I’ve spent the last several weeks sinking into a slow swamp of rewrites, but I can finally see a glimpse of sunshine, and if you don’t record the good days, somehow they get forgotten faster than anything else.

So today I:

edited seven chapters of Book 2, including three really tricky ones that needed New Writing, and one scene I’ve been planning to write for several months and only just got around to.

while also: shopping for baby food, doing laundry, ridding the kitchen of a scary large pile of washing up, cooking a beef casserole for dinner, baking a batch of cupcakes for Raeli to take for a school fundraiser tomorrow (Children’s Book Week means CAKE)

Partly I want to point out to myself that I can in fact do enough work to justify putting Jem in a full day of daycare a week (though she’ll be back to half days from next week – this was an emergency measure put in to help deal with a sudden extra workload.

And then I get worried that I’ll expect myself to achieve that level of domestic/professional awesomeness all the time, and fall in a heap.

Then I remember all the other things I should have done today – or, more properly, BEFORE today.

Then I tell myself not to be so hard on myself, because I had a good day, and the chances of a day available to work and a GOOD DAY’S WORK actually colliding are pretty rare, actually, and the very fact that I have only had a few full days of daycare in itself piles SO MUCH PRESSURE on that day that the fact that I get anything creative done is in itself a miracle.

So um yes. It was a good day, which is not something I take for granted. And I’m almost done with this book. Then I get a few days of leisure (ha!) to plan the trip to Melbourne, prepare for my panels, and hang out with my girls before I neglect them for a week.

Tomorrow I will take Raeli to school (the one day a week I do the drop off), take baby Jem in later to visit Raeli’s school for the Book Week Parade, take Jem to daycare in the afternoon, spend the next two hours doing a small amount of work such as editing two chapters and possibly posting some dolls, then pick up Raeli and take her to gymnastics.

Heh. Possibly all my days contain awesome achievements, just of different varieties. Thank goodness all my favourite podcasts have new episodes out. It makes the drudge work so very undrudgey. I look forward to housework now!

A mixed weekend, many highs and lows. I ran away from my family on Saturday to do some work on my book at the State Library in Hobart (it stays open an hour and a half longer than my local on Saturdays) and worked up a storm. I haven’t been in there for years, and was pleased to see how gorgeous it is now! It was my childhood library and it was exciting to see what a nice space it is.

Then I swung by to vote before going home. No sausage sizzle! Either I was ripped off or it was over well before 2pm which seems a bit lacking in forethought. Sadly this proved to be an omen for how the rest of the election was going to go.

The family had breakfast for dinner and settled down to watch the election results unfold. Towards the end, the only thing that would have made me happier was if they had cut back to Kerry O’Brien and Stephen Smith and they were in their pyjamas, having a pillow fight.

I was glad to see how well the Greens did in the Senate, but otherwise the whole thing was extremely demoralising. Oh, the stress and lack of closure!

At least Arsenal came to the party by giving us a 6-0 win over Blackpool. Happymaking

Today there was more work. See how you haven’t been missing much by me not blogging about my daily activities? WORK IS DULL TO HEAR ABOUT. Five more days and my structural edit is done, done, dusted, leaving me a few days to plan, shop and prepare for Worldcon. I think maybe I need a new coat. We’re going to be tramming all over the place and mine has bits falling off it constantly.

I will post my Worldcon schedule separately. I’m excited about lots of the items (though unfortunately wasn’t able to make the ones I was programmed for on Thursday) and especially that we are doing a “live” Galactic Suburbia episode on Friday morning.

I became snappish and strange this weekend, every time someone asked me how the writing was going. It’s not their fault that the question makes me want to scream and jump out the nearest window. I can’t even roll my eyes and complain that they didn’t just check my blog, because I have been quite happily using the books meme to completely avoid blogging about what I have been doing lately.

There’s a simple reason for that. I’m being hammered. It has been deadline after deadline, many of them bleeding into each other, with little chance to take a break in between (at this point ‘break’ just means ‘loss of momentum meaning work is twice as hard when I start again). I don’t want to blog about it. I’m boring myself, let alone my audience!

