Playing tourist at home

We had a weekend in the city recently. Check out the view from our apartment:

Admittedly the weather could have been better, but we couldn’t complain about the location! In the heart of The Rocks, the oldest part of Sydney, we were surrounded by picturesque old sandstone buildings, quaint twisting alleys full of tiny galleries, gorgeous harbour views at every turn … So of course the kids wanted to go see the lego at the Sydney Aquarium.

And the lego was quite impressive, if lego is your thing. Moby Dick here had nearly 400,000 pieces of lego. The aquarium is always fun, if a little pricey. I love the seahorses

and the ugly dugongs. How drunk would a sailor have to be to mistake one of these babies for a beautiful mermaid??

Of course, I would have preferred less aquarium and more galleries – but that’s life with kids in tow. They were pretty patient and put up with a few galleries and a lovely Sunday morning stroll through The Rocks markets. Bribery with ice cream always helps!

We also spent a lovely hour or so browsing a couple of big bookshops. Dinner on Saturday night was at the Summit, a revolving restaurant on top of one of the city’s taller buildings. The views were great, despite the rain, and the kids had a great time stickybeaking at everything. The food wasn’t half bad either.

Even breakfast is an adventure when you’re staying at a swish place. All sorts of yoghurts and juices presented in tiny glasses made a tempting display.

Throw in a bit of time swimming in the hotel pool, and you have a pretty satisfying weekend all round. Sometimes it’s fun to play tourist in your own city.

Now if I could just convince the kids there’s more to Sydney than the aquarium …

Finding the floor: Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris

Finding the floor … or tackling the teetering tower of terror, otherwise known as the to-be-read pile. First it was a shelf, then two, then a neat pile stacked against the wall. Now there are tottering piles thirty books high. There must be hundreds of books there, cluttering up my floor and my life.

Hi, my name is Marina and I have a book-buying addiction. I can hear the authors among you yelling hoo-RAH! Bring on the book-buying addicts! And as addictions go it’s fairly innocuous, I admit. But it will take me years to get through that many books. Some have been there years already – some so long I’ve lost all desire to read them, which is crazy. I couldn’t even tell you what was on the bottom of some of those piles. Yes, I love books, but this is getting ridiculous. Time to tackle that monster!

Hence my new project – finding the floor in that scary corner of the room. Whittling down that overblown pile by reading one a week and reporting my progress here. Accountability is such a good motivator!

And to kick off the project, a book that spent barely any time on the pile, Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris. (That’s part of the problem – always reading the latest acquisitions and never getting to the older stuff – but I reserve the right to read in any order that takes my fancy.)

Dead in the Family is the tenth in the Sookie Stackhouse series about a telepathic waitress in small-town America and her continuing adventures with vampires, werewolves and other supernatural creatures. I’ve mentioned before on the blog how much fun this series is, and I dived into this one with every expectation of my usual huge enjoyment.

Let’s just say that Dead and Gone remains my favourite of the series. This one was very slow to start. Almost half the book passed in small incidents and recapping previous events. Halfway through I was wondering “when is the Big Thing going to happen? Where is the main storyline?” Sookie seemed to be spending a lot of time thinking, sunbaking, going to work, having lunch with friends and family – all the things that make up her regular life – but without any underlying storyline driving the plot along. Something did eventually happen, but it wasn’t really big enough to hang a whole book off. So instead of one main plot and several subplots, it felt like there were just a lot of subplots.

All this sounds as if I didn’t enjoy it, which is not the case. It still had a lot of elements I love about the Sookie novels, particularly Sookie’s pragmatism and the juxtaposition of her nice Southern gal manners against the monstrous misbehaviour of almost everyone around her. That’s the undead for you. No social skills. There’s humour in the way she stands up to the monsters and scolds them into better behaviour, but a serious side too. She forces them to remember their long-lost humanity.

Harris has Sookie in an uncharacteristically sombre mood for most of the book, which affects the overall tone. Bad things happen in most of the books, but usually Sookie retains her innate optimism. This time she’s still recovering from the terrible events of the previous book, and it seems to have changed her character. I guess it’s a good thing for the protagonist of a long-running series to change as the series progresses, otherwise the series can stagnate. But now there’s a manic feeling to her bubbliness, and she’s changed to the point of trying to organise the death of a vampire who’s causing trouble for her boyfriend. A rather different Sookie to the sunny character of the first books. It will be interesting to see how far Harris takes her.

