Days 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 ,26, 27: how time flies when you’re flat out and quite a bit on the stressed side.

We are doing some work on our place. We are always doing work on our place. We’ve been owner-builders for 20 years. There is always work to do. Anyway, some time ago we had three holes dug to put in some ornate pear trees to hide and shade the shed. After all, we have had twice as much rain as our average and we haven’t seen full tanks in six years. Our friend the bobcat driver dug the holes. Big M despaired – the holes were too big and would need to be filled in again or the little balls of roots on the pear tree would be hanging in mid air with nothing to cling to. But then it rained and the holes filled with water and you couldn’t put soil in them if you tried.

I got up one day to take the dogs for a walk as I do every morning (or they look at me with big sad eyes and whine a lot) and went to let the ducks out. We have two lots of poultry – one set of laying hens in a mobile cage near the vegie patch, and one pair of ducks and a silky chook that live together in what we fondly call the Compound (wired to keep the foxes out). I have had a pair of ducks for probably 12 years. They started as fertilised eggs that another silky hatched out and have been around ever since. The pairs change according to whether the fox gets the better of us or not but this particular pair was a 10 year old female and her skittish 4 year old mate. The male has had wobbly legs for a long time now and I really thought he’d go first but this morning, the female was dead in her box. My diagnosis of cause of death is an oviduct prolapse and I can’t imagine how horrible that would have been. I cried. We placed her in the middle hole.

The month rolled on. This must be the busiest time of the year for unis. Student exams are an organisational challenge to say the least. This year, we needed53 simulated patients for our practical exams and that’s my job. We got them, we trained them and they were marvellous. Exams were held, exams finished. Somewhere in that time were a couple of trips to Melbourne and my kids’ own high school exams. And I have done some editing, some good editing on the WIP. Student supervision time is at least good for that. Busy, busy, busy.

And then Sam got sick.

Let me tell you about Sam. We got her from the pound after she’d been surrendered twice. Surrendered three times and an animal is put down as not suitable for a pet. So we say that she was on death row and we saved her. Sam was about 3 at the time, a red and white border collie, pretty and not so clever and Trouble. She came home to us on the long weekend in March, 2002.

It took her about a year to settle down into life at our place. Until then, she sort of operated on her own. Scared of a lot of stuff, disinclined to obey orders, unkind to other animals. We got Digger as a puppy in the July and it crossed my mind that she might kill him. She didn’t. They were best friends and she let him get away with hanging on to her tail as she flew after a tennis ball. Digger skun her tail to a wisp and she didn’t seemt o care. They had three bad, fur-flying fights in their relationship over eight years – not bad comparing it to any other partnership, human or otherwise.

Sam had been losing weight since winter. Under her bushy coat, she became skin and bone. But still energetic. Still happy to run all day. Never one to eat much, she cut back even further. The vet said she was fine. We fed her anything she would eat: mince, sausages, lasagne.

A week ago, she stopped eating all together. Her eyes just looked at you big and wide. The vet kept her in hospital on a drip while tests happened. I visited her every day, walking her on the kind-man-next-door-to-the-vet’s green lawn, holding her IV bag up. The tests showed something going on but it would need surgery to find out. The surgery revealed liver cancer but the vet rang early the next morning to say that she didn’t wake up.

We, brought her home and she’s in the first hole, the one with the roses on top that M put there. The third hole? Quickly filled so that nothing else can get in there. If the rain would stop for a few days, the pear trees could be planted.

We have all our animals buried at our place. This includes one horse, many chickens, two guinea pigs and now two dogs. I think how lucky we are to have the space to do that.  And those holes. Dug too deep for a purpose?

Days 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11… Somewhere in this time I have added a few more words to the WIP. Not having the word count right next to me, I could hazard a guess at about 200. Hmmm. Not exactly steaming along. But as one of my friends said to me, they shouldn’t be holding NaNoWriMo at this time of the year. He meant because the beautiful weather is here and the grass needs mowing and the vegies need planting and you just want to be outside. But I mean that it’s exam time around here – for my kids and the students at where I work. Stress + busy = very little word output. I’m falling into bed at night in that sort of overtired stupor that means I can only read for three minutes before my eyes slam shut. 

The good news of this month? Lorraine Marwood won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Starjumps! Incredibly good news for this wonderful poet and person. Lorraine came to our monthly Children’s Book Chat group with her certificate and silver pen and we very carefully passed them around. She had no idea that she had won, and was waiting with the other seven short listed authors for the announcement. Andy Griffiths kissed. Lorrain kissed Julia Guillard. All’s fair in love and writing. If you haven’t read Starjumps, it’s about a family living on a dairy farm and the things that make their lives what they are. The poems stayed with me in a similar way to those written by Phillip Hodgins, another local poet and – not coincidentally – raised on a dairy farm. Congratulations, Lorraine. No one deserves this better.

