bad mother, no biscuit

 first they came, journal, writing life  14 Responses »
May 202013
 
The Facade Doesn't Fit, by Luke Chueh

So here's something obvious if only I'd stopped to think about it: an overnight trip with a 4 month old is a bit brutal.

This weekend, Squawk, the pterosaur and I tripped up to Sydney for the Aurealis Awards. We went partly because "First They Came…" was shortlisted, and mostly because I wanted to be part of the scene. To prove to myself that having a child hadn't fundamentally changed my commitment to my writing (even if it has shifted around my writing process, available time, sleep levels, patience, general location, living arrangements, diet, tea addiction, slavish devotion to twitter and all things internet related, ability to think, and just, you know, everything).

I still can't decide whether going was a mistake.

I had a truly fabulous time, and got to catch up with friends I haven't seen in years, and even to meet new friends and to connect in person with people I've only known via the internet before now. After the isolation of the first months of motherhood, being able to frock up and play with the grown-ups was reinvigorating.

But at the same time, the whole experience has left me riddled with guilt. First for disrupting poor Squawk, whose four month old brain hasn't yet learnt the soothing patterns of predictability. For her, nothing is familiar, and sleep is hard to come by because her brain is constantly being bombarded. I mean, a plastic giraffe that squeaks when you happen to push its stomach the right way is brain-bending to a baby. You should see what cellophane does to her ability to control her limbs. The other night I showed her that you could take two cups and tap them together to make a noise, and that revelation was so alarming and world-enlarging that she damn near thrashed herself right out of the bath.

My brain knows how to filter out information it doesn't need, such as the way light bounces off lino, or background babble. Being in an unfamiliar room is no problem, because I know how I got there and how long I'm staying and that I can leave when it all gets too much. I know what's roughly going to happen each day — but Squawk's "days" are usually only 2 or so hours long and they're all pretty varied. Sometimes it's light when she wakes up, sometimes it's not. Sometimes she feeds straight away, sometimes she feeds just before sleep, and sometimes she doesn't feed at all.

She's so little that she's quite simply lost in the detail of this world and its adult-sized patterns.

And this weekend I took her out of her comforting home, threw away all her familiar routines, and dumped her in the middle of a raucous party. One that was four days long, by her reckoning of days, and came straight after a trip that was also four of her days long.

I spent most of the awards ceremony itself mentally kicking myself for what I'd done to her.

To give credit where it's due, Squawk behaved with admirable aplomb. She never once got stroppy with her sleep deprivation, didn't panic at strangers plucking her out of my arms, and she sat through the ceremony without real protest. She did maintain a fairly constant low-grade eerie moaning mutter that had those nearby turning to check whether they were about to die — which promptly had me feeling anxious about spoiling everyone else's ceremony experience into the bargain.

So after the ceremony I left her tucked up in a hotel room with her Nanna, safely away from all the noise. And promptly felt guilty for abandoning her. There she was, needing to tell me what the day had done to her synapses and wanting only something as simple as a cuddle from me or the pterosaur to help her get to sleep, and she had neither. I was downstairs, so worried about her, and so tired myself, that I barely managed a coherent sentence, stuffed up pretty much every conversation I attempted, and didn't manage to find the courage to talk to even half as many people as I'd have liked.

I comforted myself with the thought that I'd be able to catch up with everyone I'd missed at breakfast. But I spent pretty much all of the night comforting poor Squawk, who was so wired that she spent every second of her sleep moaning. Breakfast therefore found me so tired (and hungry — in looking after Squawk I forgot to eat any dinner myself) that I forgot to say hello to people, forgot to say goodbye, I even forgot how to manage my utensils.

I took her because I wanted to be normal, and present.1 To be both a writer and a mother. And mostly, I feel I achieved only an effed-up version of each of them. So busy being a mother I couldn't interact with the writers on a normal level, and so busy being a writer I couldn't be a proper mother.

To everyone who took the time to chat with me, and to put up with my laggy responses as if they were normal, my sincere thanks. To everyone I missed, my apologies. (Or should that be the other way around?) I can see I'm going to have to work on this balance thing.

  1. And because we're both using my breasts. Where I go, she goes. [↩]

why is there no fire? why aren't there the makings of one?

 cherry crow children, journal, writing life  No Responses »
May 132013
 
The Unstrung Harp – Drafting; text and image from Edward Gorey's "The Unstrung Harp", icon created by me

On Saturday I decided I had No More Time. So while the pterosaur did his diligent best to look after Squawk and ensure she didn't try to feed tooooo often, I sat myself down in front of the laptop and deathmarched the cherry crow children story.