So yes, I’m still looking forward to the next one, even though this one felt more like the characters getting their breath back from the last one than a whole new story. I think there’s still plenty of places Harris could take this series – I just wouldn’t recommend starting with this one.

Wednesday WIP for really truly

Hooray! I finally have some progress to report on the writing front. Not just a quilting WIP but a really truly one. Yes folks, it took months of procrastination and a prolonged sojourn in the Depths of Self-loathing, but I finally got my butt back into the chair and started working on Verity again.

It’s been so long I had to read through it first because I’d forgotten what the story was about. Oh, yes – now I remember! Pirate ships powered by sails made of human skin, krakens and star spiders, and a bitter war between merfolk and selkies in a magical universe beyond our own called the Sea of Stars. Well, that’s not really what it’s about. That’s just the bits that make it fun. It’s about a girl’s search for her lost sister, and the family secret that could destroy them both.

Hey, say that last sentence in a movie trailer voice – sounds corny, doesn’t it! Okay, so my summary needs work. So does the story, unfortunately. Still, one job at a time. I have to finish writing the first draft first, so I can pin down exactly what happens in the story, before I can fix it all up.

You might think that, with only a couple of chapters left to write, I’d have a pretty good idea already of how it all ends. Well, and so I do, but stories have a way of surprising you – at least they surprise me sometimes! Only yesterday another tempting glimmer of an idea peeked up at me from a perfectly innocuous sentence I’d just written. And I still haven’t decided whether or not to kill off a major character in the climax. I don’t want to, because I really like him, and yet … it would be so cool for the story.

Anyway, my little wordcount widget is gradually creeping along again towards The End, which makes me feel like a real person again. A Contributing Member of Society. Bizarre, I know. Society is certainly not hanging on my deathless prose. Though I do know one little duckling who will be delighted to find out at last what happens (even though she will probably rend me limb from limb if I do wipe out this character).

Still, We Novelists cannot pander to the desires of our adoring fans, but must remain true to the prompting of our Muses. A Novelist is not a democracy, to be swayed by the opinions of others, but an almighty God in a universe of our own creation!

And right now this God’s finger is hovering over the Smite button. Hovering, I tell you! Which way will the dice fall? Only time will tell …

Fancy a magic carpet ride?

Because if you do, I know where you can find one. Yes, I’m still here. Haven’t won the lottery and escaped to the Bahamas after all. I’ve just been horrendously busy with a combination of school holidays and costume making for a production of Aladdin the ducklings were starring in.

Talk about typecasting! Beautiful Drama Duck played the beautiful but melodramatic princess. Demon Duck lived up to her demonic name by making a splendidly evil bad guy. And crazy little Baby Duck played the evil sidekick – a wisecracking parrot. Not a bad match for a little guy with a big sense of humour who never stops talking.

The show was last Saturday night, and I spent several weeks sewing in the lead-up. Yes, I volunteered, and I’d do it again, so I shouldn’t complain, but wow, that was a lot of work. I made about 20 costumes, and let me tell you, I am so not a clothes maker. Straight lines I can do. Give me a quilt any day. But mention sleeves or fastenings or waistbands and I want to run screaming in the other direction. I guess it was a learning experience! Thankfully there was another lady – a very experienced, much more competent lady! – who made all the really hard costumes and did tricky stuff like working out sizes and fabrics. I just did what she told me, and I must say they certainly looked very professional on the night.

So the costumes were a slog (though I am such an expert at elastic waist pants now!). But I really enjoyed making the magic carpet. Look at that perfect border fabric I had in my stash. Doesn’t it just scream Persian opulence? I don’t even remember buying it, but I had just enough, with barely six inches left over. It was obviously meant to be! Oh, and while you’re looking, please admire the tassels, made by Drama Duck. She could see I was under pressure so she wanted to help out, bless her.

What about turbans? If you need those, I’m your woman. I made ten, and they looked awesome on stage, if I do say so myself. They were kind of fun too.

And the ducklings, of course, were wonderful, and had the best time. Their excitement made it all worthwhile, cliched though that sounds. I’m still very glad it’s over, though! Now I can get back to sewing my quilts. Not to mention getting to bed before one o’clock in the morning.

“You seem happy today,” the Carnivore said yesterday, in a tone of mild surprise. Guess I have been a little stressed and grouchy lately.

“That’s because I’m sewing and it’s something I actually want to make,” I said.

What a lovely time I had, cutting gorgeous fabrics and sewing them back together into even more gorgeous arrangements. I’ll show you what I’m working on soon – but in the meantime:

Sorry …

I can’t resist …

Just look at that date!

