Champagne and Socks

Tomorrow is the beginning of the new round of the 12 Week Body Transformation program and I’ve signed up again. I’m doing so under medical supervision and with a promise on a handshake that I made with my midwife (and then signed off by my OB) that I not put on any weight in this pregnancy. It’s a pretty daunting thought. Don’t pregnant women *have* to put on weight? Aren’t you supposed to be a whale? Aren’t you eating for 2 etc?

Many years ago now, when I was having an anxiety meltdown, Tansy said to me – you have to work out *how* you can do [particular thing I wanted to do but had decided I could not, due to OCD] and figure out all the things you need to set in place to make that ok. What she was saying to me, and what she’s said many many times since is – figure out and set goals for things you have control over. It’s not reasonable to say “my goal is to win [X] award or publish [so and so] or create a viable business” but it *is* reasonable to set high standards for the fiction you buy and your editorial processes in order to publish the best work you can possibly publish. *That* is something you can control. And it turns out, *that* is also something you can be proud of. The rest, you can’t control so what is the use in stressing about it?  I’ve taken this advice and I’ve clung to it. When I start to freak out about something, I look at what I *can* do about it and I focus on that. If noone is buying any of my books this week, I look at what I’ve personally done to promote them and what I could be doing. And I do that.

So in the face of all the media hysteria that gets thrown at you about leaving having babies too late, I looked at what I could do, given that I can’t halt time. I looked at the factors that were within my control – I lost 15kg. I ate better, consistently. I reduced my intake of alcohol. I exercised. I didn’t take up smoking. I don’t know whether these made a difference but I do know that they gave me things I could focus on, healthy things that would improve my quality of life, even if that’s the only benefit I got.

And now here I am. 37. Pregnant. And getting bombarded with all kinds of other scary risk factors and statistics. Having a higher BMI increases the risk of complications later on in pregnancy. And given my family history of diabetes. And my own potential health complications. The best thing I can do is be healthy in this pregnancy. I believe my midwife called it ‘body sculpting” – I guess whereby the sculpture I produce at the end will be a baby? I sorta feel bad that said baby will have been made out of ice cream, chocolate and gummy bears. But probably that’s just the funny things my brain does to random shit I hear.

There’s no doubt that eating well will help me feel better and make the best baby I can make. It’s been rough so far as I have had no appetite at all, felt sick pretty much most of the time, and can’t stand the taste of water. This has meant I’ve mostly eaten glutinous carbs which have also made me feel sick due to Crohn’s stuff. I don’t see how you are supposed to only eat 200 extra calories when pregnant yet also stave off morning sickness by never having an empty stomach. How does that even freaking work? Carrots don’t quite seem to cut through that empty growling abyss in the pit of my stomach. And with my heartburn issues, there’s a whole bunch of food that I used to be able to eat that I now cannot. And so, being a vegetarian with gluten and lactose intolerances now having to avoid anything acidic … you see why toast with honey is the option, right?

Anyway. Here’s to morning sickness abating (any day soon!) and moving on to that whole extra energy thing I hear is supposed to kick in (any day soon!). I’m signing up to the next 12WBT with the goal of not putting on any weight and of getting fitter in preparation for this whole labour thing I’m trying not to hear so much about. Mostly I’m looking forward to someone else thinking through the balanced diet thing so that I start to feel better. (Incidentally, the 12WBT has a pregnancy plan option which adds in the extra calories, gives a range of meal options with pregnancy safe foods and pregnancy workouts).

So that’s me telling you the goal, as per pre season task 4. I’ll probably check in once a week on this. I start tomorrow.

Here be spoilers:

Last night we saw Star Trek: Into the Darkness in Gold Class in Rockingham. It’s not quite as flash as Gold Class in the Northern Suburbs but it’s a nice date night out and considering C and I have been apart for a few weeks and he’s at sea on and off at the moment, it was definitely a nice night out. You get free popcorn and a drink with a comfy seat and not too many people in the theatre. (I got mud cake and icecream as well!)

I’m a trekkie and would have seen this movie no matter what. And despite what I’m about to say about this movie, I’ll still head along to see the next one.

First up, you can tell a lot about the promoters think about either the movie or the audience heading along to a movie by the trailers they run before it. And what I learned is that probably not a lot of women are expected to enjoy Star Trek. Which is funny really when looking around, I estimated that the audience was about 50:50 on the gender lines. There were hardly any women in any of the trailers for movies you might also like to see. The women who did make the trailers got to be wives or whores. There was one woman who got to train and suit up in the robot warrior costume to fight big monsters in the upcoming Pacific Rim. And that was it. Male protagonists and view points all the way.

So. The movie. For the most part, I enjoyed it. I like the reboot. I kinda like the Spock/Kirk dynamic. I like the shiny and I like that it’s new Star Trek onscreen. But for all that, it was a bit … Bat Man, is the best way I think I can describe it. It feels like science fiction action now needs to be Bat Man-like for some reason. I don’t even know what I mean by that but watching this film, I felt like I was back watching the Dark Knight Rises. We’re in a gloomy place for science fiction it seems. All the preview trailers were about the end of the world. And the Star Trek film is placed just prior to the Klingon/Federation (?) war. I guess in general, we don’t seem to think brightly about the future right now.

I liked the pacing of the film and I liked the tension. I also kinda liked the pastiche to the original series. But I have to admit, I feel a bit like the point of a reboot for a franchise should mean the opportunity to do other things. I mean, sure, we’re going to walk back through an alternate timeline but does that mean we have to encounter all the previous scenarios and nemeses? Surely there is freedom in just doing totally different stuff and going in new and different directions? I would think there would be a lot of pressure in bringing back old enemies and friends.

I have two main gripes. The first is that we get a new female member to the main crew of the Enterprise – she gets a name and a job title and everything (there are other women on the bridge, probably more than in the Original Series, but they don’t get named and I think only one ever gets spoken to). So after 40 years of feminism, we get TWO named women in the gang. But … in exchange for this, we have to see her in her underwear. And like, I get that Kirk is that whole cowboy playboy dude of awesome and all but … really?? In 2013,  we still have to minimise the female physicist weapons specialist by making her take off ALL her clothes right before she disarms bombs and stuff??? Seriously?

