The weekend was a blur, roadrunner style. Thank goodness I was caught up with my wordcount so I wasn’t actually trying to write at the same time as juggling the two daughters and their need for snuggles, soccer parenting, the birthday card factory line, actual birthday party attendance involving two year old’s first dip in a pool (only mildly traumatic), the desperate need to catch up on Futurama movies as a family unit, the weekly grocery shop, picking up daughter after Polish dancing and, oh yes, a migraine.

Whereas what I actually wanted to do all weekend was to lie on the library bed and read my new Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story book constantly. And/or listen to the novelisation of the Dalek Masterplan which I got out from the library in a flurry of Jean Marsh & Peter Purves adoration (their recent audio play The Anachronauts totally did for me, and Jean Marsh’s brilliant audio rendition of the original Upstairs Downstairs novel complete with grumpy Scottish butler impersonation DID NOT HELP).

May is disappearing at a frantic rate. People keep asking what I want for my birthday. More time please, instead of it ribboning out of my fingers and disappearing into the sunset.

June is upon us, and with it comes not only the school holidays (which I rather look forward to these days – my elder daughter is old enough that having her home is marginally more compatible with me getting some writing done than is having to juggle her school & activity routine) but also Continuum travel, and one of my twice-yearly bouts of actual outside-the-house work.

So… the novel writing is likely to slow in the first half of June, which is frustrating as I’m currently on something of a roll. Luckily I have signed up for the Clarion Write-a-thon (proper link to my page here – I think it wasn’t set up yet last time I linked) to get me back on track.

This year’s goal is simply to produce more stuff. Stories, books whatever. Words, Tansy, words!

My Flappers with Swords blog tour continues – I have a piece up at Kate Elliott’s blog on Looking For The Women (in Ancient Rome) which is a response and sequel to her own excellent Looking For Women in Historically-Based Fantasy Worlds.

“If a story starts with a maiden, let’s not assume that she has to get locked in a tower.”

I haven’t been blogging about writing much lately, meanwhile. I am writing a lot. I’ve started something new while I wait to hear about a whole bunch of irons which may or may not be in the fire. It’s exciting me a lot. I’m also writing a bunch of short fic and trying to get myself Out There. The tiny time windows I have to write in are starting to squeeze tighter and tighter, but there’s nothing I can do about that except breathe deep and carry on. I’m nearly at 50K total fiction words for the year, which would be more exciting if the year wasn’t nearly half over.

The Clarion Write-a-thon just swung past my radar again. I had completely forgotten about it and yet, checking back over my blog, it’s the thing that made the difference in building writing momentum for me last year, and helped me get to the halfway point of my Nancy Napoleon novel. 37,000 words in six weeks, not shabby at all.

(more…)

Nicole Murphy has a regular series up on her blog, interviewing writers about their habits and their processes. I am her star of the week, talking about my habits here, and my processes here.

It’s a while since I have checked in with myself about what I’m doing and how I do it, so it was kind of fascinating to me to roll out these answers.

“I usually have one primary and a couple of secondary projects. This is the first year in a very long time I have allowed myself to have multiple projects, none of which are headline acts. I can write half a chapter of a novel, or 200 words each across 5 short stories if I want. Later in the year, as my projects consolidate, I intend to be a bit firmer about prioritising certain novels, but right now I’m letting myself write quite freely which is – terrifying and enchanting at the same time.”

I knew I was doing something completely different this year, but it hadn’t sunk in quite how much I have changed the way I work for 2012. It could be scary, except that I’ve been doing this long enough to know that my methods are always fluid, always changing. What works for me now is not necessarily what will work even one book from now, let alone three.

(more…)

I empathised deeply with this post about the solitary existence of writers and the way we need our people around us to keep us sane, and professional.

As part of the ongoing excellent advocacy work coming out of the #AWW challenge, here’s a list of Australian women writers of Asian heritage to help you include some diversity in your choices.

The Australian government is running an online survey about our opinions on gay marriage. So far the interim response is pretty depressing (running at only a bit over 30% saying YES GAY MARRIAGE) but it’s not based on very many people’s opinions. So if you’re Australian, go, take five minutes and register your own thoughts on the issue.

Alisa Krasnostein, Cheryl Morgan, Lynne M Thomas and many other smart people share their opinions on awards in the latest SF Mind Meld.