May the fourth be with you!!

Happy Star Wars day everyone!

It's impossible

Question of the year comes from Baby Duck, who clearly has been learning about the evolutionary advantages of primates’ clever tool-using hands. We were driving along and out of the blue he pipes up:

“Mum, what are impossible thumbs?”

WIP Wednesday

We’ve been dining in a cave for the last month because of what I laughingly describe as my “design wall” – a sheet pinned over the curtain rail in the dining room. Since I do all my sewing at the dining table, this is the perfect place for it. Except for when we wish to use the dining room for its intended purpose, of course. Then it’s a really crap place for it, since it blocks the light and the view.

However, its very craptasticness has a motivational aspect. I’m so sick of staring at the damn thing every time I eat a meal that I’ve been working on it at what passes for light speed for me. Only five more rows to sew together and the top will be finished.

There are some great fabrics in there, and the design is a quick and easy “disappearing nine-patch”. Can’t wait for it to disappear off my curtain rail. When it’s finished it will take up residence over the back of one of my lounges to protect it from the sunlight.

I wish I could report some writing progress, but my mojo has ridden off into the sunset without me. I’ll make an effort to track that varmint down when we stagger into school holidays next week. This term has been a challenging one, so I’m looking forward to a break and the chance to regroup.

The ducklings are also keen for the holidays to arrive, though no doubt the cries of “I’m bored” won’t take long to appear. Part of the excitement is knowing Easter with its bucketloads of chocolate is just around the corner. I’m still in negotiations with the Easter bunny about that. With my changed attitude to sugar it seems wrong to purposely load my children up with so much of the stuff – almost as bad as offering them cigarettes. Not that I mean to deprive them completely, but I need to find a compromise that will make us all happy. Cue hollow laughter.

Ah, the joys of parenthood.

Beam me up, Scottie

Sorry if I got any trekkies out there all excited – this post has nothing to do with Star Trek. Just can’t resist a pun, even if the connection is pretty tenuous.

But I bring you – rather belatedly – February’s finished quilting project. Ta da! One cute scottie dog:

I saw a picture of one of these on a quilting blog somewhere (can’t remember which one, sorry), so I went hunting for a pattern. Found this one and whipped it up in a day or two. (Stop laughing! Two days is lightning fast for me.) If I was being strict about such things, it wouldn’t even qualify as finishing a UFO, since it jumped straight to the top of the queue, over all the genuine UFOs that have been languishing in the cupboard. But a finish is a finish, so I’m happy. And it’s just so cute! How could I resist?

I made it in reds to suit Demon Duck’s to-be-renovated room (if the long-awaited extension ever starts). She was very particular, and requested a proper collar with a dog tag. I was just going to tie a ribbon around its neck, but no, that would have been too easy.

I considered making a dog tag out of shrink plastic but got lazy. So I took her to the shops and let her choose a real dog tag and had it engraved. I should have gone with the shrink plastic – the tag cost way more than the dog! I nearly fell over when the guy handed me the engraved tag and said “that’ll be $15 thanks”. Ouch! That’ll teach me to take the easy way out.

The S stands for Scottarina, in case you’re wondering. Demon Duck has never been big on creative names for her stuffed toys. Her very first favourite was a blue rabbit called Bunny. Then Bunny was cast aside in favour of a purple koala called … wait for it … Koala. Finally Koala was superseded in her affections by a little brown bear called – yes, you guessed it – Little Brown Bear. “Scottarina” is positively inventive by comparison.

But none of them had a name tag worth more than they were ...

Italian cooking: now with random green stuff

I had a craving for bruschetta – but do you think I could find a recipe? Heaven knows why I didn’t think to consult the Almighty Internet. Google is a girl’s best friend! But after ratting through several cookbooks I came up empty-handed. Maybe bruschetta’s too easy for cookbooks to bother with?

Anyway, I figured I could work it out. Bread, tomato, a little balsamic vinegar, and that yummy green stuff. Convinced the thing I needed was oregano I went to my local greengrocer to buy some.

My local greengrocer doesn’t label his herbs. It would be entirely possible for someone to come home with a bunch of mint only to discover it was actually basil. This may or may not have happened to me …

So I had a good sniff and came up with the one that smelled like bruschetta. Brought it home and made something that tasted just like the real thing (if you ignore the fact that it was slightly soggy in the middle – but my tummy didn’t care). It looked a treat too.