I also have a bit of an issue with the way they directed Uhura when she bravely volunteers to attempt to negotiate with the Klingons on Kronos. Was it really necessary to make her physically appear scared? I don’t think they ever make the male characters look that afraid when they are about to do scary things. They get to just bravely do them. But Uhura has to be vulnerable …

Secondly. Like Skyfall, the last 15 minutes of this movie undid the rest of the fun. If you can’t make a pregnant woman cry in a death scene, then your writing sucks. Because, let’s be honest, this is a franchise and there’s no way you bother rebooting this whole gig for just 2 movies. Which means, we know that Kirk isn’t gonna die. Or isn’t gonna stay dead. So having to suffer through that whole badly acted scene was AGONY. There was no tension, no suspense and no real depth to the dialogue. Which is a shame because the moments before that, when Kirk works to save the ship are highly charged and full of suspense – not in will he, but how will he?

But, like I said. I’m still gonna come back for movie three

Yesterday, I attended the opening for the Through Splintered Walls Art Exhibition at the new Rockingham Art Centre.

Background: Last year, around this time, we launched the sixth volume of the Twelve Planets series – Through Splintered Walls by Kaaron Warren – at Natcon in Melbourne. We had a great launch and sold a bunch of copies and then later in the con, we discovered that there had been a printing error – the top line of every page was missing. After manic searching to check this error didn’t happen at our end, we promised everyone we would replace their copies and then we set about thinking what we could do.

It was such a let down and disappointment. You work so hard to get a book to print and then you proudly release to the world and anxiously anticipate how it will be received. And you hope it will fly. So when it dives and crashes and burns … well it’s a devastating feeling. And one I hope to never experience again. Whilst we stood around feeling sorry for ourselves, Narrelle Harris suggested that we think about turning the spoiled books into artworks – to find a way to get artists involved to use the books for art instead of pulping them. As an environmentalist, I was totally broken hearted about the idea of the waste of all that paper. So the idea sounded perfect. Plus, we had a chance to tank a mistake and turn it into something better.

The three of us worked on some ideas and a pitch and then I took this to Lee Battersby who works at the City of Rockingham (the city I and TPP are now based) as the Cultural Development and Arts Coordinator. His immediate response was “we can do that!” and when I turned around, he’d organised the whole thing. He organised four artists to give four different workshops for anyone who wanted to come along and learn about paper art techniques. And then he organised for the participants to submit their finished works (made from three copies of Through Splintered Walls each, the ruined copies which I donated to the city) for a final art exhibition.

And yesterday, we attended the opening for the exhibition. Here is the Mayor of the city opening the exhibit. It turns out, this is the very first exhibition to be held in the long awaited Rockingham Arts Centre!

Kaaron was brought over for the event and to give a writing workshop whilst she was here.

Here she is giving a few remarks and raving about how awesome the finished artworks are.

I wandered around and took photos of most of the pieces. Here’s a gallery of them – every one used to be a copy of Through Splintered Walls!

This one, the artist came and gave me the story to the piece. It’s not quite as she intended. You see, her new puppy accidentally chewed up that copy of the book and so she had to change her plans! I love this piece, I think it’s really great!

And these are works that one of the workshop tutors made as examples:


It’s quite an unsettling feeling to be pleased to see copies of your book shredded, cut up and folded. I’m so happy with the way this project turned out!

I don’t really have a highly informative “this is what happened” kind of con report to deliver. Apart from the fact that a lot of my con was taken up either trying to avoid or manage morning sickness and being tired cause pregnant, when you trade in the dealers room, you don’t really experience a con the same way as everyone else. Programming becomes this outside force that determines when you think you can expect waves of people to wander through or to explain why you haven’t seen a non dealer for what feels like days. You usually head to the room before 9 to straighten up and set up for the day and then you hang out there til the room closes. If you’re lucky, like at Conflux, the room has a lock on it and you don’t have to pack your stuff up at the end of each day.

So for me, attending a con tends to be about spending time with my friends – both at my dealers table when they come and hang out with me and keep me company or bring me food (and water) and at breakfast and dinner. This time round, cause I knew this might be my last con for a while (alas, I can’t go to Brighton now), I was determined to really spend quality time with friends all in one place. Because I had to hit the sack early, I didn’t get as much bar time as I would have liked. But this, I am learning, is life.

It’s also about all the people who come past – not just to buy or look at our new books but also to say hi, to show me stuff, to check in on projects we’re working on and to pitch me. I do a lot of other business, other than selling books, in the dealers room at a con. I also get a huge creative boost just by interacting with people. I come home from a con buzzing with ideas and energy and usually throw myself into frenetic work pace for weeks afterwards. I love it.

This is what I get out of being a publisher – my favourite thing, the thing that I get the buzz from, is working with others on a project. I love the creative process from beginning to end. I love coming up with ideas, whether on my own or bouncing ideas with others. I love the development of a work – I love working with creators, I love that synergy, the being on the same wavelength, inspiring each other, taking a good idea to a better one, pushing and inspiring and supporting someone else to be the best that they can be. That’s why I do this, that’s what it’s all about for me. And if my press is never more than what it is now, I think it will have been well worth it. I’m having an awesome time with it.

It turns out, the world is a really dangerous place, eatingwise, we just never knew. As I mentioned before, I got me the OCD which is related to my anxiety stuff. And so I have a pretty darn strict set of food related hygiene rules. Trust me, I annoy everyone I live with with them. But actually, most of them are pretty standard – they’re mostly what you would do in a commercial kitchen (a lot of illness at home can be attributed to incorrect food handling).

Anyhoo, pregnancy brings with it a whole new set of food rules and I gotta admit, for someone who is in therapy for their food rules crazy (among other things), even *I* think this shit is out of the park. Let’s see … no soft cheeses, no processed meats like salami (I’m a vegetarian), no smoked salmon , no uncooked eggs of any kind – so, no poached eggs, no hollaindaise sauce, no chocolate mousse, no commercially made custards, no exciting desserts out at restaurants – no prepared salads and no unwashed salad leaves including the prewashed salad mixes you can by at the supermarket. No sushi. No eating prepared food that has been sitting around for more than 24 hours, including at your house ie no leftovers from more than 24 hours ago.

The world is completely unsafe for pregnant women! Seriously, we should look into that! My developing theory on this, by the way, is that “pregnant women” – the subgroup in society – is a moving target. So you’re never really inconveniencing the same people for more than 9 months. And then they got other things to do and so get distracted. But really. This shit is just ridiculous.

