On Work, and Work, and the end of the Working Year

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up in the New Year, I started editing Blueberry again, which is going to be my summer project, I read books which had been archived on my shelves far too long, and I sewed – bookmarks for a friend's commission, finishing the top of a baby quilt, and the beginnings of a new crazy quilt.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.

The best decision I made all year was when those copy edits for book 2 arrived in October and I begged to put them off three weeks or so, so I could get book 3 DONE. Even though technically Book 2 should always be prioritised over Book 3, I had been doing that all year and honestly thought if I stopped writing Book 3 one more time, I wouldn't be able to get started again. Luckily thanks to the prior rescheduling of Book 2's publishing date, there was plenty of time to be able to shuffle things that way, and I will always be grateful that my editor let me do things that way. As it turned out, once I sent off Book 3, I was able to get through the copy edits a week earlier than my revised deadline, because they were so surprisingly light – the second structural edit that had so thrown off my schedule earlier in the year had, it seemed, saved time and work at this end. Hooray!

Last year I was writing, writing, trying to get well ahead of my official deadlines because I had my own little bundle of distractions due to be born in August and throw my life into delightful disarray. This year, instead of fighting to get ahead, I was fighting to keep up, because there was this adorable little baby here, cuting for my attention. Plus that big girl, who was nicely packed off at school 5 days a week, but who came crashing back into my life at 2:30 every day unless I had negotiated for someone else to distract her for an hour or two.

Here I am, nearly at the end of the year, nearly able to draw a line under my year's professional commitments, with two (cough, possibly three) books coming out in 2011. I made it! And yet my biggest achievement for the year feels like it is making friendships with the other parents at school, and my biggest regret is that I didn't do more in the way of parent help, paying attention to what was going on in Raeli's classroom. It's been a hugely disruptive year, thanks to the constant shifting of teachers in and out of their class, and while I have been able to pick up on a lot of the potential problems and issues thanks to communication with other parents, I can see the value now in being inside the classroom and forming a relationship with my daughter's teacher early on in the year – because you really can't guarantee that the communication they offer is going to be remotely sufficient.

I think I've done a pretty good job of balancing everything, all in all. I've made a few assemblies over the year, and turned up to the essential events, the athletics carnival and book week parade, while also dodging out of several (excursions, the cross country, and so on) but I'm really glad that I was able to take some of the pressure off myself in the last few weeks about making the most of every-single-child-free-hour, going along to Raeli's swimming classes, taking the baby to meet Raeli and her class at recess in the middle of their museum excursio, and volunteering to go in next week to help them bake shortbread while Jem is in daycare.

I really didn't expect there to be so much expectation about parent participation in the school, and while I don't think it's fair to expect quite so much from parents, I can also see the value that the class reaps directly from some parents being able to volunteer and help out. I do have work commitments and can't afford to get too guilty about what I'm not doing, but I can see it makes a difference to my daughter when I am able to give what time I can, so I want to do more of that next year.

I am regularly reminded of John Howard suggesting that all mothers should be back in full time work the second that their children turn 5 which is why family allowance should stop at that point, and I kind of want to punch him retrospectively – without parental volunteering, fundraising and behind the scenes admin, our lovely little community school would not have well tended grounds, sports equipment, a canteen, a uniform shop, or a good half the current artistic, crafty, cooking & excursion-type activities. Parents also help with reading practice every week. There are an awful lot of school costs which the government is not helping with at all, and it's the participation of the community that makes Raeli's school such an awesome one.

Hmm, I think I got sidetracked there. But ultimately, my big discovery for this year was that balancing mothering and professional writing was not just about snatching time from my 24 hour mothering to work, but also snatching time from my work routine in order to value-add to my mothering.

This is not intended to be a slight on any of the hard working parents who don't or can't volunteer to participate in school activities – I would be the absolutely last to criticise any parent for making the most of those precious, precious child-free school hours. But I am lucky in that I have more flexibility than most in my work routine, and I have got to a point where I feel I need to train myself out of dropping my children and running away every time I get a chance to do so. They're only going to be young for so many years, and much though I want to have a huge shelf of books with my name on to mark my progress through the next decade, that's not all I want.

And I can have it all, right?



[yes, yes, Alisa, going to write that short story now...]