I sat down at 10am. There were breaks (Squawk did require feeding, after all, and bathing and putting to bed, and a couple of times my brain required ten minutes to whinge/vent/whine/tantrum/daze out), but by and large it was me and the desk/couch and the laptop and my ipod and the sheer force of my will.

I wrote the ending at 1am. It hurt. I have no actual idea, even today, what is on the page. I can't bear to look. I simply emailed my publisher the attachment accompanied by the sentence: "I have literally not checked the Scrivener export to make sure it's not gibberish."

Because professional is how I roll. Clearly.1

Yesterday and today, I've been, in the words of Gorey, conscious, but very little more.

Turns out, part of the problem I was having with this story was that I was trying to cram what turned out to be 21,000 words of story into only 12,000 words. (The fact that what I considered to be the inciting incident kept happening at the 7,000 mark should perhaps have been my first clue. When I couldn't collapse that 7,000 down into anything leaner than 2,000? Another clue.)

The other part of the problem, of course, was trying to write around a baby. Who just happened to roll her 3-month and 4-month growth spurts in together, with a head-cold2 in the middle of it all for shits and giggles. Did you know the 4 month growth spurt is renowned for making parents want to walk in front of oncoming traffic? Neither did I. I swear it's like the faeries passed by one night and swapped the baby for a changeling. The effing happiest changeling in the world, who only wants to gaze adoringly at people and make them laugh, but SHE WILL NOT SLEEP. EVER. AGAIN.

If you'll excuse me, I'm afraid I need to collapse now. And then start work on the next story.

  1. In my defense, I would ordinarily hide from the manuscript for at least a week, before doing a final edit, and then maybe even hiding it for another week before handing it in. However, I'm on a tight deadline, and I have my publisher's permission to misbehave just this once. [↩]
  2. A head cold may not sound like much of a problem. But in the shit I never knew department, turns out babies are obligate nose breathers. And if their little nose is too congested to breathe through, not only can they not breathe, they can't feed. Or sleep. They can, however, cry. [↩]

only how many months late?

 only how many months late?  cherry crow children, journal, writing life  No Responses »
Apr 302013
 
Sesame Street Martians (phone)

GUYS, I KNOW THE END OF THIS STORY.

(This story being the cherry crow children).1

Now I just have to get there. I don't actually know that bit. Yet.

  1. I'm scared to stop and count how many words I've written, thrown out, dragged back in, rewritten, edited, revised, and just generally stared at. Least efficient process ever. [↩]

i was promised tv time. there is no tv time.

 journal, writing life  2 Responses »
Jan 292013
 

Writing around a newborn — even a relatively placid, low-needs one — is requiring a significant re-think of my process. (She says, shocking no one.) Of course I expected this, but I still haven't quite come up with strategies that might work to combat not just the time-poverty but also the zombification of my cognitive functioning due to sleep deprivation. It's a bit of a brutal combination: I now have the entire day in front of me, but yet it is gulped up by errands such as feeding, settling, washing, feeding, settling, settling, settling, feeding, washing… When I do get time to write, it's in five minute snatches, and that's too brief to make any real headway even if I wasn't too tired to think (let alone write) swiftly.

One thing I have managed to implement is reading, although that, too, has needed an adjustment to fit the new lifestyle.

It turns out that feeding is just a smidge lacking in intellectual stimulation for me. I've taken to checking twitter while she's at it (and as a consequence she's taken to burping herself while still feeding rather than wait for me to remember her — I choose to view this as fostering independence). But because newborns feed a lot, there just isn't enough twitter to last the distance. So when she's done, propped up against my chest and fighting the apparently-terrifying prospect of dropping back to sleep, I read. And, because the sound of my voice is soothing, I read aloud.

It's very much changing my experience of stories. I've never been one for audiobooks, because I can't follow a story that's read to me. I much prefer the silence of words on the page, and the way a story opens up underneath that for me to fall into; read aloud to me and the story vanishes like smoke on the wind and there's just a voice intoning meaningless words at me. I simply can't think when people are talking, and if I can't think there's no story.

Here's hoping with all the enforced practice I'm getting at audio stories now, my brain will come out of this trained into a richer appreciation of the format.

redemption_in_indigo_305

Oh, and for the curious, the first book that Squawk is "reading" is Redemption In Indigo, by Karen Lord, which I picked up at the San Diego WFC. She started at chapter 7 and didn't think to complain about that, and she keeps falling asleep within a page, so I can't say much for her critical analysis skills, but she does grizzle when I stop reading.

the price of creativity?

 journal, writing life  Comments Off
Nov 282012
 

Fast.Co have a fascinating article up about the link between creativity and mental illness, I mean health:

Overall, creative professionals were about 8% more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder than the general population. The study found this to be true for artists (practitioners of everything from photography to choreography) and scientists (professors and researchers). The most startling results, however, related to authors. Writers were a whopping 121% more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder than the general population. Moreover, Simon Kyaga, the study’s lead researcher, says that authors had a “statistically significant increase” in anxiety disorders–38% to be exact. Rates of alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide also increased among writers.