The good thing is that I am marking progress. I’m currently in the middle of the structural edit to end all structural edits, and it’s doing amazing things for the book, but it feels like my head has been turned inside out and bashed with large pieces of furniture. Yes, this is still the best job in the world, but that doesn’t mean it’s not haaaard some days.

Today was my one full time work day, and it was great, hugely productive, but now I have a week of snatched hours ahead of me, and only one or two of those precious full days left before D-Day. I can’t just relax and say ‘oh, no daycare today, I guess I can’t be expected to get any work done.’ One of those deadlines is zooming up in front of me, and it’s the non-negotiable variety, so it’s all hands on deck, every hour counts.

I was expecting to be free of all current work commitments by Worldcon – and instead, that date is now November 1. Sometimes the further away deadlines are scarier than the close ones. At least the close ones mean that the end is in sight.

See, and now the whole thing has turned into one colossal whinge, which is exactly what I didn’t want to do. Back to talking about other people’s awesome books for another week, I think…

(at least I’m not still writing a PhD thesis or something crazy like that)

Episode 12 is available for streaming here, downloading here, and can also be found on iTunes by searching for ‘Galactic Suburbia’

In which we talk about publishers behaving badly, authors self-publishing, the future of reading and the price of a short story. Also we talk about books. Shocking, isn’t it?

News

Night Shade apologises for any problems they’ve caused any of their authors

SFWA puts Night Shade Books on probation as a qualified SFWA market for a period of one year, effective immediately.

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I’ve spent the last few days wrapped up in the emotions of my characters, digging away at them, making them better, and occasionally turning my back only to find them making out with each other. (seriously, it’s like having a houseful of teenagers, you can’t take your eyes off them for a moment and the hormones take over!)

My honey has gone to bed early. I can’t blame him. Just imagine what it must be like to be partnered with a writer, someone who spends so much time not only glued to a laptop (possibly I would do this even if I weren’t a writer) but also staring into space, having imaginary conversations with people who aren’t there, and occasionally acting out fight scenes in the living room (possibly he doesn’t know I do this).

I think that from the outside, possibly it looks a bit like this:

I’ve spent the day ripping central chapters out by their roots and replacing a whole bunch of madeyuppy rubbish with saner, cleaner, sexier narrative. It hurts, my brain, it hurts.

So all I can offer in the way of useful bloggage are some good things that other people have been writing:

Tehani interviews Malindo Lo (check out the Fablecroft blog for some other great interviews this week)

Kaaron Warren talks about getting ideas for endings, while Catherynne Valente talks about the importance of the opening paragraph

Why the Dove Movement is bad for your daughters (via Copperbadge/Sam Storyteller)

Stephanie Gunn responds to our latest (tenth!!!) Galactic Suburbia podcast, talking about her early experiences in reading genre.

A powerful post about what it can be like bringing a second baby into your family.

And Alisa has posted her list of Twelfth Planet Press eligible works and eligible artwork for the Ditmars that are currently open for nominations. This is convenient for me because all my eligible stories were published by Twelfth Planet Press!

That is:

“Like Us,” Shiny Issue 5 – short story
“Prosperine When It Sizzles,” New Ceres Nights – short story
Siren Beat – novelette

When my brain is together enough to sift through old recs posts I will put up a list of Australian stuff I liked in 2009! It seems so very long ago, doesn’t it?

In closing, Tehani pointed me at this announcement that 69 year old Wonder Woman has finally been allowed to swap the flag-bearing minidress/shorts for some sensible threads. I’m dubious about the Superman-style alternate version of her backstory, but I do like the mature, Black Canary style costume. And Issue 600 of her monthly comic (amazing what people will do to hang on to a franchise) is definitely something to be celebrated.

One birthday party down, one to go. I managed some work this afternoon, cranking up some Lucksmiths and eventually graduating to my actual edit playlist as I transitioned from footling with my first chapter to flat out writing an all new chapter 2.

I’m at that stage with the structural edit when the comments from the editor finally sink into the backbrain and instead of ‘yeahhh spose she has a point’ I’m completely at ‘how could I have POSSIBLY thought this was good enough, yeeHAH let’s do some digging at this ditch’ only possibly with a less bad Yankee accent.

