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!

“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.

So I’m signing up again. I might try to be a bit more pro-active about fundraising rather than just piggybacking on the Write-a-thon for my own ends like I did last year – I was a bit embarrassed to spruik for sponsorship, but hey, it’s a good cause! I thoroughly recommend people joining in if they want to give their writing a kick in the pants – the nice thing about it is you can set whatever goals you like, which makes it a bit more convivial and inclusive than the Nano tradition. (not that I’m knocking Nano, if it works, it works!)

If you want to encourage me, or any of the other Write-a-thon participants (already some quite famous names signed up, though of course those of less famous names may need the encouragement even more) then do please donate to the fundraiser – Clarion is one of those marvellous institutions that genuinely enriches the SF community.

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.

The big thing looming in my life is that I have less than two years now before Jemima starts school, though her first year is likely to be more disruptive than constructive to my writing, as I’d be exchanging 2 daycare days of 8:30 am to 5:00 pm for 2 school days of 8:30 pm to 2:30 pm (the actual time available to me, not necessarily school hours) plus one extra of I think 8:30am to about 12-1pm, so I won’t be gaining net hours as such.

But the year after that… day after day of glorious empty house!

Not that I want to wish away her early childhood or anything, but it will definitely be the end of one era and the dawn of a greater productivity for me. That’s the point at which I will have to address things like ergonomics which I hand-wavy about now because I never get to spend more than an hour working on anything.

Yes, I should be writing. Instead, I am blogging. This is how I write.

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.

Peter Ball flagged this interesting article about how Iceland as a country has been using social media to aid in economic recovery. I particularly love their Tumblr “Iceland wants to be your friend.”

Another brilliant & funny parody-read-along post by Sarah Rees Brennan on gothic novels, this time Greygallows by Barbara Michaels.

One that got accidentally left off last week’s link post: Seanan McGuire on Fanfic

Ben Peek muses on worldbuilding, and a critical approach to fantasy traditions, especially when it comes to race.

Also on my iPod I have really enjoyed a couple of great podcasts lately: Shaun Tan guests on (the horribly named) Shooting the Poo, and is fascinating to listen to, especially talking frankly about the experience of being an animator at the Oscars last year. The latest Writer and the Critic also has a guest, and if you’ve never had the opportunity to see Mondy and Rob Shearman giving each other hell as the mates they are then this is the podcast for you.

I’ve been meaning to write a post about the importance of women’s history and why history is actually supremely important and relevant to people’s lives, inspired by this kickass women’s suffrage vid first brought to my attention by Sean the Blogonaut, but I’m obviously not going to get it done, so have the vid. It is most excellent.

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.

This has come as a shock to me, let me tell you! I spent 10 years teaching Creative Writing, evangelising about the glories of editing. I constantly tell myself that rewriting is easier than writing new words, there’s so much less pressure to be creative, you have it all THERE and you just get to tease it into being better.

But, of course, that’s the problem. Rewriting *is* easier than writing new words. There’s less creative pressure. And yes, I really am this perverse… the fact that it’s easier is what makes it harder for me. The older I get, the more my writing discipline depends on creative pressure, and momentum. As soon as either is relaxed, my brain starts self-sabotaging.

Because I have not been able to convince my brain that editing is hard, high-energy work (which, you know, it is, just different to the generation of new words) I often struggle to get it done at all.

The other challenge of rewriting/editing vs. generating new words is that there’s no easy way to measure progress, or plan tasks. It’s like the government health or education budget – it takes every resource you throw at it and can always use more. But figuring out how many resources are ENOUGH is really hard.

My current way of dealing with any kind of editing or rewriting work, whether it’s done with the aid of publishers or on my own, is to procrastinate for approximately half the available time, panic madly, and then hurl myself into the task, feeling sick and stressed, and furious at myself. Because that is not my business model. I’ve never been the kind of writer who pulls all-nighters. I work incrementally, build up momentum, and create sensible, achievable regular goals. Even in my old uni days, I would leave my crazy essay writing to the last available entire free day I had, not the last minute. (ah, for the day of entire free days) But when it comes to the editing and rewriting process, my brain just goes out the window.