One of my favourite Tor.com posts this week – Redskirts looks at some of the portrayals of women among the traditional ‘redshirt’ junior-Starfleet-person-of-the-week tradition in the original Star Trek.

The new Doctor Who companion has been announced and we still know very little about her – Ritch Ludlow asks some questions about fan response to Amy Pond and considers what kind of standards might be applied to this new character.

Oooh, another great one from Tor.com! Comic artist Faith Erin Hicks whose work I really enjoyed on ‘Friends With Boys’ has drawn a personal response to The Hunger Games as a popular story, drawing upon her family experience (as the daughter of a Vietnam veteran). I love to see the comics form used to tell powerful memoir and this brief piece is very compelling.

(more…)

So it’s a new month and along with hatters and hares, March is bringing a whole lot of new writing issues for me to talk about in what seems to be a theme of writing process vs. lifestyle this week (started with Writing – Mothering – Balancing and continued with Mothering, Writing, Pilating, Guilt).

My plan for this year is still pretty loose, but the big goal was to have the revised, polished and generally awesomecaked Nancy Napoleon novel ready to submit by the end of March. Which seemed pretty sensible to me – I had ROR at the end of January, and school holidays ended the middle of February, which gave me a whopping SIX WEEKS to revise the book at make it awesome.

But then I convinced myself that I had all these other bits and pieces of things to do, like writing my talk for the Horror film festival, and a few short stories, and… well the main thing was that at that point I’d put down very few new words since November, and much though my ‘no writing school holidays’ experiment was a great success, I was starting to get the itch. So I gave myself a different goal of writing 10,000 words on various fiction projects, and happily played with the idea of getting back into some kind of writing routine.

At least, that’s what the top part of my brain thought was happening. The public face of the brain. The secret, dingy underbelly of my brain had a whole different agenda, which I have been circling around for the last few days, waiting for the bad news to be revealed. Here we go:

The truth is, I hate editing myself.

(more…)

I finished my short story! It feels like a big achievement, the first thing finished of the year. This is going to be my year of finishing things, and rewriting things, and submitting things. Many things. For the first time in a while, I don’t have a contract or official deadlines which means I have to MAKE MY OWN.

Today is Pilates Day, an activity I took up when Justine Larbalestier started evangelising about how important it was for writers to start that kind of stuff BEFORE developing RSI or some other work related injury. When I started, it was amazing how many people were there to fix something awful they had done to their bodies. I would feel a bit abashed about being there pre-emptively, but it seems the thing to do.

Pilates is one of those things I had to circumvent a lot of guilt to allow myself to do – because it’s something that’s about ME and not the family. Especially when I was using household money to pay my way – but since our last big budget rehaul, I’ve been paying for it myself and buying less things on the internet in order to do so, which means I feel less like I have to justify This Thing.

(I know, by the way, that I shouldn’t have to justify it, and what’s good for me is good for the family and so on, but logic is logic and guilt is guilt)

Managing guilt is a huge aspect to being a working mother. Or a mother full stop, I guess. (it’s also one of the hardest aspects to reconcile with being a feminist – what works in theory often falls down in practice, and when the baby’s screaming, theory doesn’t help much!) I find it interesting when talking to other mothers that we all have different lines of guilt, those which we cross regularly and feel bad about, those which we try not to cross and feel AWFUL about, and those which we are okay with.

(more…)

It occurs to me that the blog has become less and less personal. I write a lot of pop culture essays, and put up links, but I don’t talk much any more about process, or my writing career, or even personal everyday stuff.

I’m not sure why that it – the process stuff I understand, because I’m so wrapped up in the -aargh- phase of finishing my new novel that I’m not ready to talk about it. And, you know, my kids are cute and all, but there’s only so many pictures I can post of them dressed as Doctor Who characters.

Still, I’d like to continue talking about home and domestic stuff, if only to continue my theme of – hey, writing and parenting, go together pretty well but it’s HARD sometimes.

I didn’t work this weekend at all. I often don’t – taking weekends has been a big and important step for me, and one I’ve only come to in recent years. Partly it was deprogramming from the PhD years, and partly a symptom of working from home – I’ve always been self-employed/freelance/creative and that means you never have a structured day off. You have to make one.

