published books.
Heh well I completely didn’t podcast Siren Beat, but I did start the CreatureCourtCast to read some sample chapters of Power and Majesty, and should do something similar with Book 2. And I didn’t get to all of the Russ, but I read quite a few of them and consider myself a hell of a lot more educated in the ways of Joanna Russ than at this time last year. So I’ll count that as a win.

Of course the most interesting thing about looking back is what I didn’t expect or prepare for: like winning the WSFA small press award for Siren Beat, and getting to vicariously enjoy Alisa’s voyage to Washington and beyond. Also, when the year turned, I had no idea that we were going to start Galactic Suburbia this year, a podcast that has given me great pleasure and joy. I didn’t know that Raeli being at school would lead to a whole new social group for me, or that my biggest regret of the year was not the lack of working time, but not volunteering enough at Raeli’s school. It’s also been lovely seeing so many of my friends succeeding with their work, getting new books out into the world, more rungs on the publishing journey. In particular, seeing Trent finally get his debut novel out there after so many years of hard work towards that goal, and seeing Rowena get another series out there after a hiatus almost as long as my own, filled me with pride and gladness.

It’s been a year of hard work, rewarding feedback, loving friends and family. I really have very little to complain about. Here’s hoping 2011 is a good one, for all of us!

I have been domesticking up a storm this week, shopping, making things, cooking, and planning more cooking. Surely earned a Mother of the Year award this morning by entirely forgetting to take the baby to daycare – for her ONE full day this week, the one I had made many plans with Raeli for. At 10:30 (after a bad night’s sleep because someone had nightmares and had to climb in with us) I suddenly blinked, stared at the baby and said “we forgot to take Jem to daycare!”

Cue mass hilarity all around.

Once we had rectified that mistake, Raeli and I had brunch at the local cafe and then went down to Meredith’s Orchard to stock up on fruit and vegies for the Christmas weekend. Got a good deal on raspberries, picked today! Back home to rehabilitate her dolls house in return for putting away or chucking away a whole lot of old toys. And then it was icecream concoction construction (or possibly deconstruction). Using silicon cupcake cases & chocolate mould trays, we made vanilla penguins, turkish delight hearts, and mince pies, all by stirring interesting things into icecream. I also made the outside layer of the icecream pudding (Christmas Bombe!). I was going to have a Turkish Delight core but now I’m thinking raspberry-doctored vanilla.

Sadly I think the creativity overstretched practicality. The results were delicious but messy, and I don’t think the freezer is cold enough for the icecreams in the moulds to harden properly. The best results were the mince pies: brandied fruit stirred into vanilla icecream and scooped into star-shaped silicon cases to serve.

Oh, and I whipped up a lasagne too Though I managed to split the bechamel sauce like a bad hollandaise, leading to huge amounts of delicious but strangely lumpy cheeseness over the dish. Turns out that an extra large fruitcake pan is actually excellent for making lasagne in. Once again, messy but tasty. (actually that pretty much sums up most of what emerges from my kitchen)

Raeli and I alternated between bonding beautifully and grouching at each other, largely because her vocabulary seems to have reduced sharply to ‘BUT MUUUUUUM’ which drives me wild with irritation, especially when she follows up ‘don’t say that to me again’ with “BUUUUUT MUUUUUUUUUM.” There were times when I thought my head would explode!

She’s still only five, right? Not fifteen?

Tomorrow’s plan is to make it to Pilates for the first time in a month (a succession of disasters and babysitting letdowns have prevented me), to pick up a few groceries (no big pre-Christmas shop for me, I can’t face the queues), check the postbox and then come HOME and pretty much stay here until the holiday hits. Still need to finish the Christmas Bombe, bake a gingerbread cake, and probably make christmas muffins with Raeli because she desperately wants to.

Sigh. Baking with children is fun, but takes FIVE TIMES LONGER.

I should really wrap presents.

Kind of sleepy, actually.