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!

(more…)

I appeared on the Aqueduct Press blog this week, summing up some of my favourite things about 2010 – TV, podcasts, books, etc. Normally I leave my summing up of the year for New Year’s Eve (always a chance I might squeeze in one more awesome book!) so it was kind of warm and refreshing to get it over with now. I am a huge fangirl of Aqueduct Press, so was very excited to be included in this year’s list of awesome people participating in the “pleasures of reading, viewing, etc.” series of blogs.

I turned in a project today that on the surface looked small and dainty but in actuality turned out to be a mammoth effort, starting back in September right after Worldcon, and occupying a large part of my brain ever since then. I’m delighted with the results – and very proud of it. Possibly it’s the most ME I’ve ever written. In any case, I should be able to announce more about it in due course – but the important thing right now is that it’s DONE. That means the last deadline for 2010 has been met, and I can get on with cleaning the house for Christmas, and facing the impending school holidays with valiant readiness.

My next deadline is 10 Jan for the proofs of Book 2, and the copy edits for Book 3 should be arriving at the same time, which means I will be working through most of Raeli’s school holidays, though hopefully it’s the kind of work that can be done in large sections during sleepover visits, trips to the movies and other activities with people other than me. There are plans afoot.

Daniel Simpson has done a gorgeous review of Galactic Suburbia over at ASiF. It’s a lovely if surreal thing to read – most of the feedback we get is from people we know pretty well, so it’s rather odd to have what we do reflected back at us by someone who isn’t in intimate acquaintance. Also, he seems to like us a lot, which does not hurt at all!

Rowena gives Power and Majesty a shout out over on the King Rolen’s Kin blog. I know exactly what she means about the frustration of using strong stylistic visual images to inspire your writing, and then realising it doesn’t actually come across all that clearly in the text. Something I realised retrospectively about the Creature Court books is that other people didn’t see the 1920′s culture and fashions quite as clearly as I did when I was writing them! Not that these things should be allowed to get in the way of the story, but… sigh. Why don’t they illustrate adult novels?

Speaking of shout outs, I also got one over at the Writer & the Critic podcast, now in its SECOND episode. I am very excited that they are going to review one of the books I recommended to them, even if I can’t quite remember what it is I recommended. I’m sure they were AWESOME. Also I very much enjoyed listening to their contrasting reviews of Feed, both of which brought up a lot of issues about the book that I hadn’t remotely noticed. I’m glad I posted my review before I listened!

I caught a preview for the Doctor Who Christmas Carol on ABC TV this week – so exciting! Funny too – I like the way it totally looks like a proper BBC costume drama right up to the point where the Doctor arrives, covered in soot. I am just bouncing about getting the Christmas special on real TV here in Australia on Boxing Day – it’s going to be PROPER CHRISTMAS AT LAST.

Now I am collapsing in a heap after the 5 day marathon that was making Raeli write Christmas cards for her entire class. And birthday party invitations. Also, we have haircuts. There has been much organisation happening.

Phew. School play tomorrow. Hooray!

So, last year I wrote about the icky feeling of lying to my intelligent child about the Santa myth. Well… the reindeer is well and truly out of the bag, thanks to the blabbing of young Dr Oscar, age 5.

“Oscar says Santa doesn’t bring the presents, it’s your parents,” she said, eyes welling in the back of the car as we drove home from a merry evening with friends (these questions ALWAYS come up from the back of the car). “Is it true?”

Caught on the back foot, I tried to weasel out of an immediate answer by trying to gauge whether she actually wanted an answer to that question, but when she said “I want the truth” in a solemn little voice, I crumbled and confessed all. She was sad and confused and it was HORRIBLE. I ended up trying to explain the history of Christmas over the next hour, tying myself in knots over the whole thing.

I’m still not sure how she’s taking it. She veers from excitement and delight at being in on the grand conspiracy, to being glum and dispirited. She did perk up a bit when she discovered we were responsible for the Monsters v. Aliens DVD (though she didn’t remember the Beauty and the Beast one that actually took effort to supply out of season, the wench).

Before going to bed last night, she firmly wrote a note to Santa. She seems to shift between accepting that it’s just me and her Daddy, and still believing in Santa. It’s like it takes time for the layers to peel away… today, at her insistence, we went to sit on the knee of a shopping mall Santa (which she had requested earlier, after a friend reported the experience – we’ve never done that with her before). If anyone’s looking for a good Santa in the Hobart region, by the way, I can recommend the one in Centrepoint – he was very respectable looking, the elves are well organised, and the photo only costs $10. After checking out a mum’s and bub’s forum I found out that some can cost as much as $25! There wasn’t even a queue.