Partly I have known this about myself for a while – especially my ability to shave weeks off deadlines in order to kick-start the panic centres of my brain. I always call this the Lintilla Complex, after my favourite Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy character. She appears in the second series of the original radio version of the story, which he chucked away to replace with a different plot for the books, and thus she is now pretty obscure, but I love her to bits. She’s an archaeologist who has had her arm offically broken, because of a theory that having some kind of stressful obstacle put in your way actually makes you more efficient. (which, okay, now I come to think of it is probably pretty offensive to anyone with a disability, MOVING ON!) I seem to recall she has a button which she regularly presses in order to get, for example, guards finding them, therefore prompting them all to run a lot faster and secure their goals more effectively.

When it comes to editing and rewriting, I am Lintilla with a broken arm. I sabotage myself JUST ENOUGH in order to get the synapses screaming, but not huddled in a ball on the floor, and then I Get Shit Done.

It’s exhausting just thinking about it. I’ve managed to not acquire this tendency for anything else in my life (except maybe cleaning the house in the week before hosting a party) but I seem to be stuck with it when it comes to novel revision.

I was starting to suspect that I had done it again, and that for all my sensible reasons for not starting the Nancy rewrite back on February 11th when school went back, really I was Lintillaing. Then came today. Which was the 1st March, and also one of my precious daycare days. So the best possible, possible day to start rewriting the book, or at least planning what I needed to do to get the project done.

And of course I spent most of the morning frozen, circling around the task of even OPENING THE FREAKING DOCUMENT in order to get all sorts of other things done (so not a wasted day!) and realising every time I considered starting the revision work that, in fact, I didn’t want to. When I did finally open the document, it felt like a ridiculously huge achievement, because I had spent the whole morning actively ignoring the little voice in my head that was trying to move the goal posts, again.

So my plan for March, apart from REVISE NOVEL is to work on the revising of the novel every day. I’m not going to say how much time, because my time is a highly sought after resource in this house, and I’m not going to say how much I’ll get done per day because, to be honest, I have no idea what the job entails. This is one of those instances when you realise that writing books is like building houses – you think you’ve learned enough from doing it once to do it flawlessly the next time, but all you learned is in fact how to write that book which is already written, and the new one requires a WHOLE NEW TOOLBOX.

Sigh. I think I learned more about myself as a writer today, and I’m not sure I like what I’ve learned.

Time to break my arm, call for the guards to chase me, and start running.

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.

One of my lines is that I don’t use paid daycare for Pilates. I only have two days a week for the 2 year old in daycare, and I need those days for writing! I also use that time for shopping, housework, chores etc. but I’m well aware of how much writing and writing-related work I have to do that doesn’t quite fit into those days. Daycare days are my days where getting shit done is a lot easier than any other time.

I’m lucky that I have no guilt at all associated with daycare. But then, my kids have always loved daycare, and benefited from it. Our local centre is a really good one. And it constantly annoys me as a feminist that, when telling people that my daughter is in daycare, I always feel the need to tell them STRAIGHT AWAY how much she enjoys it, and the direct benefits she gets from going there, regardless of the whole ‘mummy needs to be sane, mummy needs to get her work done, no matter what’ issue. I shouldn’t justify myself, but… I guess there’s a hint of pre-emptive defensiveness sloshing around in there.

So lucky to have sociable children, though! I have witnessed the pain and stress of parents who have to fight their kids (and their own overwhelming guilt) to leave them at daycare, and it’s dreadful to see them go through that. I empathise deeply.

As we figured out on our last budget, it’s a bit dicey as to whether we can afford that second day. But one is NOT ENOUGH. Our compromise was that I would try to contribute the equivalent of that one day in my occasional income over the year (the kind that arrives in random cheques, fits and starts). I always knew daycare was worth it, so never really paid attention to quite how much it costs, but we’re talking $3000 over the year for each day. So, um, yes. There’s another level of guilt associated with those days – I always feel the pressure to make them REALLY REALLY PRODUCTIVE.

That is what we call Useful Guilt.

