Champagne and Socks

Since I’m sitting and updating my calendar for 2012 – this time I am hoping to have a system that won’t require that this time next year – I may as well do my year in review. I’m not very good at taking a step back and acknowledging what I *did* do – much better at listing what I didn’t.

Art, Culture and Music
– Guggenheim exhibition with Kathryn
– Rocky Horror Picture Show midnight screening at Burswood
– Quilt and Craft fair with Christine
– Wicked with C and David
– Attended the Stirling ball
– Balboa Park

Publishing
– Above/Below by Stephanie Campisi/Ben Peek
– Nightsiders by Sue Isle (Vol 1 of Twelve Planets)
– Love and Romanpunk by Tansy Rayner Roberts (Vol 1 of Twelve Planets)
– Thief of Lives by Lucy Sussex (Vol 1 of Twelve Planets)
– Bad Power by Deborah Biancotti (Vol 1 of Twelve Planets)
– World Fantasy Award nomination and win
– 6 TPP shorts made the Aurealis Awards finalists, 1 co-win
– Glitter Rose in WFC bags

Podcasting
– guested on Salon Futura
– Boxcutters blurb in Press Gang special
– Galactic Suburbia First Birthday
– Galactic Chat series began
– Live and Sassy began

Conventions and Travel
– Convened Swancon 2011, Perth
– Attended World Fantasy Con, San Diego
– Travelled further north than have ever been before for a work project

Personal Stuff
– Moved in with C.
– Went to the cemetery far too many times this year.
– Completed the couch to 5k program.
– Applied for and successfully interviewed for new job.
– C proposed to me.
– Set wedding venue and date.

– got a 9 week old puppy to raise.

I, like Nnedi Okorafor now have a bust of an antisemitic, misogynist, racist in my house.

She made the above post a week ago and until then, I actually knew very little about H. P. Lovecraft (maybe that’s the most scandalous thing I’m going to write in this post). Reading that post was the first I ‘d heard that this figure was deeply repugnant as a human, really. I’ve never really been that interested in his work and truthfully, I’m not going to give myself a hard time about that anymore.

It’s hard to move past some of the things I’ve since read that he wrote about … well, about people like me, among others. And I’ve spent a week ruminating on it all. Should I say something? Do I have to say something? What should I say? What’s appropriate to say? How do I feel about it? How should I feel about it? What should I do with the bust of this person now? Is it appropriate to have this person’s face out on display in my home?

In the end, I didn’t feel it was ok to be silent and just sidle past – never mind the Jewish girl with the H P Lovecraft bust on display. Move along, nothing to see here.

After a week of thinking about it, I haven’t moved the bust from its current position and I don’t feel any less honoured to have received it. I have, though, thought a lot about how nice it must be not to have to worry about such dilemmas. And I’ve thought about the word privilege a lot and what that means and feels (to not have it). But mostly I’ve really really really enjoyed the fact that H P Lovecraft would have hated the idea that I, and others who won the World Fantasy Award this year (and in other years), you know, did.  And I’ve thought about how really, that is the best outcome. You know, she who laughs last etc.

China Miéville has his Lovecraft head turned to the wall, like a naughty boy, so he can write behind his back. But I don’t want to continue doing what I’m doing with Twelfth Planet Press behind Lovecraft’s back. I want to do it in front of his face, all proud and unapologetically. My success disproves his beliefs.

I don’t like the argument along the lines of the statue transcends its resemblance of Lovecraft to now represent the award (more than representing the man it’s fashioned in likeness of). I mean, in some ways it does – it has done for me until last week, given I didn’t actually know much about the man. But it doesn’t hold for me as strong argument because if I took that to an extreme place, there’s no way I would want to display an award for any cool thing if its trophy was the face of Hitler. At some point, you can’t look beyond the face to what the trophy represents without the face influencing the meaning.

Ultimately, I’m deeply honoured to have been awarded a World Fantasy Award. And I’m also proud that the nominees and the winners are diverse – more diverse than Lovecraft would ever have liked or perhaps envisaged – and demonstrate that the membership and judges of the award do not support or condone his politics. And as for me, I find strength in knowing I am alive and doing ok when I think about men like Lovecraft and Hitler who have wished me dead or that I never existed at all. It makes me strive harder. And that’s never a bad thing.

Before I forget to remind, we’ve got a bunch of things going on at TPP.

