If you’re a regular listener to Galactic Suburbia, don’t forget to check out the Boxing Day Super Mega Podcast over at Notes from Coode Street – Alisa, Alex and I joined Jonathan and Gary, along with Mondy from The Writer and the Critic and Grant from Bad Film Diaries. It was great fun to record, and I think we did a great job at summing up the last year and looking forward to the next one. I think we’re going to try to do it every year!

Marianne de Pierres has called on her writerly friends to blog about their writing plans for 2011. Margo has shared her plans here.

So here are mine:

Shattered City [Creature Court Book Two] will be out in April, and Reign of Beasts [Creature Court Book Three] in October. Those dates are pretty firm, as far as I know.

There’s also a short story quartet with Twelfth Planet Press, which is Not Announced yet, but which we accidentally discussed on Galactic Suburbia, so it’s silly to pretend it doesn’t exist. I’m really proud of these stories!

My writing plans for 2011 are quite single-minded: I have Fury, the first Nancy Napoleon novel, to write. It’s rather lovely, I’ve been turning it over in my head for a while now and am looking forward to March when I can tear into it. We’re planning on a ROR for September, so I’m planning to have Fury drafted and done by August.

I should have time to get started on something else towards the end of the year, especially if I do the Nano dance, but I’m leaving my plans open in that regard. If I’ve presold Fury by then, it might be sensible to get started on the next in that series, though I’d prefer to do something else in between. I have another dark fantasy series ticking away in the back of my head, plus several YA projects fighting for my attention.

Still, for the first half of the year at least, it’s all Nancy Nancy Nancy… and thanks to that delicious Australia Council grant, I have TWO full days of baby daycare to help me along the way.

A friend has been working steadily away on his fantasy novel. When he finished, he called me up and asked me, “What do I do next?”

My advice was to write Book 2. While it might seem counter-intuitive to keep putting all your eggs into one basket, when it comes to fantasy you learn a lot more from getting to the end of your series than the end of the first volume. Also, you learn so much in writing Book 2 that you can then go back and look at Book 1 with new, jaded, experienced eyes, and rewrite accordingly.

But now he’s finished Book 2, and I feel like I should be able to give a more comprehensive answer.

Only… I’m not exactly an expert in getting published for the first time. None of us are, of course – there are many ways to get published for the first time, and most authors only experience ONE of those. In my case, though, it was a pretty atypical route (involving a competition that no longer exists) so giving advice on how to get to that point is a bit like… well, when friends ask for advice on coping with relationship breakups. (Um, I’ve never had one. Still on my first.) Possibly that is a bad example, because I am AWESOME at being a complete EXPERT on other people’s break ups.

But anyway.  My point is that people often look to published authors for advice, and while we can often share really fabulous advice about working methods and business plans and all the stuff we actually do, I’m not sure that we’re always that useful when it comes to helping new writers figure out how to get started.  Started was a long time ago for some of us…  And while getting published isn’t necessarily easy for us, and certainly isn’t something to be taken for granted, it’s still a whole different game trying to sell a book as someone who has a track record.

I’d like to be able to offer my friend something a bit more substantial than “Query agents first, don’t send the whole books unless they ask for it, don’t pay ‘reading fees,’ yes they REALLY expect a synopsis to be a page or so…”  And while I’d like to just send him away to listen to five years’ worth of Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing and Will Write for Wine podcasts, possibly he was hoping for a slightly more efficient answer.

So what I’m wondering is – where should I point my friend?  What blog posts, what communities, what research hubs?  Where are the nearly-published submitting-like-crazy writers hanging out in 2011?

If you had just finished your first fantasy novel, what would you do with it?

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 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.

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As usual in November, the interwebs have been alight with Nanowrimo themed posts – from bitchery, eyerolling and sideswipes to unadulterated glee, professional encouragement and cheersquaddery, plus, you know, a LOT of wordcount widgets.

It does make me sad how many people are willing to criticise Nanowrimo without actually having taken part – when it comes down to it, apart from the poor agents who quite UNDERSTANDABLY get twitchy at the thought of all those half baked 50K mss being emailed to them on December 1st, no one is getting hurt here. It’s a fun group event – some people turn it into professional development, others are in it with a hobbyist mentality, and some are just plain typing with no other purpose in sight.