Now, I've long known of this prevalence towards mental illness among creative types, being friends with quite a lot of writers, but I'd always assumed it was actually correlated to all creative types. That writers stand out as being particularly afflicted is fascinating.

The article briefly posits some interesting theories as to why this might be the case, but what I liked most about the article was the conclusion it drew in regards to possible treatment methods, and the emphasis that any treatment method which gets in the way of the creativity is unlikely to stick, as it were.

wait, who let september happen?

 journal, writing life  4 Responses »
Sep 162012
 

Yesterday, I kited myself off to the suburbs for a photography outing. The set-up was simple: a friend needed guinea pigs for his portraiture assignment, and a whole slew of dirt-poor and socially terrified authors could do with having an up to date publicity mugshot if the offer was on the table.

As I was getting ready, the pterosaur decided to try and prepare me for the process by pulling out his own camera and bombarding me with photos, paparazzi-style. Mostly, I pulled faces at him, talked all through his efforts (which always results in photos of me wearing the most bizarre expressions), and generally acted like a muppet.

Here, for example, I am channelling my inner marabou. I don't think I'm particularly successful because I've seen a marabou exactly once, and at no point did said marabou look in any way bemused.

Unfortunately for all concerned, this panic-induced mania did not change when I actually reached the proper shoot, I must say. Which I suppose will have given the poor photographer excellent training in dealing with difficult subjects, but at the same time, there's now a very real chance there will be photos of me looking like some sort of science exhibit (Sept 2012: Crazy Lady, Looking Terrified) going into someone's portraiture assignment. I've decided to consider this a win for diversity.

And hey, after all that malarking about, I was fed a hearteningly strong cup of tea and the most delicious twitter cookies.

Tweet! Tweet! The cookies: on Twitpic

some days losing is winning

 cherry crow children, writing life  Comments Off
Sep 052012
 

This weekend just past I threw what little clothes that still fit me into a suitcase, remembered my ugg boots, and skedaddled off to Lake Mulwala for a writing retreat. In a move that will haunt me for the rest of my living memory, I forgot my camera. Luckily, others didn't.

The lake is actually a dammed-up river, complete with a vista of drowned trees lifting their death-spindled limbs above the water. It's home to a healthy fish population: I never saw any, but late at night when the water was still I heard them, quick and thick and heavy through the air and straight back into the water. It's also home to quite an array of bird life, including pelicans, ducks, cormorants, seagulls, sulphur-crested cockatoos, the tiniest of chittering, swooping swallows,1 and a lone black swan who knew that humans bore bread.

In between contemplating that view (and eating, and chatting, and napping), I worked on the cherry crow children story, and I managed to wring sufficient words out of my brain to call the weekend successful in terms of progress … but I've now also spent all of yesterday and today mulling over where the story's going and what I learnt about Haverny Wood through writing those words, and I think it's time to ditch them all and start a new draft. Truly, counting words is one of the worst, or at least most meaningless, ways of measuring progress on a story. It's just that, often, it's all there is.

It's been far too long since I've indulged in a writers' retreat. Writing can be such an isolating and time-hungry activity — so much so that of late I've taken to spending my Saturdays in a local cafe with some writing friends, in an attempt to combine socialising with productivity. A retreat gives me not only time and space away from the pressures of the dayjob world, new and interesting scenery2 to jog the braincells but also, most important of all, a chance to hang out with people who know what it's like to pound away at the craft of writing simply for the sake of it.

That sort of understanding and camaraderie is priceless and refreshing. Especially since the first person I spoke to on returning home to Melbourne3 summarily dismissed my writing as a hobby in which I indulged "sporadically" in order to "get some alone time". I think I will never cease to be amazed at how much people like jumping to simple, single-reason explanations that let them label and judge others.

  1. I've never seen swallows before — I didn't realise how very tiny they were! [↩]
  2. In this case the scenery was superbly awesome with a twist of melancholy/eerie [↩]
  3. Not the pterosaur, for those quick-jumping minds! [↩]

Let me 'splain — No. There is too much. Let me sum up.

 briskwater mare, cherry crow children, first they came, journal, writing life  4 Responses »
Aug 262012
 

Back in June, I guest-posted over at David McDonald's blog, on the topic of silence:

It’s something I’ve heard at almost every point of wanting and trying to build a writing career: you have to be active on the internet.