Firstly, our sale off a bunch of titles ends Dec 31, 2011. Visit our website here and grab A Book of Endings for $16, Glitter Rose for $20, Horn and Bleed for $9.60 each, any of the first 3 Twelve Planets for $14.40, Sprawl for $20 and a bunch more.

Secondly, our novel manuscript submission period opens January 1, 2012 and ends January 31, 2012. Check out all the details on guidelines etc here.

Thirdly, we’re supporting the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012 with a 10% discount on all our books which fit the challenge all year long. Here’s how.

Fourthly, enter our Goodreads Giveaway to win a copy of Deborah Biancotti’s Bad Power:

Fifthly, keep an eye out for more TPP announcements over the next fortnight or so!

Ah. First day of my 12 days of leave and I already feel like I’m too knackered to have accomplished anything. I know, I know, it’s only 1pm. But still!

Had a lovely cuppa with Tehani this morning. It was so good to just catch up. And I shall miss her terribly when she leaves for Tasmania. I think I have only just started to feel settled enough here in this house to be ready to do the whole “pop out for a cuppa and chat” thing. So I guess I never really took proper advantage of living so close to another kindred spirit. Still. We won’t live here forever. And I shall resolve to do better next year in popping in for cuppas with Terri (who will be on the way home from work now) and Helen.

I described 2011 to Tehani as a year of waking up and smelling the coffee. I quite like that description. I’ve been thinking the year over a lot recently as I mull over how I want to blog the year in summary. This was the first time I thought about it that way, and I think it’s apt. It was a year in which the veil was lifted for me in a whole bunch of arenas and a year in which my hand was forced to see and tell the honest truth and act on it. Because when you move out of denial, you *have* to act. The other option is no longer an acceptable alternative for me, after this year. In other words, I wrote in a previous post that things were getting really real down here (I love that Missy Higgins song) and there was no escaping that. And you know, the smell of coffee all about. So it was a year of culling – possessions, unwanted commitments, pretense and unrealistic expectations (maybe one way of putting it). A lot of drawing the lines for things and realising what my personal boundaries are. It was a deeply confronting and at times very stressful and discomforting year. But also a year in which the pay off of that was, without exception, ending up in a better place or position. The whole lotus in the mud thing (the deeper and richer the mud, the more beautiful the lotus).

And so on that whole crunch time thing, today I start my new workout routine. I’ve been working on this program for the last couple of days, the first parts being getting your head around a bunch of stuff. Again with the facing down the awful truths etc. It’s been more eye opening than I thought it would be. Right now I am thinking up a bunch of reasons why I should start the workout phase tomorrow and not today. But that would be an excuse and I don’t do that anymore. The idea of changing personal habits still fascinates me. I am very much a creature of habit and I do not like change at all. I spent the whole of November complaining about C’s facial hair as he grew his moustache and  beard (for work had to have both if he wanted the mo) and then was upset the day he finally shaved it all off. “You really don’t like change, do you?” was his response.

So yeah. I *like* the habits and ruts I find myself in even if they aren’t healthy or productive or useful. And I start to panic at the suggestion of changing them. I worry that I won’t be me anymore and I don’t cope well with suggestions like: why not do it for just a little while? Or what about doing this on Monday and that on Tuesday? I am a total routine person.

And yet? So far this year, I *have* made important changes (in terms of degree of change *to me*) and have found them extremely beneficial, enjoyed them AND have not lost my sense of self. Really, I do wonder how it is that I define this “self”. I had gotten into a long lasting habit of watching TV before bedtime – sometimes 2 or 3 episodes of a show I was watching at the time – and would watch on my laptop in bed before falling asleep by midnight or 1am. Like, I’ve been doing this for years. And I prided myself on being a night owl. I’ve always been one, I did my most productive work after 7.30pm and I didn’t really sleep that well. When I moved in with C he gently suggested we not have a TV in the bedroom (!!!) which I felt was fine actually, because I had my laptop. And then a couple of months ago, I guess after coming from the US, I started instead going to bed early – I aim to be asleep by 10 but it’s mostly 10.30 – and I started taking a book to bed to read a chapter or two before sleeping. And now it’s become more going in a couple of hours before bedtime and doing maybe 2 or 3 hours of reading (not just books but also internet and publishing) and most importantly, no longer watching much TV in the week. I have become *that* person. I would seriously never have believed I could watch maybe only an hour of TV on some nights during the week. The concept of turning off the TV *in preference to do something else* has never ever been part of my mindset. Ever. Partly TV these days is so crap. But also I have so many other things I want to do in preference (who IS this person?). I still watch TV but I prefer to do it in longer sessions on say a day of the weekend whilst doing other things too.

