Having reached the end if not a complete blitz then at least a consistent 6 weeks of hitting writing targets, my current plan is to hone my skills of not-writing.

It’s easy as a writer to get caught up in metrics – word count means progress, books only get written if you regularly put your bum in your seat and type, etc. etc. Those things are true. But it’s also important to recognise when you’re drained and need to refill the well – and particularly when you’re pushing too hard at a book.

For me, it becomes obvious when the writing is hard. Writing is not always easy for me, and writing every day is certainly not easy, with my intense time pressures. But while I am proud of a lot of the work I did over the last six weeks, both on my novel-in-progress and other projects, I can’t deny the fact that I never kicked into that stride, the beautiful momentum that usually fires up after a consistent month or so of writing.

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So, I set myself a challenge within a challenge this week: I not only had to write 5000 words, but they all had to be on the Steampunk Victoriana Fairies and Robots novel. Every single one of them.

When I’m tracking wordcount, it’s usually about making sure I make some kind of measurable progress, and I usually discount any other writing when I’m working on a novel. That’s why I so rarely get short stories written! By the time the weekend comes around, I’m done.

So this year my plan, since it’s the first year in a while with no specific deadlines, was to write a bunch of words (my crazy goal was 200K) and to count everything I wrote, as long as it was fiction. It’s been pretty great because I have been able to keep up work momentum by jumping from project to project – it’s a lot easier to write 1000 words each of 5 different projects than 5000 words on the same thing. Sort of. Mostly. Except I haven’t been doing that, I’ve been doing 300-500 words on 10-15 different projects. Per week.

Scattered, me?

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Last night we got to attend “Angel Story,” one of the events as part of the current Festival of Voices, at MONA. I feel like a bad Tasmanian for this being my first time inside the swish high art museum since its revamp (I was hardly out of the place when it was a classics museum) several years ago – and was beginning to feel like we were the only people in the world who hadn’t been there!

We got as far as the grounds last summer, for my godson’s 4th birthday, but with a horde of tired and sticky children, didn’t quite feel adventurous enough to go inside.

So there I was last night, glammed up, walking around this bizarre structure, all glass and sandstone edifices, surrounded by a whole bunch of art patrons, and I didn’t manage to take a single photo. Sorry!

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I keep lurching between thinking that I shouldn’t be writing at all right now, or that maybe I should have given myself a more hardcore writing challenge. My big word for the week was ‘research’. The book that I’m writing right now, which may or may not be called Flavia Wednesday, and I first got the spark of the idea for it around January this year.

Normally I have so many novel projects backed up that it takes at least 2-4 years from the initial spark to actually getting to write the dratted thing, and I loved the idea of writing something while it was still “fresh.” But of course, freshness isn’t everything, and those 2-4 years often allow for a lot of quiet background thinking, character association, and casual research. Which I haven’t done.

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Tamara of Uncharted Pages interviewed me recently, which was great fun because she’s an enthusiastic reader of the books, and had some detailed questions to ask me. I had an opportunity to delve a bit more into my own processes as far as worldbuilding and behind the scenes systems are concerned – and by the time I was halfway through the interview I was having serious trauma flashbacks about the spreadsheet drama involved in trying to track the backstories, emotional baggage and sexual histories of a dozen or more complicated central characters.

“Seriously. Even spreadsheets can’t fix everything. I had a few fixed points such as certain ages of characters when particular events happened, and everything else orbited wildly around it. Sometimes I felt like I was juggling hamsters! Strange, sex-obsessed hamsters who liked to set fire to things.”

I miss my Creature Court. But I don’t miss the spreadsheets.

Words are dragging for me right now. I made my second 5000 words by dragging it out, 100 words at a time, as painfully as any job can be which involves you sitting at a desk with nice hot cups of tea and the internet to distract you every ten minutes.

I love my novel, I’m happy with it and I even know where it’s going, but despite fun scenes involving drunken brothers, enchantresses and governesses and bratty girl scientists aren’t inspiring me to drill out the words at what I consider a reasonable rate. For some reason I’m hiding from the book, though, and instead turned most of my writing attention this week to a long-neglected chapter of a co-writing project (we’re at the point where the plot has to make sense, ouch!), a children’s novel that’s been kicking my butt because research, a short story or two and a comic script.

Hey, I never said the 5000 words would be on the same project! (I hope I didn’t say that)

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I’ve been talking with people a lot lately about money as currency, and time as currency, and how the two things don’t always have a straightforward exchange rate. And since Twitter blew up again today with a whole bunch of drama and insults associated with indie publishing and money, it seems like the right time to have this conversation online as well.

Because if there’s one thing that drives me crazy as a working writer who isn’t actually trying to earn a living entirely from her craft right now but would REALLY LIKE TO, it’s the idea that as soon as writers and publishers start looking at the business side of things practically, and expecting to be paid a reasonable and sustainable amount for their time and effort, they are somehow selling out.

Money matters. Paying artists matter. Too often, writers and artists are sent out into the world without any kind of business background, because there’s this stupid romantic idea that as soon as you start treating your art like a business, it stops being art.

Personally, I’m in it for the money. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I don’t expect to be J.K. Rowling here. I don’t crave mansions or film deals or any of that craziness. But if I can’t earn an income from my writing, then how can I justify spending so much time doing it?

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Miraculously, I wrote exactly 5000 words of fiction this week. Well, not exactly miraculously, of course. It did require hard work and effort, and there were no magic wands involved.

But this, the first week of the Clarion Write-a-thon was going to be the hard one, because it overlapped with one of my two fortnights a year of actual paid-outside-the-house work (exam supervisions at the university). And that was before I had to juggle my whole work, already bursting at the seams with childminding favours, to incorporate an allnighter in Emergency with my Dad (who is now fine) and several days of dealing with the practical fallout of that.

So, yes. I wrote 5000 words because I’m bloody good, really. (I am often asked how I get my writing done while managing a family and I NEVER say it’s because I’m bloody good – maybe I should)

The supervisions I’ve been doing for most of this fortnight involve either scribing (where I physically write the exam for a dictating student) or managing small rooms of between 3-8 students either on computers or in smaller rooms because of special needs. Apart from the scribing exams where I’m busy the whole time, most of my work involves a lot of set up at the beginning, lots of stuff at the end, and several long hours in between where I need to be present and alert, but can read a book or check my email as long as I look up regularly. For most of this fortnight I have used the time to get through some of my To Read list, and still working on my read-three-for-every-book-I-buy system, I have almost managed to catch up from my many Continuum book purchases.

But this week it occurred to me that really, given that the Clarion Write-a-thon had started, and I had promised myself 30,000 words in 6 weeks, I should be writing. It occurred to me after I had already covered the only spare sheet of paper at the desk in tiny writing, on both sides. The next day, I bought a notebook.

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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.

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