This, by the way, is my own way of looking at the world. Other people can spend their daycare days however they like! Mother guilt is kind of a personal, specific thing. Like body image, it’s amazing how many women can be deeply critical of themselves and yet happily encourage others to not feel bad at all, without even noticing the disconnect.

I couldn’t attend my weekly Pilates class if not for the voluntary service of one of my parents. This is another common thread of modern motherhood – reliance on the next generation up for unpaid daycare and babysitting, in order for our own family to function. The upside of this is that my Mum and Jem get some time together weekly (and it’s an arrangement that doesn’t have to change during the school holidays, which is a major plus – she can just include Raeli in the morning’s plans). There are other direct benefits – Mum is flexible, so I can extend my Pilates class into getting other chores done, parcels posted, PO Box checked, and even having lunch occasionally with my honey. Plus she always does my washing up, and sometimes cleans the floor too. MY MOTHER IS AWESOME.

The key to making Tuesdays work for me is to not plan to get much of anything done. Which is fine except when I have a daily writing target I have to reach.

My Dad chips in with at least one Raeli pick up a week, which extends one of my paid daycare days to 7.5 hours entirely child free instead of having to do the school run with my older child hours before I have to pick up the younger one. Which is fine until soccer season starts. At least Raeli can occupy herself for a couple of hours – far more than when she was younger. She has discovered comics and (in the last fortnight) chapter books, so hooray!

A huge decision this year, which turned out to be more drama than I hoped, was to move Raeli’s after school gymnastics from a Jem daycare day to a NOT Jem daycare day. It means a hideous Wednesday now, as it turns out that the cute little cage full of toys to occupy stray children is busier than a traffic intersection, and Jem didn’t want a bar of it. She spent the whole gymnastics session clinging to me and eating potato chips pointedly. But the pay off is that Thursday now is calm and streamlined – last year we had Raeli after school activities on both daycare days which was a bit frustrating.

All dull details for my readers, I expect! But the upshot is that all this juggling means that time is incredibly valuable to me. My time is money – because a good chunk of my writing time is paid for, by me or by our household budget, and thus is money not paying off the mortgage. So that adds a certain pressure not only for me to be personally productive, but to get paid for my work. I think a lot harder now before doing favours for people, or volunteering time.

I didn’t do a single hour of classroom help last year, which I felt extremely bad about, because we’re supposed to have that time, aren’t we? Supposed to give that time to our school and our kids. Without parent help, for instance, the classroom is so pushed that kids don’t get tested on their spelling. So there was a bunch of guilt. But not enough guilt to give up my rare, precious paid-for hours.

All this is great but it makes for a lousy writing day – often I don’t get home until 12-1pm, and of course I have to leave the house at 2:30 to pick up Raeli from school. Luckily my mother is good at getting Jem down for her nap early – later naps are starting to become a drama for us, because if she doesn’t fall asleep until 1:30, dragging her up for the school run becomes miserable for everyone.

These are the things I think about when people say ‘how on earth do you get any writing done?’

My answers, given with suitable facial indications as to how serious I’m being:

“Well, I don’t, really. Have you seen how many books other writers can get done in a year?”
“Panic = adrenalin.”
“I’m a really bad housewife.” (true, though I make more effort since podcasts)
“Daycare helps.”
“My mum cleans my house.”
“I neglect my children.” (mostly not true, though it felt like that the day my toddler punched my laptop)
“Oh, well, you know.” (translation: if I don’t write, I won’t write, and that’s not an option, what do you people who don’t write novels do with all that time pouring out of your ears?)

Mostly when people ask how I get my writing done, I resist the urge to laugh bitterly in their faces, and then try to tactfully answer so as not to in any way imply that they are in no way at fault for not writing novels themselves in the spare time they don’t have. Which means I completely never take the credit for all the work I do, and the effort I put into that work.

When you love something, you make time for it. I chew pieces off the ends of other pieces of time, and jam them all together with sticky tape. I never really stop and smell the roses, because I’m too busy trying to squeeze my time dry, three times over. I have no hobbies that aren’t, somehow, also work. Sometimes I let my kids watch too much TV. I never do enough housework. I don’t get enough exercise. I expect a lot of my partner.