Am I still me?

Couple the above with the giving up a true love of mine – coffee. Which helps with the falling asleep by 10/10.30 pm and then sleeping a long uninterrupted sleep. Guess what? I feel fantastic. And as my friends have pointed out – I was so so so sick before I went away and then after I got back. I’d say my health has improved 200% compared to how I felt in October. And it’s not just these changes. Of course it’s some other more personal ones too. But almost all these are about me taking control and responsibility for my life and for how I feel. And it’s not yet second nature. There is still a lot of searching whether I am choosing something because I think it’s what someone else (maybe the person asking etc) wants me to choose or because it’s what I want. And that is still involving me realising I sometimes choose the first over the second. But importantly I’m now changing that.

Mmm coffee.

You know, every year, I watch all my crazy crafty friends do that pre Christmas Eve panic as they try to fit what I think is three months of knitting or sewing into the last 4 days to get their gifts finished on time. I’ve watched this and thought it was insanity. And so this year, when I fell in love with some over the top Christmas fabric, in September, I justified purchase of it by deciding to make hand made gifts this year. You see where this is going. But! But I started in November! And I am still, no, I am still not finished. Sigh. My fingers hurt as I madly hand quilt. I have recruited my Mum to help me finish off. And I am still wayyyy behind. My annual leave starts today and I shall be spending tomorrow furiously at (craft) work to at least meet some of my Christmas Day deadlines.

In thinking over this madness, and the need to obviously start earlier than November, even for what is a relatively simple project, I’ve realised that I would resent starting making gifts for Xmas in June. Like that would encroach into my personal crafting time, for making things for me. And in recent days, I’ve been looking forward to finishing this project in order to get stuck into the projects I had earmarked for working on in my holidays. But I also realised that making these gifts has kickstarted me back into sewing every night, which I hadn’t been doing before that. So that I will easily slide back into regular crafting afterwards, when I hadn’t before.

And I always have this massive introspection when I fall into what I think is a new routine – will it mean the old one is gone for good? Have I changed? What does  this mean? etc etc. Because ultimately, I’ve reduced the amount of time I have for craft in the evening because I go to bed earlier than I used to and I now spend maybe half an hour, sometimes an hour, reading in bed before I sleep. One of the new things I started when I came back from the US. It means I have less time for crafting but I am reading more. Cue the loop that is the beginning of this sentence.

So that’s like my general update. Too busy running around chasing my tail this last month. Too much to do, too little time. I’m wrapping up at my current day job and will have the first half of January to hand over before I move on. My new job will involve a long commute. A commute that will add an extra hour of commuting to my day and I already commute two hours a day. It’s the one and only main con for this position. And I don’t know how I’m going to go. But I’ve had some fantastic suggestions on this. Obviously its a great chance to catch up on all the podcasts I’m behind on. So that will be great. I’m thinking of finally exploring audio books – driving 15 hours a week will mean I can actually listen to a book a week. But my favourite suggestion so far came from a colleague in a different team who said, “hey did you know that you can get Adobe Reader to read you out your pdfs?” Well no, I did not know this. AND OMG I nearly hugged him. Because we shall be reading novel submissions come January 1 and the thought of losing more of my time  for TPP from commuting (driving is the only option) was making me feel a bit sad. But if I could get my computer to read out submissions to me? Well then my commute is not a waste at all – I can be productive and its not so easy to be distracted by the internet etc. Last night C set it up for me on my laptop. And he’d bought me an iTrip as a present a few weeks ago which I’ve been using to listen to podcasts whilst driving. So I may very well be all set up AND be in a more productive situation than previously. Very excited.

I hope your last days of December are going well. I wish you all the best for the holiday season and a very happy new year. I hope to be around here in the next few days catching up on some thoughts and so on. But I’m also planning all sorts of other things that I want to do.

Last week I caught a really interesting TED Talk By Lauren Zalaznick on the conscience of television. She talked about how TV shows have responded to our times. “That television is how we disseminate our value system.” She looked at the top 10 shows at points over the last 50 years and how they reflected our social conscience at that time – in response to things going on at that particular time. It’s a fascinating talk if you love TV.