Only then I did find a recipe and discovered that the thing that smells like it belongs in bruschetta is actually basil, not oregano. I have a vague memory now that oregano has smaller leaves. As you’ve probably guessed by now I’d be the first one out the door in any cooking contest. It’s probably a good thing my greengrocer doesn’t label his herbs, or I’d have bought the wrong thing.

Hmmm. What do you think, internet?

Is my random green stuff really basil?

Colour my world

Feeling a little blue today. (No offence, blue, I think you’re a lovely colour.) The world seems kind of grey and miserable. (I know, I know, grey – you must get sick of being equated with misery. And you don’t even get to be a colour. You’re just a shade.) So I’m adding a shot of colour for your viewing pleasure.

Ta da! The Mighty Internet has taught me to crochet. One stitch, anyway. I’ve been having fun throwing colours together, the brighter and more clashing the better. I love the way they make each other glow, all jumbled together like this. Maybe one day these will be a blanket, like this beautiful one at Attic24 that inspired me. Or knowing me, I’ll run out of puff and they’ll end up just cushion-cover size. They’ll still make me smile, though.

Another thing that’s making me smile lately is this pretty cyclamen sitting on my kitchen windowsill.

The flowers are so delicate but, frankly, a little weird, like butterflies balancing on top of poles.

I love the way they gradually stretch and unfurl. Nature comes up with some doozies, that’s for sure.

If you need more colour in your day, go check out Loretta Grayson’s blog. Wall-to-wall gorgeousness! I used to read her blog regularly a few years ago, when I was into scrapbooking. She always did the most amazing scrapbook pages, so artistic. Now, it appears, she too has the crochet bug. Or maybe she always did, I just didn’t know about it. But when I rediscovered her blog today it felt as if crochet had taken over the world. Go, hookers! I mean, um, hooky-type crochet people. You ain’t seen colour till you see what Rett does with it!

Do you have a favourite colour? It’s so hard to pick just one – it’s like choosing between your children! They’re all beautiful in different ways. Most days I say green out of habit, but really, I love them all.

Except maybe red. Sorry red, you’re just too … in your face. Although I have been using quite a lot of it lately in quilting, as you’ll see when I get around to posting a photo of February’s finished quilting project. So I’m learning to embrace red’s brash charms.

What’s colouring your world lately?

Finished!

Feeling mildly accomplished tonight – have just finished a short story and submitted it to an anthology. At this point I can’t tell if it’s good or bad, but that’s not the point. It’s finished! And what’s my word for the year? Yay, me! Another project done.

This one’s been in the works a long time. Every time I drove home from visiting Mum last year I passed under a bridge called the Skye Winter Bridge. I looked it up just now; it’s named after a poor little toddler killed in a police chase.

In my head it turned into the Winter Sky Bridge and I started thinking about a magical bridge that appeared in the sky at a certain time of year – a transient, unstable bridge that was the centre of a whole world’s creation myth. A bridge that the people of the world believe leads to heaven, but in fact goes somewhere else entirely, and a boy who has to climb it in search of his lost brother.

Stories get started in the strangest ways, don’t they? I love hearing writers discuss the evolution of their stories. Such big, amazing things can grow from the tiniest seeds of inspiration. A word, a phrase, a line of poetry or an image in a magazine can spark a whole book. It’s like magic. Creating something where nothing existed before.

And speaking of books – now I’ve finally stopped procrastinating and finished this story, I can get back to Verity. Which also deals with a search for a lost sibling, come to think of it. Seems to be a recurring theme of mine lately. Should my brothers and sister be worried?

I only have a couple of chapters to go to finish the first draft. Then Drama Duck can stop harrassing me to find out what happens. Poor kid, she’s been very patient. But she’ll have to wait till next week. February’s nearly over, and I still have to meet my goal of finishing a quilting UFO this month – guess it’ll be a busy weekend!

What about you? Have you finished a project lately, or accomplished a goal?

Mad dodo skillz

Well, the holidays are well and truly over, and we’ve gone back to all our usual activities, including taekwondo. At the end of last year, the girls and I moved up to high yellow belts. One of the black belts made taekwondo gingerbread men for everyone in celebration. Ninjabread men? She went to a lot of trouble. They had white taekwondo uniforms on and everyone got the appropriate coloured belt for their grade. So cute!

Sadly, Baby Duck is still languishing among the white belts, two grades behind us.