I already have a bunch of eating issues – I have some food allergies (nuts, sulphur) and intolerances (dairy, gluten, deadly nightshades food group (tomatoes, eggplant etc)) and then some other foods I avoid because of my bowel diseases (meat, seeds, grains). And it turns out, that all the foods I’d been relying on to eat to fulfill my daily nutritional requirements as a person are in the above group pf outlawed foods whilst pregnant. And further, that when restaurants cook for vegetarians, they add only the above, banned for pregnancy ingredients. Over the last weekend, I ended up eating meals like – boiled pasta with butter stirred through it at a very nice Italian restaurant because they could not remove the soft cheese out of any of their vegetarian options and when I asked well what did they have for pregnant vegetarians? all she could offer me was pizza. At the con hotel, there were three vegetarian options on the menu two of which were chips. And the third had uncooked eggs. There was also a buffet meal option but the food looked like it had sat out for quite some time. The soup of the day remained creamy mushroom for the entirety of the con which raised other concerning questions. I took to stealing boiled eggs in their shells at breakfast in order to be able to eat something at lunch.

So over the weekend I lived off bread, muesli bars and eggs. I dunno about you but there’s some kind of fucked up irony where you end up feeling gross, bloated, unwell and wondering when you last ate protein, cause you can’t fucking eat anything in case you accidentally kill your baby. All these stupid rules leave you thinking … but now I am eating a stupid arse unbalanced diet. How is this right??? Seriously. How?

I’m lucky because my friends have been travelling with me at cons for a while and they know my Crohn’s gets triggered and we’re starting to pinpoint how this happens. Mostly because I am a difficult eater, and I don’t like to be openly difficult so I will tend to eat things I know I shouldn’t just to fit in. I eat too much gluten and it doesn’t end nicely. This time round Terri and Tehani made sure I got gluten free options by including it in the Coles runs they did to source food (how lucky am I to have such great friends?) and I didn’t feel as bad as I usually do.

And it begs the question, has part of why I’ve felt so horrible in my first trimester been because in order to follow the stupid “don’t leave your stomach empty” rule to supposedly avoid/manage morning sickness, the easiest thing to grab is gluten filled carbs? You’re supposed to only eat 200 extra calories whilst pregnant but bugger me if I can figure out how you do that AND maintain a constantly non empty stomach. When you have that raging hunger abyss in the pit of your stomach, a carrot stick just ain’t gonna cut it.

I read an article on an online news site yesterday which said that women who eat (primarily) junk food whilst pregnant are more likely to have babies who are addicted to junk food. And I thought – fuck off! When you rule out all the fucking healthy shit I’ve been eating in the last year because of risk of listeria, what the fuck else does that leave you?

So. Yes. Welcome me to the world of never can win, eh? The guilt and shame of being a pregnant woman and being constantly at fault. It’s delightful.

At the con, I drank a juice and halfway through I thought that maybe it was fizzy – maybe it was? maybe it was supposed to be? maybe it was reaction with my mouth (I had a minor flare up over the con and my mouth was full of ulcers, hello not being able to eat properly, and my tongue gets funny). Anyway. I panicked cause I thought maybe I had drunk off juice. And I asked those around me, “OMG have I killed my baby?” to which I got two very matter of fact “Nos” from Alex and Rachel (love you both). This is what we do to women with all these fucking rules.

I’m assuming a whole bunch of these posts I’ll make on this grand adventure of realisation to the extent of women’s body policing and sexism I am about to experience you’ll nod and tell me you told me so. And sadly, that’s just how it’s gonna be, I spose.

One of the most infuriating things for me in the first trimester was that whole not telling anyone thing til you hit the 12 week mark. Actually, it’s had me raging mad for weeks and weeks. It’s a whole lotta bullshit, that, that serves to make other people feel better and bright and shiny about my experience. There’s no way that shit is about me.

For example, on news that I was indeed pregnant, I discovered, much like getting engaged, I was suddenly completely behind on everything. Apparently, if I want an OB (and I do, see yesterday’s post about some potential complications plus my age etc), I need to book in with my Dr of choice at 6 weeks or else they get booked out. And I’d know which doctor I want because … ???

I couldn’t book an appointment with my GP until I was 7 weeks along and the OB doesn’t see you until 10 weeks so that’s a long time to go in your beginning stages without really any advice, guidance or help if it’s your first time if you don’t tell anyone. Am I supposed to have just gone to a couple of books and muddled through on my own?

And of course, no matter how much I tried to be all “hey this is not a thing until like 8 months along, I can totally just go on with my regular daily life like nothing is different, cause that’s what I’m supposed to do, right?” I felt dreadfully ill most of the time, unbelievably tired, I have a cold that doesn’t go away (8 weeks now – I think it’s just another pregnancy symptom and it does allow me to not have to supersmell all the time), I can’t sleep and then I need to sleep all the time, and pregnancy brain … I was dropping balls all over the place. And … I’m supposed to just … offer no explanation?

BUT … I’m also supposed to suddenly go off coffee (that one is hard to hide in an office situation when you are known as the local caffeine addict snob), alcohol, soft cheese, unknown if unwashed salad, prepared salads, uncooked eggs, smoked salmon, anything that has been in your fridge for more than 24 hours etc etc (try looking unsuspicious at a convention with that list). And what the fuck is with every vegetarian option at a restaurant being pregnancy unfriendly??? Seriously?

You know what? I’ve just felt like a big fucking liar for the last 2 months. This whole not telling people means you have to lie, all the time. How is that more palatable? And people get suspicious (I’m sure a bunch of my Twitter followers picked up on the clues) and start asking you outright, like “Why aren’t you drinking coffee, Alisa?” Which is like … if I was going to tell you, I would tell you, right? But instead I had to look people I really like and respect in the eyes and lie. It made me feel like shit, every single time.

And here’s what makes me angry about that. You don’t tell people you’re pregnant in the first trimester “in case something happens”, right? I’m going through this experience regardless of whether or not you know about it. I’m on the train and it’s left the station. No matter the outcome, this is real and valid to me. Now if I tell you and then I have to … untell you? … then you have to deal with the yucky unhappy icky things related to “something happened”. If I don’t tell you, and something happens, you get to go on with your life and not deal or interact with it. But for me, I was already on the train, regardless, I have to go through it. And the not telling others is about sparing them “unnecessary” emotions.

So, if you don’t tell anyone and you can’t talk about being pregnant, does that mean it’s not really real until the second trimester? If people don’t want to hear about it til they know it’s “stuck” then … what is it when it’s the first trimester? Not something we want to take seriously until we know for sure it’s going to work out happily? We don’t want to be a part of the unhappy stories of first trimester pregnancies. And for me, then, the whole discussion about how evil murderers women are if they have an abortion in the first trimester becomes so unbelievably fucking hypocritical. YOU DIDN’T EVEN WANT TO ACKNOWLEDGE IT ANYWAY!

One of those, either way women’s experiences must be denied, things.