I particularly am interested in TV before and after 9/11 because I guess that’s really my era and I’m interested in how television has changed and responded to events that I’ve lived through. Given that, I find flash mobs really fascinating. Firstly I LOVE THEM! (and the one below is an advert but still, it’s a great flash mob).  But what fascinates me about them is how the phenomenon is a complete juxtaposition to the rest of the way pop culture is responding, I think, to the state of the world. The world is pretty grim. Things are pretty right wing and all “with us or against us”. Our future looks grim too with more economic hard times to come, possible collapse of the European Union, a scary US election to come, climate change is happening whether the top dogs want to admit it or not and with that more and more extreme weather events seem to be hitting harder and harder.

What better response that for a bunch of strangers to suddenly break out into synchronous dance? Am I right?!

I’ve known it’s been coming for a while and today I put my big girl pants on and went gluten free. Being caffeine free has been really rewarding – and I say this as the huge coffee addict that I was (am?) – so much so that it’s a breeze to continue it, even with the seductive aromas of the dark nectar of all good things. I feel better. I feel more awake. I no longer drag myself through the day. I sleep better. I drink more water. … I feel better.

But. My reactions or intolerance to gluten and dairy has been increasing over the last few months. And it’s kinda gotten to the point I was at when last I went cold turkey on the fun things in life. I can deal with some of the less serious side effects – and have done so for a long time, hence my “should be but am not” practice. But now I am in physical pain which increases throughout the day til I feel very unwell at nighttime.

And it occurs to me, as I have thrown off the (bitter doubleedged sword) shackle of the coffee addiction, that it seems utterly self defeating to choose actions that directly lead to sabotaging myself by not feeling my best. And that if all I have to do is … not … to feel unhindered or at least not handicapped in the day … well, why would I? It’s like, there’s enough crap holding me back or obstacles I have to climb to get where I want to go and do what I want to do, why should I be actively going out and seeding the course with mines? It  makes no sense.

And that above is the result of five (is it 6?) years of counselling. There may be hope for me yet.

So today was the day. I started it in a cafe waiting for my car to be serviced and found a bunch of gluten free options. I had hot chocolate so didn’t go lactose free. The work canteen now offers at a minimum 1 gluten free lunch option, often 2 or 3. So I opted for one of those for lunch. And then had gnocci for dinner. And? Verdict? I still need to go lactose free – I bought lactose free milk and put it in the work fridge so the rest of the day was lactose free and from tomorrow I will be properly. BUT I am in much less pain this evening than yesterday. And almost no nausea. Win.

Also, this is *much* easier than it was 10 years ago when I had to live off rice and those rice biscuits for a year. We had an afternoon tea this afternoon and some of my workmates brought in bought gluten free mince pies and gluten free choc chip cookies and they were good!

I’m very sleepy so I’m going to write this fast else I’ll probably not get to it for another couple of days.

Much has happened. Yesterday I had a fabulous day, all up. I gave notice for my day job and accepted a job offer for a new one – same organisation, completely different location. It’ll be different work too, which I’m looking forward to – change is as good as a holiday and all that. Course with the winding down of the year and the winding up of my role, it’s getting harder to be dedicated to silencing the squeaky wheels. Much to do, so little left of the year.

Also. Yesterday we had a massive thunderstorm. Not really a big deal unless you live in a city that is drying and rain is less and less common and more and more of an event when it does happen. We had a real and mighty thunderstorm. I absolutely loved it. I finished work, ran postal errands and then picked C up from the train and we headed off for coffee before meeting up with T and Kathryn for dinner. We hung out in the Imp having coffee when the storm and rain began and I told C this was my favourite thing to do – sit in a funky cafe, drinking coffee (I had hot chocolate) and listen to a storm outside. Then we headed off to browse Crow Books which was our meeting place and I declared book buying/browsing in a bookstore, listening to a thunderstorm outside my favourite thing to do. You see the pattern. Anyway, I picked up some books, we bumped into T there and then we headed to Cinnamon for dinner. We had a lovely catch up and then it was time to go home. I drove home in that lightning display, into it, actually. And it was spectacular. And then I fell asleep listening to the rain and the thunder. And it’s so rare in Perth now for that kind of weather to last that long that it was just so joyful to listen to it.