Baby Duck has a lovely nature, very caring and sensitive. Sure, he can be loud at times, and is certainly not above whacking his sisters when the provocation is great, but on the whole he’s a gentle, laid-back little dude. He just doesn’t get taekwondo.

At our school the sparring is non-contact, ie you’re supposed to stop short of actually punching or kicking anyone. Of course sometimes a foot or hand will connect accidentally (particularly among the younger practitioners!), and when it happens to Baby Duck he’s outraged.

“He kicked me!” he announces to the world in horrified tones.

You’d think he’d realise, from all those ninja cartoons he watches, that that’s the whole point of martial arts.

Most of the time, however, he’s quite safe since he allows a good ten-foot margin between him and his opponent at all times. I was trying to spar against him at our last lesson, and every time I kicked he fell back ten feet, then retreated another five feet before delivering his return kick. I tried to persuade him that he’s never going to defeat an opponent by standing on the opposite side of the hall, but I don’t know whether he bought my arguments.

Of course I’m happy that he’s such a sweet kid, and I don’t want to change him, but, you know, just a little more aggression would be helpful. He thinks the best part of taekwondo is chatting to his friends when they’re supposed to be learning their forms, hence the form is still pretty wobbly. Watching him go through his form is like watching a marionette. He’s all floppy and gangly. At this rate he could be a white belt forever, which wouldn’t go down well.

I instituted an incentive scheme, thinking to appeal to his greed. $30 for every grading! The girls have earned 60 bucks apiece already, which brings on tears when they get paid and he gets nothing, but doesn’t translate into motivation. Maybe I just have to wait for him to grow up a little more.

It’s ironic, though – the whole reason we started taekwondo was to find him a sport he’d enjoy. Yet he really couldn’t care less, and it’s Demon Duck and I who are keen. Demon Duck has a phenomenal memory. Show her a form once and she’s got it. She’s a good little sparrer too. I’ll have to work hard to keep up with her. Don’t want her beating me to black belt – although that’s a distant goal at the moment. I’d settle for just being able to do a side kick without losing my balance!

Hooked!

I was very tempted to call this post “The Happy Hooker”, but decided to err on the side of caution, lest I attract all sorts of unwanted traffic to the blog. Of course I’m not talking about anything unsavoury, merely that I have a new hobby (as if I needed another one of those!).

Here is my first effort in progress:

For a long time I’ve been thinking I’d like to learn to crochet one day. Well, I decided the day had come, and asked the Internet very nicely to teach me. And you know that Internet, always so obliging! I found a great, easy to follow video on Youtube and off I went.

And then the Internet went all evil temptress-y on me and led me to some truly mouthwatering sites, like Sarah London and Attic24. Oh my goodness, the riot of colour! I want a ball of wool in that colour! And that one! Ooh, and those too! And the combinations and patterns are so divine. I can feel a new addiction coming on.

At least, unlike my sugar addiction, this one’s not bad for me.

Favourite books of 2010

I read 75 books last year, including non-fiction, fantasy, sf, young adult, paranormal and the odd general fiction or thriller. The bulk of them were young adult or paranormal, which are two genres I didn’t read only a couple of years ago. I guess I got tired of my usual diet of epic fantasy, and went looking for something new.

Nevertheless, one of my favourites last year was the biggest, fattest, most epic-y epic fantasy I’ve read in years, The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson.

If epic fantasy is your thing, don’t be put off by the stupendous size of this book. So what if you give yourself tennis elbow just holding it up? It’s worth it, I promise you.

Sanderson’s worldbuilding is fascinating. He has the same wonderful knack as Glenda Larke for creating a truly unique ecosystem. His world is ravaged by huge regular storms, which has shaped the way people live and all the creatures that exist. There are also tantalising hints of world history, and you get the sense this is a real world, with all the complexity that entails.

His main character is Kaladin, currently a slave, formerly a talented warrior, who is embroiled in an ongoing war in a very dangerous role. He is part of a crew that carries a bridge for the regular soldiers to cross the chasms that snake through the unusual battlegrounds where the war is taking place. Bridgemen drop like flies all around him, and his struggles to keep his crew alive and find a better life for them make compelling reading. So compelling that I did my usual thing of skipping all over the book. I got so caught up in Kaladin’s chapters that I skipped the ones dealing with the other characters and read Kaladin’s through to the end first, then came back and read the whole thing again in proper sequence.