When I teach creative writing, like the Write Your Fantasy Novel course I taught last Saturday, I always try to emphasise the importance of figuring out what writing advice/work methods work for you. Figuring out how you can most effectively write the best book you can is the most useful thing you can do as a writer – and sometimes the easiest way to do it is just Try Everything and see what sticks to the ceiling. Nanowrimo is a great way to test out all kind of writing advice and techniques – and to figure out if you’re the kind of writer who can work under that kind of frantic deadline, or not.

Believe me, if you want to write professionally, you need to know how well you handle deadlines.

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It’s now less than a week until the end of the month, which is a little scary for me as that’s when my book is due in. But that also means it’s less than a week until NaNoWriMo starts! As good a time as any to link to the post I wrote last year about The Myths of NaNoWriMo that are regularly perpetuated by writers who haven’t actually tried it…

I adore Nano. I love everything about it. I love the frantic pace of writing, the PRESSURE, the word wars, the playlists, the self-imposed deadline to end all self-imposed deadlines, the creativity, the pressure. I love making writing dates with my friends, those who write all year round (and I never get a chance to see otherwise) and those who only clock in with the writing thing at this time of year. I love carting my big fluffy monster laptop bag around to cafe after cafe and living room after living room and playing Lily Allen through my headphones on an endless loop because damn it that woman makes me write faster.

Last year, I wrote with a three month old baby on my lap. It was challenging, to say the least, but it was also an amazing step in proving to myself that I could juggle new motherhood and writing.

This year, the buzz is starting, and we’ve managed to lure new flies into the web (HEY MILLIE) which is super exciting. But… I won’t be old schooling it this year. It was a big admission for me to make to myself, that the full NaNoWriMo was not on the cards for me this time around. I’m looking at finishing the most intense book project I’ve ever worked on this Sunday, and even I am not crazy enough to launch into a 50K marathon the day after. A mad riot of new bookery is tempting, but it could burn me out for months. I’ve been swamped in deadlines all year, and this is finally a chance for me to breathe and catch up on other things. Including, um, some rather major copy edits for Book Two, which my editor was nice enough to postpone a few weeks to let me get the much-interrupted Book Three finally done.

On the other hand, it’s FREAKING NANO and there’s no way I want to be left out. Plus, I don’t want to miss the chance to harness the magical November vibe and get some serious work done before summer holidays hit me and I’m back to full time mummying. So…

I’m making a list and checking it twice. Instead of one big 50K project, I’m going to put several smaller projects together, covering different areas in my life that have been crying out for some serious attention. Call it the Month of Manic Multitaking Mama – MoMaMuMa! Heh okay, maybe we won’t give it a special name. But here’s my November plan:

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Apologies for those who couldn’t access this blog over the weekend – we had a domain name crisis, all sorted now.

Funnily enough, my thoughts have been very much on narrative endings, lately. How they work, how you drag all the threads together, how to make it satisfying, all that stuff. My head has been filled with the end of this book for six months now, and it still keeps pulling surprises on me. All I can hope at this point is that my characters don’t gang up on me and murder me in my sleep. I would not put it past them!

I’ve always been fascinated by endings, and very critical of those that don’t work, or that finish too early or too late. Diana Wynne Jones, whose books I love so much I could make a quilt of them to snuggle under on cold, sad days, always seems to me a little too hasty to finish, as if she stopped just half a chapter short of perfection. I allow this because it makes me less likely to stab forks into my arms in utter jealousy at how good she is. Then there’s the Eddings duo and their lengthy, drawn out farewells which rival Tolkien for sheer self-indulgence (I’m pretty sure the end of the Elenium starts about a third of the way into the final book).

Then there are the perfect endings, the ones that make you feel calm and good (or awful, but in a good way) like “frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn,” and Janet writing Thomas a poem, and “Placet” (by both Sayers and Willis).

I love writing endings, normally. There’s a beautiful bumbly tumbly pace to them, like running downhill very fast. That moment when everything slots into place and you know all the scenes you have to write, and it’s just a matter of typing, and isn’t it a good thing you have those mad typing skills that almost keep up with your brain at moments like this?

This one is proving harder than most, probably because I have more POV characters than I’ve ever handled before, and no I can’t kill them all off just to make the throughline simpler, and then there’s all the pressure I’m putting on myself to pay off all the promise of book 1 & book 2… I really hope writing endings isn’t like flying in planes or taking exams, which is to say something which seemed easy peasy when I was seventeen and gets harder and harder the older I get.