And I’ve been working on a bunch of things at Twelfth Planet Press. Some are obvious – the next couple of volumes of the Twelve Planets. I’m loving how Showtime and Through Splintered Walls are shaping up. Showtime has a draft cover but I’ll post that when it’s closer to done. I’m clearing the decks for the novels submission month which kicks off on January 1. And I’m working on a couple of other soon to be announced projects. Today though, I got to announce this upcoming project for 2012:

From Twelfth Planet Press in 2012, comes the next volume in our novella series:

Salvage

by Jason Nahrung

a 40 000 word novella

Beware of the links below to the new website for Cheeky Frawg – you might lose a bit of time as you wander around, lost in the shiny:

Cheeky Frawg Books has launched a new website. Does it sell our ebooks? Yes! But very…cheekily. It’s an interactive and mysterious experience you truly won’t want to miss, in a 180-degree scrollable environment. Free content, hidden treasures, singing fish, the animated Myster Odd video, and, of course, the full catalogue of Cheeky Frawg ebooks, including Amal El-Mohtar’s The Honey Month and the ODD? anthology, featuring Jeffrey Ford, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Amos Tutuola, Hiromi Goto, Nalo Hopkinson, and many more.

Cheeky Frawg specializes in quality, self-aware e-books. We hand-craft every e-book on a letterpress using only the best, most perfectly formed 00000s and 111111s.  Forthcoming titles include the legendary The Encyclopedia of Victoriana by Jess Nevins, It Came From the North: Finnish Weird edited by Jukka Halme and Tero Ykspetäja, Jagganath by Swedish sensation Karin Tidbeck and Don’t Pay Bad for Bad by iconic Nigeria writer Amos Tutuola.

Note: A percentage of direct sales in December will go to aid iconic fantasy editor, artist, and writer Terri Windling, who is suffering from financial woes.

Well, I have a list of things that I want to do in 2012 and I know it’s ambitious. But it does include getting my read on so I thought I might as well throw my hat in the ring and join along the Australian Women Writers 2012 National Year of Reading Challenge.

Objective: This challenge hopes to help counteract the gender bias in reviewing and social media newsfeeds that has continued throughout 2011 by actively promoting the reading and reviewing of a wide range of contemporary Australian women’s writing. (See the page on gender bias for recent discussions.)

Goal: Read and review books written by Australian women writers – hard copies, ebooks and audiobooks, new, borrowed or stumbled upon by book-crossing.

Genre challenges: 
Purist: one genre only
Dabbler: more than one genre
Devoted eclectic: as many genres as you can find
 
Challenge levels:
Stella (read 3 and review at least 2 books)
Miles (read 6 and review at least 3*
Franklin-fantastic (read 10 and review at least 4 books)*
* The higher levels should include at least one substantial length review

So, I’m going to be a Purist and stick to speculative fiction :). And I’m also going to be practical and set myself the Stella Challenge level – 3 books and 2 reviews.

I think it will be a lot of fun and I want to encourage others to participate. There’s also a second part of the challenge WeLovetoRead2 which is also a really worthy challenge. I’m not going to participate in that aspect of it though, due to time constraints.

However, Twelfth Planet Press will be getting behind the campaign and will be offering a 10% discount on our books throughout 2012 which conform to the challenge. Either email us at contact@twelfthplanetpress.com with the link to your challenge post for a discounted invoice or let us know in the instructions for your purchases by including the link to your challenge post. In the meantime, we’re having a sale for December and are offering 20% off almost all of our catalogue.

Phew, what a day today. I dragged myself out of bed cause I stayed up too late last night reading – something I am going to repeat tonight (so close to Xmas!) – and was finally out the door at 7am instead of my usual 6.40. And I was 30 mins down the road when my car died. First the radio went. Then the indicators. Then the whole thing just suddenly lost momentum. Luckily I could pull off into the emergency lane. I checked my phone and yup, sure enough, I had 9% charge left on it. So I calmly called C and asked him to call the RAC and then I waited for them. A very nice man actually stopped to see if I was alright though he couldn’t help me. I thought it was nice that he stopped all the same – chivalry/good behaviour is not dead! The first RAC man determined that my alternator had died and helped me to get the car off the freeway and to Cockburn Gateway and to call the tow truck. I’d waited about 45 minutes for the first RAC man and then he told me the tow would be about an hour, that I should head off to get a coffee and come back. I raced off to Big W (yay for being open before 9!) and got a phone charger (and then a hot chocolate on the way through) and raced back to my car. At which point I really was cursing myself for wearing my highest heels that day and for not packing a paper book for the first time in weeks. And when I got back to my car and charged my phone off my laptop, I discovered I’d already been texted for the tow. Not at hour/90 minute wait after all.