It won’t surprise you then that I decided “fuck that” and did it differently. There’s no way I would have made it through that first stage without my friends. I did need the reminder that “this too shall pass”. I needed suggestions and help on finding ways to make it through the day. And what’s normal and what’s not. And a shoulder to cry on. Most of that, of course, was C, who has been brilliant and kind and patient and got himself a loyalty card at the pharmacy round the corner for his midnight runs already. One night, he gave up rugby training to lie in bed and hold my hand and watch DVDs all night with me cause that’s all that was left that could be done. I also had to tell a few people I’m working on projects with because I became flaky and unreliable at working to deadline and I needed to be watched, with that suddenly unreliable pregnancy brain. It was really clear something was up. There really was no way to hide it. Plus, in publishing you work on 12 to 18 month timeframes and I have a huge chunk of time about to come up in which I won’t be working, really. And I needed to start troubleshooting on that with authors.

I can’t imagine not being able to access and lean on my sisterhood. I think that must be one of the cruellest ways to control women – to shut them down and tell them they shouldn’t share (and validate) their experience with anyone. I don’t think I would have made it through without my friends. And I feel very angry that anyone else should have to feel that they should have to be able to do it on their own.

Incidentally, thank you to everyone who commented on yesterday’s post – I think there is a big difference between drive by lobbing of advice bombs and being engaged in a conversation in which you’re invited/asked to share your experience.

I’m snuggled into bed at Tehani’s house and am so so tired but so happy to have been to Conflux 9 this weekend. After half a week living with my friends, they’ve got my morning sickness figured out and my Crohn’s sorted and I’m feeling halfway decent after weeks and weeks. I’d been looking forward to this weekend for lots of reasons – seeing my friends all in one place, getting to launch Asymmetry, and FINALLY being able to tell people that I’m having a baby!

I’m having a baby!

I’m not very good with keeping my own secrets and I’ve been wanting to explain the loooooong period of sickness and redeem my very unreliableness. It’s been a really interesting process, both I guess, internally and socially. And I’m sure I have more of this “interesting” to go.

I’ve had a pretty rough time of the first trimester. If I knew it would be like this, I’m not really sure I would have signed up. Some days I was really quite immobilised by it. I quit my job 2.5 weeks early (went part time for one of those weeks) because I felt so ill and because I needed to sleep 3 hours at lunchtime after coming home from work about midway into my first trimester. I had days where I had about 1 hour to check emails and work on my press outside of my day job and needing to sleep (and I HATE napping). Morning sickness kicked in at about lunchtime to 2pm ish and increased steadily by bedtime. I’m still pretty much worse in the evenings and just not interested in life (generally) after about 7pm. That made being at the bar at the con til late an impossibility for me this con. But c’est la vie. I also have been suffering some side effects of Crohn’s which have been very painful, and interfered with any joy in life including sleeping. So it’s been a fun time (where fun is the opposite of a good thing).

I think this weekend, we’ve pinpointed some symptoms that are not morning sickness but Crohn’s related on top of it and so managing those as well as the other seems to be helping.

It’s been interesting how people are so quick to judge, though, how I’m going in relation to their own experience. The one thing I’ve learned so far is absolutely guaranteed that my experience of my pregnancy, and how it tracks, is going to be informed in no way by any one else’s. At all. And I’ve pretty much stopped listening. But it’s still *really* irritating how people have a need to share.

As well as my Crohn’s, I have a couple of other issues to manage through this. I have an Rh negative blood type so there’s stuff for that – that whole thing all my life where doctors and my mother have said “you know you have negative blood, right? And that that will cause problems when you have your babies” has finally arrived. But luckily they have antibody injections you can have now so that just seems like a monitor and manage situation.

The other is a bit more serious. For the last 8 years or so, I’ve had an anxiety disorder. It’s manifested in the OCD but also in mild panic attacks and depression. I’ve always been aware that depression can be exacerbated by the pregnancy/birth process and I’m aware of issues with my anxiety that may magnify through this and beyond. So I’ve been really managing my mental health with this in mind – mostly sticking with monthly visits with my counsellor, whether I really needed them or not, just to have someone really know me and be able to monitor me when I may not be able to. And also … just in case … etc.

But I’m quite fascinated by the number of people who feel a need to … is initiate the right word? … new people on this path. The number of people who feel a need to make comments like, “your life is over/going to change now” or “you will never sleep again” or “it’s going to be so much worse than you can imagine”. It might make them feel somehow triumphant, that they survived this death defying obstacle course but it’s really not a nice thing to do to someone with an anxiety disorder. I mean, really? You think I know nothing about pregnancy and child rearing that I haven’t been stressing about this for the last 5 to 10 years and that’s why it’s taken me this long to do this? I mean, really? What? I’ve never known *anyone* with a kid or just ignored *all these really obvious things about kids*? I’m a pretty organised, plan oriented, research gathering kind of person. You’d have to not know me very well to think I just woke up one day and thought “hey this’ll be fun” and leapt in, feet first, with no preparation whatsoever.

I’m going to start being much much more assertive (I was going to write “rude” there but actually, it’s them who are rude) about patrolling my boundaries. I need to for my mental health and there is going to be NO touching my stomach without asking, I am stating that now.

My aunt gave me some really great advice which was to pick one or two good friends who’ve had babies and follow their advice and ignore everyone else. And I think that’s really wise. Her other piece was – you’ll discover you’re not superwoman but you’ll also discover you’re the only one who cares. Talk about hitting the nail on the head. I’ve been really struggling with this for I guess 2 months now. I had pregnancy brain really really badly. I’m not used to not being able to rely on my head, in the face of anything. And here I was doing shit like making a cup of tea, carrying it out of one room and appearing in the next without it and no idea why. I lost words, they were just not there when I went to use them. I forgot how to do things. I became very clumsy. And it was *awful*. And then I resigned from the day job and it almost all went away. And I thought … shit, I was trying to do too much, I have a limit. And I did not like that. And, between you and me, so far, I’m not really enjoying being pregnant. I’ve kinda hated it, to be honest. And by extension, the world (more on that tomorrow). And I’ve been thinking that maybe I’m not going to be one of those women who love pregnancy and can hold down a day job and clean their house and cook dinner and run a business and be sweetness and light to everyone and everything. And I’m thinking that I might have to come to terms with being ok with that.

Before I move on, I wanted to dig a bit deeper into the stats I presented last time on the Aurealis Awards novels categories.

In my last post, I compared the gender of shortlisted authors and the winners in each of the Aurealis novel categories and then compared those to the gender breakdown of the Ditmar novel category. I wanted to look at that a bit more closely. Here is the breakdown in Ditmar novel winners by whether they won, shortlisted or were overlooked in the Aurealis Awards novel categories.