Not that the stories of the other main characters aren’t interesting – far from it! It’s just that Kaladin was the best-drawn character in a book full of great characters. A win-win situation, really. The only downside is I have since discovered this is the first book in a projected series of ten, which means I’ll be waiting a long time for the end of the story, á la Robert Jordan and George RR Martin. Let’s hope Sanderson is a faster writer than either of those guys. At least Book 1 did have a very satisfying conclusion, while leaving some of the larger series questions open.

The other real stand-out of the year for me was Liar by Justine Larbalestier, a Young Adult which I’ve already reviewed here. A truly mindblowing book.

I read lots of other fun YA too, including some of the Percy Jackson books by Rick Riordan and the Skulduggery Pleasant series by Derek Landy. Skulduggery is a detective, and the books are fast-paced, full of magic and mayhem. The really fun part is that Skulduggery is dead – he’s a skeleton, and a wisecracking one at that.

Derek Landy visited Australia in 2010, promoting the (I think) fifth book in the series, and we went to see him at our local children’s bookshop. He was very entertaining, much like his books. Demon Duck asked him where he got the idea for a skeleton detective.

“Out of my incredible brain!” he said.

I found some new authors on my visit to Aussiecon in September, and one of them was Tansy Rayner Roberts.

Her Power and Majesty is the first in the Creature Court trilogy, and I’m eagerly awaiting the second instalment, due out in April, I think. This book starts with a bang – naked guy falls from the sky, off his face on drugs, observed by our country bumpkin heroine, who’s just arrived in the big city to take up an apprenticeship as a seamstress. When it turned out she was the only one who could see him because of her hitherto-unsuspected magic, I thought I knew where this book was going. But no – instead of becoming her mentor, he takes her magic with her blessing.

And that was just the first surprise this book had in store. Later ones were much more jarring, so much so I had to reread pages several times to be sure what I thought had just happened really had. Roberts isn’t afraid to inflict suffering on her characters, and there are some pretty dark and dangerous ones in this book. Also lust, betrayal, a strong heroine and a very strange and as-yet unexplained adversary. I was so eager for more that when the book ended I had to read the whole glossary, something I never usually even look at, just so I could stay in the rich world of Aufleur a little longer.

Another world I like to visit is that of Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels. It’s southern USA, only changed by the discovery that vampires are real. They “came out of the coffin” when Japan invented a synthetic blood they could live off, and the revelation has had profound political and cultural effects on society. It’s also made Sookie’s life a lot more complicated than it used to be. She’s a telepath, so not only are the vampires after her body, they’re after her mind as well.

Dead to the World is my favourite of the series so far. I could tell you the telepathic barmaid is a great character with a distinctive voice (true), and each book in the series adds new and interesting complications to the overall story (also true), but why do I really love this series?

Hot romance! Gorgeous vampire lovers!

I know, I’m shallow.

And this book is my favourite because it’s the one where Eric, the powerful (and hot – did I mention the hot vampire lovers?) regional overlord, who’s been lusting after Sookie for three books now, loses his memory. Instead of being a menacing (but hot!) figure, he has a complete personality change and becomes endearingly dependent on Sookie, who finds him running down the road near her house in the middle of the night. It’s romantic. The hot sex doesn’t hurt either. Ahem.

Okaaay. Moving right along.

Sex as oppression this time. The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff was a very interesting exploration of what it means to be a wife in a polygamous marriage. The novel actually tells the stories of two nineteenth wives – a woman in a present-day Mormon sect accused of murdering her husband, and the based-on-historical-fact story of Ann Eliza Young, the nineteenth wife of one of the founders of the Mormon church, and her struggle to end polygamy.

The modern story is narrated by a teenage boy. His mother is the nineteenth wife, accused of murdering his father, neither of whom he has seen since he was thrown out of the sect at 14 and left to fend for himself. This part of the story follows his efforts to prove his mother’s innocence, no easy task given the sect’s attitude to outsiders.

Woven together the two stories present a damning indictment of the practice of polygamy. It was fascinating to read but also depressing to consider how much misery is caused by men using religion as an excuse for not keeping their libidos under control.

On the non-fiction front my favourites were two books I’ve already discussed on the blog.

Get Everything Done by Mark Forster is a great tool for procrastinators, as discussed here. Even works for procrastinators’ children. Drama Duck finds the oven timer trick very helpful for getting homework done.

The other one is The Sweet Poison Quit Plan by David Gillespie, which I discussed here.

You know how people talk about “books that changed my life”? Well, this one really did! If someone had told me at the beginning of 2010 that I would give up peppermint chocolate that year I would have laughed.