Raeli and I spent time Christmas shopping, and she seems to have gotten over the whole experience. I’m not sure I have. I felt awful, every uneasiness about the Santa Lie that I’d ever felt just exploding, all at once. I don’t think I can bear to go through that again with Jemima.

Maybe I’ll just have Raeli tell her.

Santa's WHAT??? OMG, so who bought us the trampoline?

(more…)

So that was November, then…

I was pleased that I managed to make the month so productive, despite the urge to collapse in a heap in the wake of finally, finally, finally finishing the draft of book 3 (which it appears is most likely to be titled Reign of Beasts). Thanks to my List of Doom, I kept writing, putting together a draft of a publishing proposal for Fury to be polished up in the New Year, I started editing Blueberry again, which is going to be my summer project, I read books which had been archived on my shelves far too long, and I sewed – bookmarks for a friend’s commission, finishing the top of a baby quilt, and the beginnings of a new crazy quilt.

And you know, in the midst of all that I pushed through my copy edits for The Shattered City (Book 2), and prepared for & taught a one day course on writing fantasy novels.

One of the items on my list was to write a short story. Originally I had another plan for that, but then Alisa went and rejected two stories from a project we were doing together, which left me having to start from scratch! (In a good way. I am hugely excited now about what I’m doing, and she was totally right to kick those stories to the curb. Good enough is totally not good enough.) One of those stories is now done thanks to the List of Doom, and I have to write the other as soon as I can. I’m in a weird in-between-professional-deadlines space right now, where I don’t know where the next deadline is coming from. I will receive proofs for Book 2 and structural edits for Book 3 at SOME point, and everything will have to be dropped to do them, but I don’t know when. All the more reason to polish off my other necessary jobs ASAP, especially as I only have another fortnight or so before the school holidays hit, and there’s no such thing as a truly productive work day until late February.

But in any case, I did my not-Nano November, and while I never got up the high energy equivalent to writing 50K (as it turned out, writing about 5-6000 words as part of smaller projects was my limit) I managed to complete 34/35 items, and that last one was a crazy quilt square that I could have polished off at the last day if I’d dropped everything to do it, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to prioritise that way.

Once I get this last story done, which I have been plotting and replotting in my head so it’s just about ready to burn up the page, I am officially free of commitments, and I would love to have a little of that freedom before I get publisher deadlines again – one thing I have learned this year is that you can’t use ALL the time you have until the end of a deadline, as other things are always turning up to compete, usually in the last two weeks. I’ve always been one to start slowly and build up momentum to rip through the work at a high pace in those last couple of weeks, and so the stop-start-stop-start work pace this year has thrown me for a loop more than once.

I honestly thought I would never get to the end of Book 3. I seemed to be constantly one month from getting it done, and every time I had to stop and start again, I lost momentum and had to “waste” time scrabbling around and getting my zone back, only to be interrupted with a new urgent task as soon as I got up a decent head of steam.

(more…)

(via Blue Milk)

So, this one gets me where I live. The overly gendered toy market and the advertising that goes along with it is a constant frustration for me, as a mother of two girls. We’re not just talking about pink or blue packaging here. There is a huge divide between the products created for girls and those for boys, and this vid shows something about how confronting that can be for parents who actively think about this stuff.

Boys, in Toydepartmentworld, get to be warriors or builders. Even the building toys that are mostly directed at them are often quite violent in the story that goes along with them, or the advertising associated with them. Girls, meanwhile, get to be sparkly princesses or shopping queens.

The ads targeted at children are gross parodies of the gendered advertising aimed at men and women. The whole thing seems designed to create the four wheel drive and fashion magazine purchases of the future. Which, of course, it is.

The vid quite rightly points out that pushing these kind of tight, limited gender boxes on children at such an early age can have quite awful and far-reaching consequences. At a time when they are learning how to be human and how to find their place in society, a time when everything they learn gets soaked into their consciousness like a sponge, two of the biggest messages they are internalising is that boys must be strong, violent and controlling, and that girls must be pretty, glamorous and domestic.

It’s not just advertising. Of course it’s not just advertising. Our children are absolutely complicit in this rigid stereotyping of genders. I feel at times like de-brainwashing Raeli from the ideas about gender she and her friends come up with in the playground is a full time job. It’s like they spend their entire lunch break sitting around and wilfully constructing the most limited and small minded social constructs for themselves.

(more…)

My new phone has a camera in it! I know, most people are way ahead of me on this technology, but I’m excited by it, especially as the only camera we own that I’ve ever known how to use has broken recently. So hooray, lots of pictures!

Kathryn Lomer at Fuller’s Bookshop last Sunday, launching Three Things About Daisy Blue, the final book in the A&U Girlfriend series by Kate Gordon. You all know how much I have loved this series – while it’s sad to see it end I was delighted to be able to attend the launch of the last one, which happens to have been written by a friend of mine!