I write because I write because I write.

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.

Which was fine except that I forgot I do have a daily wordcount quota to reach – this is not a particular ‘writing this thing’ month for me, because of school holidays in the first half and working up to my big Fury revision (apparently I need to take a run up) but I had a bunch of small projects to work on so my plan was, starting from the 11th of the month, I would write 500 words a day on fiction.

My overall goal for the year is 200K of fiction, but that’s based on 25K a month from April to September (my sustainable active novel writing target) and then a successful Nanowrimo in November. However, writing 500 words a day from the 11th to the 29th (on things I had to write ANYWAY, chapters for a co-writing project and short stories, mainly) meant I could get a 10,000 word head start on my year.

And, this weekend, I fell down on it. Because 500 words is so small, I can manage it mostly with an hour or so (sometimes more, sometimes less) of concentration, or a whole bunch of 15 minute bursts of concentration, and there was no concentrating happening at all this last weekend. Mostly it was icypoles, Doctor Who Monopoly, and endless baths for the children to make up for the fact that they couldn’t go outside.

But with only a few days to go before the end of the month, and a hard deadline for one particular short story, I panicked yesterday evening and drilled out the 1000 words (on the right thing!) in a moment of adrenalin fuelled madness.

Sure, it doesn’t sound like much. It’s half a good Nanowrimo day. But I am out of practice, and it was hot enough to melt everything between my ears. So I take that as the victory it is.

I really need to finish that short story today.

But I don’t know yet whether my after school babysitting option is a go or not, and the difference that makes is an extra 2.5 hours in my day. 5 hours, or 7.5 hours. When you also need to clean the house, cook the dinner, catch up on a week’s worth of email and… and… and…

Really, I don’t have time to write this blog entry. But unlike everything else I have to do today, it’s finished!

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!

The house was so decadently large that we were able to critique separately from the non-writers in our party, and had the benefit of getting to know each other’s families as well as the non-stop industry talk that characterises these retreats.

We tried the experiment of using an iPad and Skype to include a long-distance member, with our virtual Maxine sitting in on a couple of sessions, as well as getting to have one of her own. It worked a lot better than we suspected it would, and while you wouldn’t want to do it every time or for every session (the great value in these retreats is getting to hang out in person) it was certainly better than having no Maxine at all! Those who weren’t experienced with Skype found it quite distracting to be talking to a black panel, and we talked at one stage about decorating a boiled egg to represent our Maxine (a random apple core just didn’t have the right aura about it) but we coped valiantly with the technical challenge. A good precedent, I think. We had also meant to record podcasts while we were there, but totally forgot. Sorry!

We were right on the beach, so the girls (and grown ups) tracked sand everywhere, indulged in recreational sweeping (or as Jem put it: the Cleaning Game) and generally had a ball. The tennis courts, mini-golf, swings, kayaks, and especially the pool table were all utilised, and we were greatly entertained by the facilities we could never use to their full extent, like the six fridges, three ovens and gazillion beds – the house is usually used to cater family weddings and conventions, and can comfortably sleep 20, or feed 50. The non-writers also took the chance to go off adventuring, as we were close to historical sites like Port Arthur, and tourist attractions like the berry farm.

And oh, everywhere we looked there was water, sand or greenery. A beautiful place, inspiring and (mostly) secluded. The mud crabs delighted the girls, as did the ocean in their back yard, and I only regret that the changeable Hobart weather only created two perfect swimming days – the one when we arrived and the one when we left, of course! The storm in between was marvellously atmospheric, though, and we only had one day so cold that the mainlanders started to look a bit grim and shivery. And yes, we let them have a wood fire.

The food as ever was epic, Dirk being delighted with the best kitchen we’d ever provided for one of these events – he offered up salmon, salads, baked chicken in damper crust, smashed potatoes, butter chicken, lemon cake with strawberries, pancakes and a truly luscious bread and butter pudding. Also fresh-baked bread, and for one especially memorable breakfast, petit pain au chocolat hot from the oven. The older kids often hung out with him in the kitchen, and he shared cooking tips and techniques with them. Raeli was especially excited to see bread made from scratch! We also ate our way through titanic quantities of fresh dark cherries and sweet greengages.