The Ditmars are often seen as a “correcting force” for the Aurealis Awards. 6% of the time, or once, a novel won the Ditmar which did not make the Aurealis Awards shortlists. That novel was The Scarlet Rider by Lucy Sussex. It is recognised in the subsequent charts as N/A for Aurealis Award category.

This chart breaks down the Ditmars novel winners into genre using their shortlisted categories in the Aurealis Awards (for the length of the Aurealis Awards, only). 50% of the time, a SF novel wins the Ditmar. Last year was the first time that SF novel was written by a woman – Kim Westwood’s The Courier’s New Bicycle.

61% of the time, the Ditmar novel goes to a novel that only shortlisted, but did not win an Aurealis Award. Those winners are broken down below into genre category.

The other aspect I wanted to drill down into was the Fantasy novel category. It was remarked to me after I posted the last statistics that it’s interesting because it’s not a new thing for this category to be a strong female – dare I write “dominated” – category. It’s essentially the trend for this award.

Tallying up the winners for this category, where each nomination is a separate novel,  a couple stand out:

Juliet Marillier – 3 wins, 8 nominations

Sara Douglass – 2 wins, 10 nominations

Sean Williams – 2 wins, 3 nominations

Garth Nix – 2 wins, 3 nominations

Jane Routley – 2 wins, 2 nominations

This starts out with some feel good, happy carefree plots but be prepared for the sobering finish.

Looking at the gender breakdown of the Aurealis winners and shortlists over time.

Aurealis SF Novel category:

Here is the breakdown by gender of the SF novel category for the history of the award:

And here is the corresponding breakdown by gender of the SF Novel category winners for the history of the award:

But what of the shortlists? Here is the breakdown by gender for the shortlists for the SF novel category for the history of the award, by year:

What I feel I still need to chase down here, if the information can be found, is what was eligible for consideration for the shortlists for each of these years to have a look at that gender breakdown.

But here’s some fun facts for this category. Over the course of this category award, there have been 19 wins to 13 individuals: 4 women and 9 men. The 4 women are Marianne de Pierres, Kim Westwood, Maxine McArthur and Kate Orman and they each won this award once. 5 men have won this award more than once: K A Bedford (2), Damien Broderick (3), Sean Williams (2), Sean McMullen (2) and Greg Egan (2 – though he declined the second).

Aurealis Fantasy Novel category:

Shortlists by gender:

And the winners:

And shortlists broken down by year for comparison:

Aurealis Horror Novel Category:

Shortlists by gender:

And the winners:

And shortlists broken down by year for comparison:

And YA Novel Category:

Shortlists by gender:

And the winners:

And shortlists broken down by year for comparison:

And finally, I thought it would be interesting to compare the above with the Ditmar novel category.

The Ditmars have been running a lot longer than the Aurealis Awards, are a popular vote by the attendees at Natcon and there is only one novel category:

Now, this is a pretty shocking pie chart. I think it presents case in point, Tansy’s Theory that as soon as you ask people to narrow their choice down to one, you [mostly] get a male winner. That 15% female winners, equates to 7 compared to 39 male winners: Cherry Wilder in 1978, Lucy Sussex in 1997, K J Bishop in 2004  and then Margo Lanagan (2009), Kaaron Warren (2010), Tansy Rayner Roberts (2011) and Kim Westwood (2012).

Or more importantly, here is where they sit chronologically:

I need to do a proper comparison, but it feels like in most years, the SF novel beats out the Fantasy or YA to win the Ditmar. The other thing of note, is that the fantasy Aurealis category has some strong female novelists who appear multiple years on the shortlists and often have won several. These include Juliet Marillier, Sara Douglass, Glenda Larke, Marianne de Pierres, Isobelle Carmody.

I think these two awards gender breakdowns are interesting to compare to awards I already looked at, namely the lifetime achievement awards:

All these awards represent narrowing the winner choice down to one person. The most interesting here is the Peter McNamara Convenors’ award, given the novel category gender breakdowns above.

Despite having a bad night again last night, I think I’m progressively starting to feel a bit more like me. Ish. I still have a battery of tests to do, running here there and everywhere for time sensitive stuff, but they’ve started giving me drugs to treat symptoms. And it’s amazing how you realise just how bad you felt when you start to feel not bad and also just how easy it is to forget what feeling human feels like. One of the most important leaps forward was having my Vitamin D trebled by a doc this week. I feel instantly better. I’m sleeping great and I have my energy back. OMG not having energy is like some kind of horrible torture for me.

I’m also my own worst enemy, as my mother loves to say.

The worse I feel, the less likely I am to take action to make myself feel better. Dehydrated? Unlikely to start drinking more water. If I’m lucky, I’ll up the caffeine intake. Have a headache? Why pop a pill when I can just blame the self infliction and thus point to the self deservingness of said pain? Lack in energy and general blahness? Why consume more fruit and veggies and take a vitamin when I could loll listlessly about, nosh nutritionally devoid junk and just groan?

So my gradual improvement this week has also improved my outlook on life (yay) and I’ve started to eat better and take my meds and gotten into the upwards spiral I so often avoid.

And got myself to uni yesterday for the first time. (I mentioned I have an office at home so I don’t really need to be on campus all that much?) I had the energy and mindset to be able to cope with parking (luckily I had already set the parking app up on my phone so I just had to learn to use it) and I found the Humanities building and the postgrad lounge where the workshop I had RSVPed for was held. I’m not convinced I needed the workshop, I couldn’t tell you what I got out of it and to be honest, I find most other people’s thesis topics kinda boring (except for Helen’s other student who was there, obvs, since his is SF creative writing), which is more likely due to my lack of arts qualifications than anything. Also, I’m mostly not here to hang out and waste time. I can see that it’s a really fun campus and there are so many cool things on and even just that I could get involved in in my own dept but at the same time, I have a lot going on in my life right now, I took a big salary hit to be here, and I feel too old for the uni experience this time round. I’ve been there and done that and know how easy it is to lose 6 months or a year of productive study to being a student. And so on the one hand I’m making myself go to all these workshops on how to do a phd, which I didn’t take the last time through, but on the other hand … I mostly know all this stuff – I know that my thesis topic will change over the next four years. I know that at the moment I want to solve the world but most of that will fall away because the point is that you need to focus on one specialised idea and contribute that to your field etc.

Probably the one thing I took away from yesterday is the way a creative production phd is a dance between the creative work and the exegesis, that the two form one thesis together and that you need to work on them simultaneously so that one informs the other. And that that’s pretty cool as a thought exercise. And that it’s really really cool that I get to spend the next three years, like, thinking. I still can’t believe I’m allowed to have fun enjoying my day job. So weird.