Day 5: later, at home. Added 300 words to WIP. More importantly, I’m fixing up the glitches along the way, putting in those bits of foreshadowing, plot bits and changed character things. Phew. Sometimes you just think it’s never going to happen.

On the technical side: we now have a wireless router so I’m on the couch with the netbook while M is beside me scanning YouTube on her iPod. This is the first time it has worked! Miraculous happenings! Also playing with my Beta version of Scrivener for PCs. See literatureandlatte to find out all about this.

Latest reading is Trash by Andy Mulligan. So far, so good.

Day 3 and 4: can’t write when you’re crook. That’s just a fact. But you can think.

Things I did over these two days in order to progress the WIP: talked to my friend the diabetic educator which helped with major problem in plot, started reading loaned library books on bipolar and Chopin (separately, not together) in order to make plot decisions, went for a long walk with dogs to put it all into order (not a good idea because it made me feel sicker). So, no words, but not altogether a waste of time.

Day 5: still at work. Nothing’s happened yet.

Day 2. I’ve spent the first two days re-reading my WIP and coming to the sad conclusion that it needs a lot of work. The story arc is loopy, the characters surprising in their uncharacteristic behaviour, the chapters flee in every direction. At least I’ve got something to work with, I guess.

But the daemon in this is Lord Time. Finish work at 7pm, come home to a wonderful cooked meal but do the domestic things – dishes, clean up, listen to everyone’s day and then try and fix the new computer. Again. Time by now is 9:41pm and I’m no night owl. The alarm went off at 5.30am so I’m about done for the day.

But NaNoWriMo is calling and I have this feeling that without that little pressure sitting behind me I wouldn’t even be thinking about the WIP and what needs to be done. So it’s working. Yeah.

Today’s the first day of NaNoWriMo and yes I’m going to give it a go. But not strictly according to the rules! The aim of NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. Well, I’ve got plenty of words lying around so my aim is to do something on my current WIP every day in November. Because of all the other things that happen in my life, this is a challenge. Love a challenge, I heard me say. And what’s worse, I’m going to try and blog it.

Day 1: Current WIP has 50, 083 words. It needs a damn good tidy, a bit like an unruly hedge that was planted straight and went completely out of whack. Part of my problem is that I need to do a bit of research and decision-making about where to from here. I’m onto it, having borrowed books from library and done an internet sweep. Got a bit of a layout problem as well, but I might cheat on that for the moment by simply labelling chapters with characters name (there are two voices in this book). I can work on that some way down the track. I don’t expect to write many words in NaNoWriMo but I want my head and therefore the ideas to be clearer.

PS Sent Mongrel (now known as Wrecked) re-write off.

I have three major projects to work on at the moment: the PhD novel ( I call it Fear for a number of reasons but mainly becaue of its topic!), the dystopian novel that is undergoing a rewrite (and needs a new name but for now it’s Mongrel) and my teen rom fantasy that is an absolutely wonderful thing to lose yourself in (Wynterborne). This was initially a paralysing thought. How was I going to do this as well as All Those Things that go on in normal life? But as spring lengthens the dasy, and with it my energy, I see that it’s very possible. Realistically possible.

This is what I’ve done so far. I reached a point in Fear where I just ground to a halt. I found myself going backwards and forwards over the same thing while characters did a lot of navel gazing and the flood waters (in the book but also around Victoria) sailed on by in their murky browness. So I stopped and put it in the metaphorical drawer. Next, I pulled out Mongrel. With a bit of help from some new friends, I’m ironing out some kinks in the plot and along the way some other things are happening that are surprising me. I’m about 2/3 of the way through the upgrade (which I think describes it better than re-write) and can see that when this is done, it’ll have to be bottom drawered as well. I’ll be ready for Fear again, which I want to have to a decent level by January in order to get someone else’s thoughts on it. Hopefully, that will leave January free for Wynterborne’s upgrade and sequel because I’ve always thought that I need to work on these two things together.

Yeah, I know you shouldn’t put timelines on these things but it really helps me to have a ball park date, something to aim for, something to be able to say, ‘Yeah, I think I can do this by then.’ It’s psychological trickery but who cares?

Meanwhile, I’m waiting to hear whether my application for a May Gibbs Fellowship has been successful. This is the first time I’ve applied because it’s about the first time for a number of years that I can see that some time away from family would actually be alright and Nothing Major Will Happen if I’m not at the helm for a week or so at a time. I haven’t applied for any grants etc for years, partly because I don’t think I’ve needed anything grant-related like travel or research costs. The only thing I crave at the moment is concentration time.

Off to the pictures now with M to see Tomorrow when the war began by, of course, John Marsden. I know I’ll be disappointed but I’m going anyhow to see what they’ve done with it. But how can film ever compete with imagination?