Being so close to Barilla Bay, we had to “do oysters” one night! We did have permission to raid the local oyster beds, but they were frighteningly large and mostly underwater, so we ended up playing it safe and not risking the wrath of the sea gods. We bought seven dozen and ate our way through them on the night of the official release dates of Margo’s and my books – particularly appropriate for Sea Hearts! Though no seal wives were harmed in the making of our dinner.

It wasn’t all eating and talking – though of course that is a huge part of our ROR weeks! There was work, too, and we critted up a storm, with quite intense working sessions that left us light headed and sleepy by the time evening came around. There is absolutely no price you could put on the benefit we get from having so many dedicated professionals giving feedback on your book-in-progress, and getting a window into their process at the same time. We had books that were fragment first drafts, books which were five minutes away from going to the publisher, and everything in between.

And of course, what is workshopped at ROR stays at ROR. But oh, I wish I could tell you about these fabulous books that are coming!

We talked a lot about worldbuilding as plot, one of my favourite writing techniques, because once it was raised in one session, it became relevant to all the others (of course!). We talked a bit about agents, ebooks and the changing marketplace, too. And, it being our anniversary ROR (we didn’t manage to have one for our ten year mark – this makes it eleven) we ended up looking back on our our careers had changed and developed since the original five of the group came together. Rowena has been archiving the goals we set every ROR, and it’s fascinating to see which of our past predictions came true, and which were heartlessly abandoned. Marianne and Trent (and Maxine, of course) we missed you MOST on that night!

I’m very pleased that I managed to time my book launch to fit with the last day of ROR (it involved some very precise timing and great goodwill on the part of my publisher!) and even more pleased that Margo was able to join me. It’s a rare thing to have so many of MY author people at one of my book launches, and it felt like an appropriately dramatic way to celebrate the end of a trilogy that began, as many of my books do, with a ROR manuscript. [more launch pics here]

It all feels a little flat now it’s over – and we keep thinking of other ways to use that magnificent house! It would be a fabulous site for a Clarion style writing workshop, or boutique professional conference. (Tehani and Terri, take note) The sign of a good ROR is that we start musing nostalgically about coming back to that particular place before we’ve even left… but of course, we never do. There are always new places to explore.

Rowena’s ROR report here, with a bunch of different pictures of different bits of the house and island!

Margo’s report on the ROR blog, talking about Formidable Energies – the very very early stage novel she brought to our workshop!

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!

So I wrote 40,000 words of weird Shakespeare necromancy novel, to the point where I think I know the plot and the shape of the series, which is exciting, even if the chances are I won’t get to finish it any time soon (at least, if the Nancy series takes off, this one will have to wait, which will be GOOD NEWS).

The holidays are racing fast towards us, and I realised today why it is I try to arrange things so I have hardly any writing work to do in December – school only has a few weeks to go and it’s all assemblies and haircuts and homework and Christmas preparation and extra social engagements and general domesticity taking over, and I totally have to let it do so otherwise my head will explode.

Mind you, my ‘summer holiday’ is also going to consist of critiquing a bunch of manuscripts for ROR, a sekrit editing project, an extra mini-sekrit writing project (just for fun), and you know, I did half think I should be writing some short stories pretty soon. Plus super mighty Tiptree reading. So… there’s that.

Also I have to be prepared for the fact that at some point the part of my brain that I like to call the Gingerbread Zone is about to go ‘ping’ at any moment, and whip me into a frenzy of baking, decorating and menu preparation. Because it does that. One has to allow for these things. If you’re going to occasionally go into berzerker mode where pre-soaking dried fruit in brandy or melting icecream in order to refreeze it in interesting shapes makes ALL THE SENSE IN THE WORLD then you’ve got to plan your schedule around those times when the ginger-nutmeg haze comes down and there are sudden gaps in your memory…

Yep, that’s right, it’s beginning to look a lot like (NO, DON’T SAY IT, NOT ALLOWED TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE COMING SEASON UNTIL IT’S DECEMBER)

Oh, wait.

December is tomoooooorrrrrow!

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!