Whilst I slog away processing the full stats for the history of the Aurealis Awards, here’s some stats for the current shortlists. I think these will be interesting to compare against the average, when I have that. Being a creative publishing phd, I’m also very interested in publisher statistics. I’m in the process of thinking through performance indicators for various measurements of “success” and here I am playing around with some of the elements of those (how do you measure how successful you have been at executing what you set out to do? – Big thesis-ey question)

Here is the breakdown of shortlisted authors, editors and artists by gender:

And this one is a breakdown of the lists by the publisher size:

I’m also interested in looking at trends and changes in the publishing industry so the following graphs look at which publishers have what proportion of the shortlists – divided roughly into big publishers and indie; and also number of titles per publisher shortlisted.

ETA one final plot, of the women shortlisted for the Aurealis Award in 2012, these were their publishers:

Just a short one today – The Kitschies. The Kitschies are new awards, established in 2010 with the single Red Tentacle (novel) and subsequently gradually adding the Golden Tentacle (Debut novel), the Inky Tentacle (Cover art) and the Black Tentacle (Judges’ discretion). Important things to know about The Kitschies are that they are presented by Kraken Rum and “reward the year’s most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works that contain elements of the speculative or fantastic.” The mission of the The Kitschies is “encouraging and elevating the tone of the discussion of genre literature in its many forms.” And the most important thing about these are the prizes – £2,000 in prize money and hand-crafted Tentacle trophies!

Here are the stats. I’ve only presented two charts here. The first chart is the gender breakdown of winners with 12 winners across 4 years, and excluding two of the Judges discretion awards at this time – SelfMadeHero (which does have a female publisher) and the World SF Blog.

And the gender breakdown of the Red and Golden Tentacles ie the fiction component only.

As part of prepping and researching for my phd candidacy application, I’m playing around with lots of gender numbers in Aussie specfic. This is actually going to be far more intensive and fiddly than I originally thought and I keep coming up with extra ideas and tangents to run off in. Meanwhile, I thought I might throw various plots and snippets here as I compile them. At the moment, nothing really is part of any narrative or train of thought. I’m just amusing myself as I compile a looooot of different sources of information into something usable.

Today I played around with the achievement oriented awards. So these are more to do with rewarding individuals for their contributions to Australian SF/F rather than rewarding a specific accomplishment in the preceding year (like the Ditmars or Aurealis). We have three main awards for these – the A Bertram Chandler which is awarded by a jury on behalf of the Australian SF Foundation; the Peter McNamara Achievement Award for lifetime achievement; and the Peter McNamara Convenors’ Award for excellence.

So, first here are some pie charts of the breakdown of all winners for each award by gender:

You can see we’re hovering around that 25-30% average Russ talks about. The Chandler and the Peter McNamara Convenors’ awards decisions are made by juries. I don’t have the breakdown of those at the moment. However, the Peter McNamara Achievement Award decision is made by one person. A different person is selected each year to make the decision. Here is the gender breakdown of these judges:

So the breakdown by gender of the judges is the same as for the winners. But interestingly, when you look at who chose whom, only one woman (Helen Merrick) chose to award the Achievement Award to a woman.

Then I thought it might be fun to look at how many people won more than one of these achievement awards – how diverse are each of these awards? In total, there were 47 winners of these three awards. These 47 wins were won by 37 individuals.

8 individuals in the Australian SF community have won more than one achievement award but only one of these was a woman – Lucy Sussex. Shaun Tan and Terry Dowling have both won the Peter McNamara Convenors’ Award for Excellence twice – the only ones to have done so. And just one person – Paul Collins – has won all three awards.

Blogging is really hard right now, for a whole bunch of reasons. I have a lot to say but no energy to start.

So instead let me tell you about my exciting glass drink bottle. I’ve been coveting my boss’s one for ages. And then recently, I’ve had to take water with me everywhere I go, and not being overly organised, I’ve been stopping at my local servo on the way out to anywhere to grab a bottle of water. Since the need to have water on me is not going to go away any time soon, I’ve been starting to feel really bad about my consumption (and disposal of) plastic bottles. Yesterday, I was unable to make it to Lee Battersby’s book launch in the city and C went as our representative. Since he was killing time later on, I got a message asking me “about those glass bottles I wanted” and he brought me home two of my very own. And today,  I trialled the 800ml one. It wasn’t as heavy as I thought it might be and now I feel all virtuous at my reusing the bottle and it’s ability to be regularly cleaned. Here’s one very happy water drinking person and a nice reduction in my carbon/water usage/landfill footprint!

So it’s the weekend after my first week of … not going to a day job. Technically, I’m not working/studying yet but I’ve been trying to get work done where I can. I’ve not been well, and that’s dragging on so I’ve been still struggling with lack of energy. And normally I can at least work on the laptop or read or even craft but at the moment, I just have No Energy. I don’t like it but fighting it or pushing through it doesn’t seem to be working. At the moment, I’m just having to reduce my expectations of what I can get done in a day. But I Don’t. Like. It.

Some interesting things I’m observing. It’s going to take a while to rebuild my hard edge between the week and the weekend. This morning I just proceeded with my usual routine – wake up, turn on the computer, check for email and just dive in to tasks that need to be done. And then I pulled back a bit to think about what a weekend is and why I have chosen a new path for myself. One of the reasons of which was to get back my weekend. And I thought about how nice it would be to start a new quilt project or something. And just do that for all day. And then I watched the Lizzie Bennet Diaries for a while before heading out to catch up with a friend. And then run some TPP chores. But the thought was there. And tomorrow is another day.

During the week, I realised that I’ve entered another world. I wanted to pick up the printed copies of A TRIFLE DEAD from the printer and be home before noon. I had not driven my car for 6 weeks so no surprises that the battery was dead. So C called the RAC before he left and the guy came at about 7am. He jump started my car, warned me it might not hold the charge and I left it running for about 15 minutes before I turned it off and did a few more things before heading off for the day. Whereupon I discovered that the car again did not start. So I called the RAC and the same guy came back and laughed and then replaced my battery. And then I was on my way.

I decided to fill up the car on the way and was struck by how calm and not busy the station was. I headed up the freeway, mostly after all the traffic and I picked up the books after 9 and headed home. I decided to do a food shop before getting home and again, I noticed how calm it all was. Lots of car spaces and not busy in the shops. Not a long waiting line at the cashier, no one really in my way.