Much of the rest of the day was spent much less dramatically – the tow truck took me to the mechanic where I left my car. I got picked up and taken to my parents. Then I waited for the car to be repaired, did some work on the laptop, ran errands and had coffee (hot chocolate for me) with my dad. And in this running errands bit I discovered that my print run of Bad Power had arrived yesterday! Had I not had to come north to get my car fixed, I wouldn’t have been near my post office til maybe Saturday or early next week! So that was a big bonus!

I raced home through peak hour to make it in time for the Galactic Suburbia recording! And then I did the Bad Power mail out!

In fact, a rather mellow day, when all is said and done. Tomorrow I go back to work for some unpleasant things to face – why do people leave things to the very last gasps of the working year and then expect you to work miracles? Canna be done, Cap’n. And we have our end of year thing tomorrow afternoon. And then … 8 days left of work and perhaps a wee bit of a change for me in the coming year.

Plans plans plans. My head is swimming with plans of what I want to do in the future and it’s very difficult to stay enthusiastic about the grind of the present – you know that whole winding things up for the end of year thing.

I’ve suddenly got an exciting holiday to plan and granted it’s a long way away from now but still. Planning! Things to do! Things I want to see! Must make a “indicative” suggestion list. Wouldn’t want to be too scheduled but but but! SO EXCITED. Ahem.

Some time ago Deb had me promise to consider taking the month of December or January off TPP. To just … break. And relax. I think today I realised that’s probably not going to happen. I’m a bit sad about that but am also really revved up on the projects I’m currently working on and want to give as much time as I can to them. I want them to be the best I can make them. And I ended up behind in 2011 which I understand but can’t quite forgive myself for. Yes, yes, I can hear C’s refrain in the background.

Anyway, it is what it is. And I don’t do well idle anyway.

I keep forgetting I only have Xmas and New Years off – maybe 10 days, maybe a little more, I haven’t counted yet. But I have this huge list of things I somehow genuinely think is reasonable to get done in that time. Like I want to catch up on a bunch of TV shows. And I want to get stuck into finishing a few of my quilting projects. These two are compatible but um in 10 days? I can probably *work* on one project and undoubtedly will *start* several new ones. Thereby not completely goal A and setting myself to have even more UFOs (unfinished objects) for next Xmas. I also want to clean out and tidy the two spare rooms – one of which is currently the TPP storeroom and craft dumping ground. The other has two cupboards of craft supplies that I want to organise and audit. I also have a bunch of novels I want to finish. Last Short Story to get on top of. Oh and the rest. Like, all the TPP tasks I haven’t gotten to this year and the new projects/ideas I want to initiate or implement.

Rationalising is needed. I know.

And then I’m starting to think about 2012. It’s a new year. I’ll be getting married. I’m thinking of the cons I might attend and the ones I won’t. There’s change afoot in my day job and at this stage I don’t know which way that’s going to play out. And I feel like I need to set some rules for my hobbies. Yeah yeah I know how that sounds. But maybe something like, I can only buy a new book for every 2 that I finish reading. OR something. And I signed up for Cookie A’s sock club. It’s been a few years since I joined a sock club and that’s because I was using it as an elite sock yarn collecting exercise. This one though is a lot of fun – it’s the choice of 2 sock patterns with a skein of yarn every other month and two cookie recipes to bake to go along with it. It’s the cookie recipes that sealed the deal for me. And on umming and ahhing about it, C said to me – well I guess I’ll be baking the cookies. Damn  I love that man. And the thing I’m coming to finally realise is –  I can be superwoman and do it all but only because he does some of the things for/with me. Which the more I think about it, the more I realise this  is what is called a partnership or a team.

We’re expecting the arrival of Bad Power by Deborah Biancotti – Book 4 in the Twelve Planets series – any day now. To whet your appetite in the meantime, enjoy a series of excerpts from and about the book.

Palming the Lady

“She told me my future.”

“What was it?”

“In the words of Dorothy Parker-”

“I know. No one gets a happy ending.”