Here’s Kate herself, describing what sounds like a great fun teen book set in Bali. She read a scene about a girl eating a durian and throwing up on a boy’s shoes which had us all squirming! I look forward to reading this one.

Jem’s new trick, feeding the Glammer! She loves sitting at the big girl table, but loves feeding her food to grown ups even more.

(more…)

Right now, her favourite song to listen to in the car is… “Journey’s End” by Chameleon Circuit. Sad but true!

(vid has, well, pretty much all the spoilers for Doctor Who – Journey’s End. Remember when that skinny chap in the suit was the Doctor?)

So I wrote the end of the last of the short stories I needed to write last night, and while it still needs some work, I’m pretty much done with that commitment – my plan was to enjoy one blissful day of baby cuddling and domestic catch up before I plunge into finishing that pesky third novel once and for all.

Ha, guess what happened? Yep, one sick child home from school.

In practice it hasn’t been too bad – I have reformatted a story, sorted some doll business and parcels, and otherwise am catching up on my reading, sewing and Xena watching when one child isn’t threatening to throw up and the other isn’t randomly screaming or clinging to my leg.

Then there’s the pipecleaners.

We’ve had an ongoing niggle with the school about notices – Raeli’s teachers seem to prefer the method of waving a small pile of notices around vaguely and *not* insisting that each child take one and put it in their bag. Five and six year olds. Uh huh. Which basically means that those parents who spend any amount of time in the playground chatting to each other are constantly finding out about things that we missed! You know, important things like notes to participate in school photos, or preparation for free dress days.

Last week, i discovered thanks to the parental gossip network that a flyer had gone out, detailing a particular “boat” that they wanted us to help our child construct for this week. When I asked the teacher about it on Friday, she had no flyers left and promised to have one there for Monday (which meant, as the boats were required this week, that we wouldn’t have the weekend to build the dratted thing).

With Raeli home sick today I was fretting a bit about that flyer, as we were running out of days when boat-construction was remotely practical. My honey, being the Best of Dads, volunteered to go to the school this morning and fetch the flyer. He ended up having to go to the office and photocopy it himself!

Not just a paper boat, as it turns out. It’s an elaborate sail-car which requires all kinds of crafty ingredients. Bendy straws, beads, toothpicks, pipe-cleaners… I have all of it except the last item, and my one attempt to leave the house was stalled by that promising-to-throw-up child again. Gah.

Pipe-cleaners. Really. This is my life, where the difference between a calm day and a stressed day is the lack of two freaking pipe-cleaners.

What I want to know is, how do families with two working-outside-the-house parents possibly cope with the weight of expectation that comes from primary schools? if it’s not baking cakes and constructing articulated vehicles it’s attending assemblies, sports days, fundraisers, meetings and that’s before we get to formal parent help – something I constantly feel guilty about not volunteering for.

Bah. What is a blog for if not whinging? Everyone cross fingers with me that my tykelet will be fresh as a daisy tomorrow, so my first daycare afternoon of the week can be spent as it should be – finishing a novel!

It’s the AFL Grand Final tonight sometime imminently. Under normal circumstances I would be blissfully unaware of this fact, but my daughter’s school considers this an annual event worthy of note – and they gave all the kids a free dress day, so they could wear their team colours.

(more…)

[direct from the iPad: a drawing by Raeli of Alisa at the TPP dealer's table]

memorable moment: Mondy staring at Aifin after about 10 minutes intense conversation about iPad sleeves and suddenly announcing, “Hang on, are you THE PRODUCER?”

many other memorable moments: Alex, expecting to be completely anonymous at this con, being faced by various people saying “are you ALEX FROM MELBOURNE?”

drink of the convention: the purple daiquiris at the Voyager 15 party.

frocks of the convention: Alex, Alisa & Terri at the Hugos.

book of the convention: THE LITTLE PINK ONE.

You can find a video here of Tony C Smith’s live broadcast of his reaction to the Hugo awards. About 40 mins in, he finds out he won the Best Fanzine for Starship Sofa and explodes with joy. It’s also a nice little visual of what it’s like to be following award ceremonies (as I usually am) via the internet.

Blindmouse’s con report (including a well thought out response to my disastrous female superhero panel)
Random Tangent has some great, detailed reports about panels attended. My favourite of course is Day 3 which refers to my feminism in fantasy panel!
Megan with glorious enthusiasm about her first ever lit panel.
Catherynne Valente documents how it feels to lose a Hugo.
Gary Kemble has gathered some links.
Voyager on the inaugural winner of the Norma K Hemming Award (THE NORMA!!!), Maria Quinn.

Tehani’s con report.
Flinthart’s con report
Mondy on life after Worldcon.