As a parent, the weekend is the time when I have a fellow parent home all day, and there’s a lovely decadence in that. Baby smells whiffy, there’s a 50-50 chance I don’t have to deal with it! But because of that, I regularly slip into the bad habit of assuming I will get more done on the weekend than I actually do, and feeling on Monday like I’m WAY BEHIND which is stressful and horrid.

Also there’s the thing where, during the precious Nap Hours that still occur most days (that’s when the 2 year old naps, not the rest of us), my seven year old daughter quite reasonably expects that sometimes we’ll do something together. Something Jem-free. I had no qualms about telling her to go read a comic or something, Mummy was busy, during the school holidays, but now she’s back at school, there are very few Mummy-Raeli-Jemfree hours.

So I try to keep my expectations of the weekend to a minimum, unless I have a dire deadline. This weekend, once I got the head’s up that we were going to have crazy 35 degree days with it not cooling down much at night (a rare occurrence in the Tassie summer) I decided that okay, I wasn’t going to try to get ANYTHING done this weekend at all, except for maybe catching up on my bookshelf reading.

(more…)

There’s a trick, well-honed over the last eleven years, to finding a good ROR retreat. Ideally, we need some kind of shared accommodation to fit 5-8 writers, a working kitchen so Mr Flinthart can do his thing, a decent-sized space to all sit in for critiquing sessions, some inspiring scenery and some nice walking areas nearby.

Steeles Island, a mostly-private peninsula out near Carlton Beach (on the eastern shore of the Derwent River), turned out to have all these things in spades. It was a lucky find, as it turned out to have so many benefits we hadn’t even hoped for.

This particular ROR (wRiters on the Road/Rise/Riesling) had a family theme to it. We’d only included family members once before, when little Raeli was too young for me to bear leaving her behind for a whole four days, and so she and my honey came along to a North West Coast Tasmanian ROR, staying nights with us at the Hawley Beach house we rented, and disappearing during the days to visit relatives. This time around, we planned to do something similar only with Jem along – and then Margo and Rowena decided to bring family members too!

(more…)

So I finished Nanowrimo and ‘won’ in that I completed 50,000 words of novel this month (though I think it doesn’t technically count as a win because I wrote them on two different novels, too bad, I’m counting it). I didn’t do much ELSE this month, of course, but I also was glad to feel that I didn’t completely neglect my house, children, reading obligations, etc. It’s almost like I’m getting the hang of this novel thing. Only the first week was teeth-grindingly hard.

Which of course has made me raise the bar of expectations as to how many words I can put on the plate when I am officially writing a novel – the old 1000 words 5 times a week is starting to look somewhat shabby. Still… no use thinking about that now, I have months and months before I can be actively writing new words every day again. Though the collaborative novel I am writing with the magnificent Kate will continue on and off over the next month or two I guess… at least I get whole days when I am not actively supposed to be working on it!

(more…)

16316 / 50000 words. 33% done!

So I think I can blog about my current WIP again because I’ve started liking it, which after a week of near-torture is something of a relief!

My main problem at the moment is that I am writing a story set in the Verona of Romeo & Juliet (well, not entirely THAT Verona what with the tropical islands and the necromancy) and the only way to add magic and logic and possibly the occasional steam-powered robot (oops) to Shakespeare is to make sure that the canon itself works hard in the story. And there are only three canon facts about my heroine Rosaline, apart from the whole thing about Romeo being in love with her before Juliet: 1) her complexion was pale 2) she was determinedly chaste and 3) her sister’s name is Livia.

All of these things have given me a massive headache, at one time or another. But if I chuck them out, why bother calling my heroine Rosaline at all? So I’ve had to address them in my story, and in the building of the character. The only problem is that now her sister wants to be a point of view character and she’s a stitch away from becoming joint protagonist, and I can’t, I simply can’t have a protagonist called Livia. Quite apart from the fact that I’ve written three different fictional Livillas in the last two years (OK two of them were historical figures but still) I still live in hope that some day I will write the Great Livia Drusilla novel of all time, and how can I possibly do that if I already have another fictional Livia inside my head?

So I have to screw with canon. Which bugs the hell out of me. Because, you know. I want to be true to the play. Apart from all the liberties I already planned to take.

So she’s going to have to be Olivia, or Livian, or Liliane. Or something.

Damn you, canon!