It’s certainly less fun than heading for ‘THE END’ used to be, but that could be because of the inevitability of certain events which are not all fluff and happiness, so instead of romping downhill crying tally ho! I am more sort of sidling up a cliffface with a guilty look on my face as I dispense justice and injustice with pinpoint accuracy amongst my characters.

The end must be in sight, cos new books are leaping into the queue in the hopes I will pay attention to them next. Yes, I said plural. Anything less would be far too easy…

I try very hard not to use hugely exaggerated war-like metaphors (deathmarch, and the like) when dealing with even the toughest part of this writing job. Cos, you know, however much it is building my stress levels and doing my head in, it’s still a job that can be done from a comfy chair with a hot cup of tea at my elbow.

But right now, I am in the middle of a battle. Not a metaphorical battle with the book – a battle inside the book.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the final act of Creature Court Book Three comprises of an enormous action set piece. Involving all the characters from the previous 2 3/4 books whom I haven’t already killed off. (damn it, why didn’t I kill more characters earlier) It’s huge and messy and complicated, and though I have ultimately planned this one down to the wire (which is to say written down what happens when it explodes in my head) it keeps changing on me. There is one character in particular who seems to be some kind of literary wild card. He laughs in the face of plot, and has a tendency to try to kill people unexpectedly, or inspire people to kill him at precisely the wrong moment.

This is someone who was going to be redeemed and die heroically, and instead managed to betray everyone, seize power, leave his closest friends bleeding in a pile and go skipping off into the sunset. He was supposed to be a minor character. Minor characters cannot be trusted, people! They swallow books whole!

And after spending the morning immersed in said battle, it’s rather hard to emerge, eat lunch, do laundry, cook dinner and take my daughter to gymnastics. Cos, you know. Buildings to destroy, blood to spill, sky to fall. I think I’m going to be cranky and irritable until I get to the end of this draft!

I’m hoping to hit that point by the end of this weekend, just so I can breathe, send the damaged, leaky thing off to my Swedish writing fairy for a gently critical read (I can’t take more than that right now, there might be CRYING) and race through those copy edits that landed on my desk yesterday, before I start patching the holes and making the Book Three manuscript robust enough to take a Good Firm Edit. Because, you know. I want this one to be good. No pressure on myself here or anything, but there’s no point in writing the third book in a trilogy unless it can be better than the two that led it there, and also pay off everything you’ve set up.

It can be done. It will be done. I just have to keep my head down until the explosions die down, the smoke clears, and I get to find out who made it to the end. The really sad thing is, I think I’ve written all the sex scenes for this one. No fun stuff to reward myself with once I’m finished being Dr Big Mean Writer. Until, you know, I start the next book…

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!

Jonathan talks here about trying to come up with a suitably dramatic but inoffensive term for those of us who work from comfy armchairs trying to suddenly do quite a lot MORE than we usually do.

That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing. I have been trying to work on several short stories at once this month, which is surprisingly effective as compared to just trying to work on one – if one stalls, you move to the next, and so on – but is also a real drain on the creative energy. The thing about short stories is – they are actually just as hard as writing novels, but you can’t let your attention span waver, or get into a comfortable pace. There is no comfort in short stories! They’re constantly asking you questions like “but where is the story going?” and “but what is the THEME?” and “how are we going to wind this sucker up” rather than that nice ‘lalalala now you’ve done all the work at the top end we can just continue on under our own momentum for a few months” feeling you get from novels.

I’m going to be starting a new novel soon. I’m really quite excited about it. My brain is obviously very excited about it because it’s all “hey let’s listen to THIS music,” and “let’s daydream about THIS plot,” without actually acknowledging that there’s about another month’s work still to do on BOOK THREE of the Creature Court.

I am not by any means out of love with the Creature Court. But Book Threes are, it turns out, terribly hard and full of enormous pressures, and I am jumping out of my skin with excitement about the fact that I have a new Book One right around the corner.

Soon. Not yet. Soon.

Raeli is back at school, which is lovely for all of us, even if I do have to remember to pick her up at 2:30 every single day. Jem now has one and a half days of daycare a week, which is a profit to me of several hours.

And oh yes, I’m reading, reading like a maniac, gathering great momentum for Last Short Story, catching up on the kind of novel you read in a day or less, ripping through my library stack, and so on.

None of this is in anyway procrastinatory about that last teeny bit of Book 3 that has to be written. Not at all. My brain wouldn’t have any reason for putting off the task I’ve been longing to get done all year, would it?

Bad, bad brain.