Me? Give up peppermint chocolate?? Inconceivable!

Yet I not only did, I don’t even miss it. In the process I also gave up headaches every morning and about four kilos. Not a bad deal, I say!

I wish I could make everyone in the world read this book (David Gillespie probably wouldn’t mind that either!). The facts it presents are quite scary, and make a compelling argument against eating sugar. Anyone whose New Year’s resolutions revolve around healthier eating or losing weight could do worse than have a look at it.

There were lots of other good books on the reading list, but those were the stand-outs. I have plenty of happy reading to look forward to this year as well, since the To Be Read pile has hardly shrunk. Books just seem to find their way into the house, and I’m always looking for new things to read. Does anyone have any recommendations for me of something they’ve enjoyed?

So far so good

Two finishes for the year so far – and the year’s only a week old. Admittedly, they were both things that needed all of ten minutes’ work, so it’s not as if I’ve been slaving away. Still, it’s nice to have that sense of completion. Even nicer to know Baby Duck will stop nagging me to finish his monkey. That boy sure is persistent.

So here he is, complete with beanie. I even made the pompom. The beanie is made from the only part of the pair of socks that doesn’t get used in making the monkey. Now I wish I’d thought of it when I made the first one. It’s so cute!

I call him Chunky Monkey, since he’s a little heftier than his brother, as you can see here. I got a bit carried away with the stuffing.

My other finish is this lap rug made of polar fleece. The colours are rather violent together, but it’s so soft and cuddly. It will be lovely to snuggle under when winter comes. The original plan was to cross stitch over all the seams, but it took me so long to go around the edges I decided I’d better not or it wouldn’t be finished till 2021!

I didn’t back it with anything, which means the knots show on the back of the stitching, though I was as neat as possible. That bugs me a little, but I like the weight and softness of it without a backing, so for the moment I’m putting up with it. Maybe one day I’ll put a backing on it.

Though then it wouldn’t technically be finished …

And the word for the year is ...

Finish.

Need to do more of that this year! The house is bulging with unfinished projects. UFO (UnFinished Object) sightings in every room. I don’t know how the poor Carnivore stands it. He’s so neat and ordered himself, and I’m so … not. Unfinished books, unfinished quilts, remnants of crazes past, my stuff is everywhere. No room is safe, not even his study, poor man. He really does love me.

He never complains, but it must bug him. It bugs me and it’s my stuff! And now it’s the new year, ’tis the season for decluttering. New beginnings and all that. So I’m determined to finish more things this year.

Last year – it feels so weird to say last year, can’t believe it’s 2011 already! – last year I finished very little. A grand total of one short story on the writing front, which is currently out on submission. Huge effort, I know. Did some revision work and of course started a new novel for Nano, but now it goes on the pile with the other unfinished first drafts. So not exactly a stellar year writing-wise.

In quilting the picture’s not much better. I only finished one actual quilt.

True, it’s a lovely one, just kind of lonely! I almost completed another, but had to admit defeat when it was about 95% done and my sewing machine started playing up. It was for a friend’s new baby, so at the last minute I threw together a blanket of polar fleece squares for him instead:

Hopefully soon I’ll find the time and patience to figure out what went wrong and get his real quilt done.

I made a table runner:

and a couple of stuffed toys:

A pouch for my sister’s Kindle:

some aprons:

and a bag that still needs some finishing touches but hey, I’m calling it done (getting desperate here!):

But boy, if I showed you pictures of all the things I started this year, my computer would explode. I went into a bit of a frenzy towards the end of the year. As Mum’s life got sadder and greyer I bought brighter and brighter fabrics. Playing with their beautiful colours cheered me up for a while. The credit card is still reeling and the cupboards are groaning, but it helped me, and I’ll have some gorgeous things to show you when they’re finished.

Which brings me back to that word again. Finish. Hmmm. I’ve always had trouble with that one! So I’m not going to be silly and promise not to start anything new until I’ve finished all the old projects. I know myself too well for that! Instead I think I’ll try to finish one sewing project a month, and get at least two of my three unfinished first drafts done before Nano rolls round again. I keep seeing these opportunities for unpublished manuscripts, and I don’t have one that’s polished enough to send anywhere. That has to change.

So, another busy year ahead. How about you? What are your plans and goals?

The house is full of flowers

The house is full of flowers because Mum is gone.

She wore the new shirt I gave her for Christmas but she never got to see how pretty she looked in it.

Red roses and rosaries; a white-haired priest with an Irish accent.