And I realised something – I’m operating my life now in that other parallel world – where the whole working day is available to me to do things in. No squooshing things into my lunch half hour or the last hour before things close after work, with every other frantic and stressed out 9 to 5 er squeezing things in. I didn’t have to rush up to pick up the books by 9.15 am. I had all day to do it. And I don’t have to be stressed all the time about when I will be able to make phonecalls or appointments or get to places before they close. I realised that I need to breathe out and slow down a bit. I have the time now.

Progress has been waylaid in the last couple of days due to sickness. It’s been most frustrating, or rather, had I had the energy to be frustrated, I would have been. I’m not used to having limited energy resources. Normally I can find a way to just push through and maybe pay some price further down the line. But at the moment, there seems to be immediate payback for pushing through and ignoring my body. I’m finding that I have very limited resources in a day – if I leave the house in the morning, I need a two hour nap in the afternoon. And I’m not liking this reduction in available work time!

So I have very little to report. Yesterday I managed to catch up with Terri at a new chocolate factory down her way. It was such a lovely day and they had a really lovely green lawn with chairs and tables set up under lovely big umbrellas. And we had a really long and chatty catch up, which was really great. I also really enjoyed the drive there and back – she only lives about 20 minutes away from me but for some reason, I much prefer the scenery between Rockingham and Mandurah than I do Rockingham itself. There’s something much more, I won’t say pristine, but … Australian outback about it. Lots of little hammocks and developments scattered between the two and you could almost imagine one of them being Summer Bay

I then came home and spent the rest of the day feeling like I might die on the couch and then moved finally to bed. C is working long hours at the moment so he discovered my agony at 6.30pm. When I’m sick, I am the exact expression of the Yiddish term “shvach” – it looks like it sounds I was very lucky that he took charge and did a quick run to the pharmacy to bring back stuff. That genuinely did make me feel better. And seems to still be working today. Perhaps I’ll get some work done finally!

In other news, we’ve been watching Season 1 of House of Lies. I really like it!

Well, today was the second day of my “being a full time publisher”.

It’s in inverted commas for now cause I’m not quite at full steam. You see, I’m starting my PhD at the end of the month. And I ended up finishing up my work contract two weeks early to sort a few things out. So whilst I’m doing that, I’m also kind of taking a bit of a rest before starting my new gig. A vacation of sorts. Oh who am I kidding! I was planning on spending all day every day catching up on all things Twelfth Planet Press.

Yesterday, I did pretty well. I got up at normal working hours and threw myself into work and I stopped at about 4.30/5pm. I really churned through the emails and progressed a few things that had been stalling. And I also did laundry and cleaned out some of my closet. Ahem.

Today the day was not so much attacked as survived. And I might call that a win still. Much less was achieved and that was mostly due to my computer playing up. I see now that after finally starting to clear space on it, it hasn’t played up in hours. But it took quite some time to pinpoint the issues.

However, things *have* moved along. The ebook format for ASYMMETRY, vol 8 of the Twelve Planets went out to ebook subscribers last night and should be available for purchase on our website later tonight. And other awesome online retailers later in the week.

And tomorrow, I shall pick up the printed copies of A TRIFLE DEAD and send those out to preorders, my car battery be willing.

Other than that, I’m very scattered and hard to focus. I’ve started reading 2312, starting listening to The Drowning Girl, knit one mitten in the flamingo pattern and started one mitten with beer glasses on it. That kind of thing.

But, my plan is to pick up blogging regularly again now that I have the time and now that I feel like I have freedom to read more widely and think more creatively. We shall see. We shall see.

For the last couple of weeks, we’ve noticed the puppy locking himself in the bathroom on purpose. Sometimes, he can do it accidentally if something he wants is wrapped around or under the door and in the process of trying to get it out, the door gets swung shut. But lately we’ve noticed that he’s been deliberately shutting the door on purpose, leaving him he locked in the bathroom.

After some time exchanging puzzled looks, we’ve been investigating what he’s been doing – he knows how to open a door by jumping on it if he’s on the right side of it, and we thought maybe he was doing that by accident on doors that swing in. But then  I started clearing all the space around the door, making sure there was nothing at all behind it and pushing it completely open. There should be no reason he would want to be behind it or to accidentally swing the door closed.

Which is about the time we realised that he was deliberately closing the door for the reason of closing it – well actually, we think he’s conducting experiments to teach himself how to open the door when it’s fully shut. We’ve caught him swinging the door gently shut and then trying to maneouver it with his mouth to open it. It’s a swing door with a doorknob, not a sliding door so he won’t actually succeed but watching him conduct experiments and checking replication, is really very cute.

We have our very own scientist in the house!

I spent my birthday at postgrad orientation day. I was intending my birthday to be really low key but it ended up being one of my favourite ones so far. I met Helen at the train station and headed into uni with her where we had a long good catchup chat over breakfast before she escorted me to the lecture theatre where I would be spending the morning.

I was determined to sit by myself, engage with noone, and focus on getting the information I need. As far as I was concerned, I wasn’t there to make friends or slide into “university life” – I’ve done all that before, the first time round, and am well aware of how much that gets in the way. So what happens? Someone sits next to me, and we get talking, and the next thing I’m doing is sending him to a TED talk that I think will be useful for his PhD topic. And some other people sit down near us. And we have to do that forced group interaction thing and I find out all three of them are doing PhDs in sustainability and planning and I realise that I have not run very far away from where I was at all!

But the day was super useful. I’m not sure how long it’d been since I’d been so intellectually stimulated – I had that complete drained exhaustion when I came home at the end of the day, like after a really hard exam. And I’d gotten a really good idea of what is required for the candidacy proposal I now have 6 months to write. And where to start on that. And some more thoughts on troubleshooting my topic and guiding where I might want that to go. All that stuff.

Sitting there in the workshop, I realised how excited I felt – I had that feeling you get, you know, when you fall in love or you win at something you’ve been working really hard at – elation, excitement … HAPPINESS. What an awesome birthday present to get – Helen spent quite some time lobbying me to even consider a PhD and helped me so intensely with my application. And there were moments where tears threatened at the back of my eyes, I was so overwhelmed at how lucky and excited I am to be able to spend the next 3-4 years on something I love so much. And how much I don’t want to waste any opportunities.

It’s a very strange feeling to be changing career tracks. And something I’ve been wrestling with for a while. I’ve been passionate about the environment since I was 14 or 15. When I first learned about global warming, and the large mammals under threat of extinction (elephants, cats and rhinos) and then the Biodiversity Act in Rio, I knew I wanted to work towards conservation. To making a *difference*. I was driven to act. I didn’t want to be on the sidelines watching the deterioration of the environment without at least trying to do something. And then my physics teacher found me a new degree at UWA – environmental engineering – which seemed to fit the bill. And that’s been my thing, what defined me, for a very long time.