Now we’re chilled out, watching yesterday’s Masterchef and waiting for Raeli to get into her pyjamas for bedtime stories. I am going to have to try and work in the evenings now instead of just chatting, watching tv and blogging – but that means convincing a different part of my brain to wake up after 9pm! Brains can be trained. If you have enough carrots (cough, Magnums) and sticks (deadline deadline deadline).

Since I want to kick the part of my brain that can write pretty sentences, I’m feeding it with the best books I can find. No Gossip Girl for me this week – well, no more Gossip Girl. Instead, I’m dipping into Dorothy Parker and immersing myself in Ellen Kushner’s The Privilege of the Sword, one of those books I’ve been meaning to read for a really long time. It’s gorgeous. And yes, it makes me want to lift my game. Damn it. Don’t you hate that?

EDIT: Forgot this – I was chided by Tehani on Twitter for not telling the world that the Guild comic #2 is out as an iApp. I didn’t know until she told me! But now I do and I read it and it is awesome. I am loving the Cyd backstory, and the how-she-met-the-gang encounters, plus actually seeing the visuals of how the game works, the aspect of the Guild that is (understandably) worked around/invisible in the actual episodes. I am sooooo hanging out for the new season to find out what happens between Cyd and you-know-who-and-if-you-don’t-what-are-you-waiting-for-watch-it-already-YES-I-SAID-SHOULD.

And that is all.

Kelly Link has been blogging all around the internet, popping up in all kinds of places and discussing a variety of topics, ostensibly to promote the paperback release of Pretty Monsters (which has made it all the way to Kingston, Tasmania – I spotted it in a bookshop today!). Over at i09 she talks about using your obsessions as fuel for short story writing, a technique I used to be quite evangelical back in my years of teaching creative writing. I called it ‘the list of awesome’ and suggested students construct a list of their most obscure and passionate interests in order to write stories that were uniquely theirs.

At some point this year I’m going to be writing a bunch of stories about or inspired by: the Shelley-Byron circle, the deified Livia and Drusilla, Brideshead Revisited, Robotech, iPod playlists and Julius Caesar. I’m really looking forward to them, as my treat for finishing Book 3. Assuming that thing happens.

Ahhh, short stories, how I miss you.

Jemima is growing and developing and doing all those amazing things that make my heart hurt, because every new stage is the end of an old stage, which is never coming back. In the last couple of weeks she has developed an amazing sense of balance (she still needs to hold on to furniture to stay upright but only just), has developed babble into something very close to a recognisable code (aka language) and refuses to be spoon fed because she wants to do it all herself, thank you very much.

We’ve leaped from mushed vegetables to whole bananas, noodles and toast, seemingly overnight. It’s a shock to the system. Just as I was congratulating myself on no longer having to spend quite so much time spooning food patiently into my baby, I discovered that actually she’s not happy puddling around on the floor with toys any more, she wants stimulation and interaction. During my writing time.

Which means I basically have to rethink everything I’ve been assuming about my own working habits.

The weekend is another festival of birthdays – two parties for Raeli to attend, at least on different days, but both at 10am. I had to break it to my honey tonight that there would be no weekend sleep ins, for any of us. He gets to stay home on baby duty while I venture into the wide world of pinatas, cake and musical chairs. Why do children have better social lives than us? I am exerting my vengeance by making her sit sweat-shop-style to produce handmade birthday cards.

My first editing week of three is half done already. The clock is ticking. Or maybe that’s just the caffeine-induced heart palpitations.

The other night I did a great interview with Paige Turner at local university-based community radio station Edge Radio. Paige has put up a podcast of the interview in which we discuss the appeal of fantasy in a tech-heavy world, how I come up with my character names, and the heavy classics/historical influences of my fantasy. As well as other fun things.

Check it out!

It’s Book Release Day! Let there be ribbons and honeycakes and rioting in the street. In the mean time – well, I never got my act together enough to write a proper acknowledgement page in time to get it into the book. I told myself I’d save it for the final volume – much as I refused to go to my first two graduation ceremonies on the grounds that I’d be getting my PhD sooner or later and it’s the sort of thing you should only do once. Or some other excuse for being slack.

But Power and Majesty is the cumulative result of many years of work, and I have many people to thank for their contribution in making it happen:

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