“You want to hear something really creepy, you should ask her what she sees in her own future.”

Detective Palmer is called to the home of Matthew Webb, an anxious young medical student who claims he’s being stalked by a homeless woman. When Palmer takes the nameless woman in, she finds she has an uncanny ability to tell the future. By the time Palmer unravels the truth about so-called ‘Mad Mary’, Palmer herself must confront the devastating future that Mary has left her – a future where the only forgiveness available to her will be her own.

Preorder your copy of Bad Power here.

We’re expecting the arrival of Bad Power by Deborah Biancotti – Book 4 in the Twelve Planets series – any day now. To whet your appetite in the meantime, enjoy a series of excerpts from and about the book.

Shades of Grey

“There are two kinds of people with lawyers on tap, Mr Grey. The powerful and the corrupt.”

“Thank you.”

“For implying you’re powerful?”

“For imagining those are two different groups.”    

Esser Grey is a rich and powerful man who has discovered, despite the world’s attempts to soften its edges for him, that one power eludes him: he cannot die. He sets out to divert the unwanted miracle through suicide and, when that doesn’t work, through murder. Along the way he meets Detective Palmer, the first person not only to acknowledge his miracle, but also his humanity.

Really, I do keep meaning to update but time is just getting away from me. Seriously, where the hell did November go? I’m not even sure that we actually did all 30 days of it? C and I keep looking at each other and wondering where the month went but also noting that we did a heck of a lot of things this year too. I’m planning on making a wrap up end of year list to remind myself because I know it’s going to be ridiculous.

I’m still doing my 6am starts with being at work by 7.30am. And that means I’m going to bed 10ish which feels like I have very little time in the evenings, or outside work. It must be about the same though, surely? Though, I am also using these hours so probably I have less hanging about in my out of work hours. Today we opened up the Dance Central 2 game that C bought me cause I said I would dance if I had it. And we had a good hour of that. I kinda think that dancing is a far more fun way to get fit than booooring going to the gym agaaaain. Plus I’ve been watching So You Think You Can Dance on Friday nights on 11 and missing that part of my life a bit. And then I had a terrible dream last night, a nightmare if you will, that I went to audition for SYTYCD and the only judge on the panel was Robert Shearman and my body just … well … it got old and it couldn’t do any of the things it used to. Well that put a light under my bushel (is that the saying?).

Other than that, we’ve been recording podcasts - Galactic Suburbia the week before last and then again this week. And I’m enjoying actually finishing novels. I have a new one for this week’s episode and am determined to finish Yarn by it too. So that we can get on with the spoilerific podcast for that. But somehow, I’m working my way through my very pared down to read queue by my bed and actually books are making it to the real bookshelves at the other end of the house. I can read! Phew!! Though I keep thinking of all the things I want to get done in my holidays and forgetting that I am not 9 anymore and it’s only 10 days and not 10 weeks. Bummer.

We also recorded a new episode of Live and Sassy. You know what December is like – I really don’t know why we a) all leave everything to the last 4 weeks of the year and b) have this imaginary line in time where simply MUST catch up with everyone we know before the end of the year, as though terrible things will happen if we leave some of them til the week after just cause it’s the first week of the next year. Anyway, so our calendars didn’t coordinate so well and we skyped this episode. We’ll be back to doing it live in a cafe and annoying our listeners with background noise early in the new year.

And books! And projects! I’m really pushing to get a few projects to the printer’s by Xmas so that I can work in a I’m in the Future kind of publishing world in 2012. We’ll see how that goes. I’m expecting Bad Power to arrive any day now. And we have Showtime in layout proofing. And Through Splintered Walls is shaping up nicely. I’m also working on a novella project which we’ll announce soon. And another possible sekret project. And of course, I’m clearing the decks for the novel submission month of January.

And planning a wedding. I only just realised today that I get to plan a holiday as well since we know where we are off to on our honeymoon. EXCITING!!! Yesterday we all trouped back to the wedding venue and did very important things like sign the contract and pay the deposit. Tis booked. And they said “see you in 8 – 10 weeks before the wedding” – OMG! And I got a showbag which was rather exciting. Or you know … useful. The venue owner finally managed to convey to my mother what I had failed to do so -the awesomeness of bonbonierre. It’s not a thing in our culture so it’s a completely foreign convept to us, I guess. However, we now have some awesome ideas to play with for that.

So, you know. Busy.