…But it comes at a cost. There’s the inevitable time pressure, yes, but then there’s also the noise.

At that time, I was trying very hard to balance my internet time. Not to restrict it, as such, but to make sure I was getting a good signal to noise ratio and — more importantly, for me — make sure I didn't feel guilty for not paying attention when I needed the time apart.

And then I promptly fell off the internet altogether.

I've been reading all my usual streams, and very occasionally tweeting when the mood took me, but mostly I haven't been blogging because, well, Life.

The biggest but simplest attention-occupier has been, of course, my TPP collection deadline. I swore to myself when I was writing Shadow Bound that never again would I sell something I hadn't already written. Now, even at the time, I knew this for an empty promise, but still. The very first thing I did was sell a four-story collection having only written one of them. Er, yeah. The first story of the three I owed, "The Briskwater Mare", came with great difficulty. Much, much difficulty. I wrote 40,000 words of false start before I finally found the story (which ended up being 11,000 words long), and it took me a good two months more than I'd budgeted (and I'd budgeted a lot of slack and generous leeway, because I know my process). Oops.

Luckily, it has, even in draft form, received the stamp of approval for going in to the collection, so now I only owe two more stories. I'm currently working on "The Cherry Crow Children of Haverny Wood" and, er, guess what? Yeah, it's coming with difficulty. So much for hoping the rest of the stories would just pour on out of me, eh? Oh well. I shall valiantly take comfort in the idea that stories which come with great difficulty are because I'm opening a vein or otherwise pushing at the boundaries of my comfort zone. Or something.

I've also, at the editor's request, written a story for an upcoming issue of ASIM. It was perhaps foolish of me to say yes, given I was already stressing over my TPP deadlines, but, well, see above re empty promises and you can extrapolate that to "I'll sell anything I can, and we all know it, right?" Unlike "The Briskwater Mare", this story came without too much trouble, although worryingly it was a rather angry story, instead of the light or humorous or even just sardonic story I was thinking I'd write. Luckily for me, the editor loved it anyway, and all that remained was to edit it (an easy enough task) and come up with a title (a task so fiendish and horrid it had no less than four people staring blankly at walls and blinking at each other, at a complete loss, for months on end). We threw so many suggestions back and forth at each other, all of them plausible and all of them workable but none of them perfect, that I was genuinely beginning to wonder whether I could send a story to print as "Untitled", or some other such meta commentary. But in the end, through gratuitous/desperate wiki'ing of large-scale abstract concepts, a title was found, and it was perfect.

The story shall be called "First They Came…", and it's going to appear in ASIM issue #55, which is due out … well, now-ish, I think.

That's most of the writing/publication news out of the way. There were also other reasons for my silence, most recently due to the Melbourne International Film Festival, during which I decided to see ten films despite a) my deadlines b) my insufficient energy levels and c) Melbourne raining on me every time I left the house.

One I can most heartily recommend is Ernest & Celestine, a charming little story about a mouse who doesn't want to be a dentist and a bear who wants to be a musician. It's just the perfect amount of whimsy and heart-warming, and don't be fooled by the narrative simplicity: there's a very rich world thought out in this one, and although it's never over-explained or harped upon, there's social commentary on the topic of prejudice, ignorance, bigotry and the value we place on various professions.

And speaking of kids, my other, biggest news (which I've oh-so-cleverly buried at the bottom of a very long post where no one will see it) is that I'm going to have one of my own.

It's due around New Years, we decided not to find out the gender until it learnt of the concept of daylight, and the grandmothers-to-be are both beyond excited and into downright agitation.

New Interview: Galactic Chat

 briskwater mare, first they came, writing life  Comments Off
May 262012
 

Hola!

I am lifting my head from the morass of editing this one story I never want to see again1 and drafting this other story I don't want to have to write2 to tell those who find such things interesting that there's a new interview of me up online.

This one is a little different, being an audio interview for the Galactic Chat podcast, so you actually get to hear my voice. I'm a little nervous about this aspect of it, because I absolutely loathe the sound of my own voice on playback. Does anyone else ever suffer from this dissonance? I swear I don't sound as plummy in real life as I always end up sounding on playback. Or at least, I don't think I do, but who knows?

Anyway! The interview is live, and we touch on the Binding books, and my collection for the Twelve Planets series, among other things, and I had a whole heap of fun conducting the interview, so head on over for a listen!

  1. This is completely normal and an encouraging sign that the process is all working out as expected. Or at least that's what I'm telling myself. [↩]
  2. Again. Normal. [↩]
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