It’s not that I feel like I’m betraying that. Well not necessarily. But I have been thinking about whether it feels like I’m giving in, or turning my back or … maybe it’s just that I’m sad to be moving on? Like, there’s nothing wrong with one door opening when one closes, but it’s still sad to be closing the room behind that door.

It’s not like I can’t still be active in conservation – there’s lots of other ways to work for a good cause.

And it’s also not unheard of to get burned out when your day job is something you’re passionate about but you very rarely get to win. And sure, part of my job was to fight the fight, if only for public record. I did have some small wins and worked towards one or two larger ones, and I have left some legacies by way of tiny tweaks to larger policies. But in all, I’m pretty jaded and cynical and some other stuff that’s mostly political and not for this medium. I shouldn’t really be there any more.

When I sat in that lecture theatre and later in the morning tea break talking to the other students about their PhDs in sustainability and I listened to their enthusiasm and passion to change the way things are, I wondered if I was doing the right thing? I wondered if this was some kind of cosmic sign about what I should be doing? I felt guilty, I guess.

I actually mulled it over for a while, until I realised that it *was* a sign, it was very *pointed* sign. That it was ok to hand over the baton to someone else, someone with the energy and enthusiasm to carry it the next round. And that in what I am doing now, I feel like I make a difference.

Longterm readers of my blog(s) will recall (perhaps with fondness, or the kindly shake of the head whilst they skip about in the daffodils ’cause they did their tax already) my ongoing Accounting Saga. There tends to be a flare up about yearly, ahead of the tax season, as I grapple with yet more spreadsheets that don’t balance, or some new forensic audit for a new system that will definitely absolutely once and for all sort out my financial recording woes.

It’s that tiiiime!!!!

Now with added bonus New Drama!

Let’s see. I should catch you up first. See. I want to be able to apply for Arts Grants. I *should* be applying for Arts Grants. Arts Grants are the holy grail. With an arts grant, I could pay those who work for TPP the real actual monies they are worth. I could pay full pro rates for writers. I could have an actual marketing budget (imagine not having to bake a zillion cupcakes the night before a book launch. Oh my!). More importantly, with an arts grant I could afford to do the things I believe we need to do for the Next Step (TM). Which is: Grow.

Applying for arts grants as a publisher seems to be a little bit more tricky. Firstly, you have to be an incorporated body. So last year, we incorporated. I think that cost about $500 in fees but I’d have to check that. That’s when TPP became a Pty Ltd entity and I got shares in the company and became a director. Then, you have to register with the Australian Arts Council Literature Board in order to be eligible to apply for their grants. This basically requires you to show that you are a legitimate entity, have a track record of publishing quality material and have established distribution streams and so on. And then, to present a balance sheet ie … and here it comes .. have freshly audited books.

Oy vey.

See, ’cause. And I want to just say up front, I’m really busy. I got married last year. I switched jobs *twice*. I published 4 books. I travelled twice overseas. I did *stuff*.

But um. Yes. Of all the things I did, the one thing I did not finish doing was move all my accounting spreadsheets into Quickbooks, which was the free software that came with my incorporating paperwork. I really liked the invoicing ability inside this program and I got that up and running. And it worked ok for some things. But, it turns out that a) forensic auditing of 6 years of records of various levels of perfectionism in their keeping takes *a really long time* and b) the software is not really set up for publishing where you also want to keep track of inventory and the per unit cost make up (it really wasn’t flexible in the per unit cost accumulating over time – like, say, I pay an author the first instalment of an advance 6 months or a year ahead of publishing, and I also take preorders for the book but later on there will be additions to the cost like the rest of the advance, the design fee, the artwork fee and the printing costs and maybe launch costs and various marketing costs). And I also wanted to be able to track projects and their bottom lines versus the entire press’ bottom line (to look at breakeven points for each project vs for the whole press). It’s not really set up for that.

And somewhere along the line I got too busy or distracted to keep up with even the front end of entering records into Quickbooks. And it got to be a big huge mess. Again. WHY DO I ALWAYS END UP HERE?

So you’ll appreciate the hyperventilating, chest thumping and loud sobbing that accompanied the having to get audited aspect of this whole gig.

I believe a text message to my brother-in-law with the question “so is 11 days a reasonable amount of time to get audited in?” kicked this off. He is very lovely and has come to our house twice this week to sit down and look at my numbers and go through my spreadsheets with me. He has approached the Mess with calm and logic, which has been reassuring. He seems convinced that this all could be Sorted out and rational and tidy. (I live in hope. I cling to it sometimes during the nightsweats) And the first step of all this was to pull together numbers for the balance sheet needed for Literature Board Registration.

My exciting news today was all that blood and sweat and tears was worth something!! I lodged all the forms and requirements last night at 11pm and this morning I got word that Twelfth Planet Press was successfully registered! Hurrah! I can’t even explain how uplifted and excited I’ve been all day. I’ve had *ideas* spilling out my ears. I feel completely reinvigorated and reenergised!

Of course, all this is overshadowed by the more painful exercise to come in actually bringing the whole books up to date and neat and tidy. And thus has a whole bunch of complicating factors now – firstly, actually finding an accounting software package that works and/or admitting that I will never fully separate from my spreadsheets and may have to run a software package and my spreadsheets simultaneously to get all the information I want. I really really like to know which projects have broken even, which might break even and which never will. And there’s all kinds of interesting data that you can look at to do with estimating print runs, advances, actions leading to sales correlations, which times of the year books sell better etc etc.

And um … now TPP is a company and that changes things. I’d always operated on the premise that the money I invested in the press I would get paid … at some point in the future … should there ever be funds. But as of March 2012, when we incorporated, there are all kinds of tax implications and you can’t just “take money out” from a company to a person willy nilly. Now I have to look at structure, shares and loans, liabilities and debts and all kinds of things like auditing, annual reports and tax and so on and so on. And a way to somehow be able to get back the money I’ve been investing in this project, at some point, should there ever be money to be got. The pipe dream, eh?

And if we’ve learned nothing else, we’ve learned it’s that the one most important thing in any enterprise is to get the foundation sorted before you run off into the distance. Oh hindsight. You’re so cute.

You know what this all boils down to, don’t you?

Yep. You guessed it.

ANOTHER FORENSIC AUDIT.

Hold me.

But it’s not all bad. I’ve been having to calculate royalties to figure out liabilities – and hopefully next week I will be paying some. This is the first year my authors have earned out their advances. More than one author. More than one book. That’s really exciting. You take your milestones where you can find em.

And the other thing of course – how lucky am I to have such a lovely brother-in-law!