A man in a frock coat walked down the road in front of the hearse while the summer sun beat down.

Black dresses and sunburn. Hot little boys with sweaty heads.

Her children following the hearse, just the four of us alone together. My brother drove and swore; my sister couldn’t remember what day it was. We laughed and cried in that contrary way people do, battered by grief.

Contrary like her. Artist and mother; creator of books and babies, the heart of our family. Both stubborn and passionate; unsentimental and loving. Champion worrier to the end.

On Monday night my sister told her everything was in order and she could stop worrying. Tuesday morning she was gone.

Even 87 years was not enough.

The house is full of flowers and I will miss her all the rest of my life.

Nano carrots

“What the hell’s she talking about?” I hear you say. “That’s just a photo of a pile of books.”

Work with me here, people. You’ve heard the expression about the carrot being a better motivator than the stick. Well, I explained this one to the two eldest ducklings this month, along with a practical demonstration.

They both signed up for the Young Writers’ version of Nano again this year. In order to avoid a repeat of last year, where Demon Duck stopped writing after a week and I had to take 1500 words of dictation from her on the last day to get her over the finish line, I bought her a book she’s been begging for.

“This is your Nano carrot,” I said. “You don’t get to read it till you finish Nano.”

Hers is the Young Samurai novel, and she finished her 3,000 words before school this morning.

Drama Duck had no trouble finishing last year – she was done a week before the deadline. That suggested to me that her wordcount goal was too easy for her, and I wanted to encourage her to tackle a bigger project. Out came Nano carrot number two, the new Rick Riordan novel.

“If you make your goal 8,000 words instead of 5,000, you can have this book when you finish.”

And hey presto! She marched up the stairs last night, having finished her wordcount, and swiped the prize off the pile in triumph.

The third one, of course, is for me: Jackie French’s new novel Oracle. I read a good review of it in the papers a couple of weeks ago, and I’m looking forward to it. Adventures in ancient Greece are always fun.

And yes, I get to read my Nano carrot too. I put in a big effort yesterday, because I knew today would be crazy, wrote nearly 4,000 words and just scraped across the finish line. Thank goodness. It was a real struggle this year.

Just to add to the challenge, our computer guy arrived in the middle of the day yesterday and took over my computer for a couple of hours. Aaargh! What’s a girl to do when she’s thrown off her computer?

Why, go and sew something to relieve her feelings, of course.

I’m so in love with this bird fabric, this is the third thing I’ve made with it, and I’m not done yet. The whole of that particular range is so delicious I could eat it. (If, you know, I had one of those weird disorders where people eat stuff they’re not supposed to, like coal or chalk. I would eat only the most bright and beautiful of fabrics.)

Isn’t it gorgeous? I think this will be a pillow for my bed. Yum yum. Someone pass me a knife and fork.

Dear Blog

Dear Blog,

I’m sorry I haven’t spoken to you in a while. Don’t give me that sad puppy dog face – I still love you, honest. You’re great. It’s not you, it’s me.

Me and that Nano guy. I’ve been seeing a lot of him this month. Between him and end-of-year madness and the Carnivore travelling a lot, things have been rather busy around here.

I know you think I take you for granted, only seeing you when I feel like it. Not like that Nano guy. My God! He’s so demanding. It doesn’t matter what you do for him one day, he expects you to show up again the very next day and do it all again. And the next day, and the one after that … I tell you, I’m exhausted. I’ve come that close to breaking it off with him – not once, but several times. This year his demands seem so much harder than previous years. I really thought I couldn’t stick it out for the whole month.

So here we are, with only three days left in November. I know you feel neglected, but hey! Get in line! What haven’t I neglected this month? You’re no Robinson Crusoe.

Just. Can’t. Wait. For November to be OVER. I’m at just over 45,000 words tonight, so I’m pretty sure of getting my 50,000 words in. But AAARRGH!! I still don’t have a handle on this book I’m writing. Still blundering around in the dark. How can I be this far through the story and not really be able to say what it’s about? If I manage to get a coherent plotline out of this mess it’ll be a bloody miracle.

So, anyway, dear blog, I promise I’ll be back soon to lavish love and affection on you. We both just have to hang on for three more days and life will be back to normal. Kind of. Well, there is Christmas around the corner, you know, which on top of everything else involves every person I’ve ever met suddenly deciding they have to catch up with me before then as if they all think the world is going to end on December 25th.

So, yeah. Maybe “promise” is too strong a word, but you know I could never leave you. In the words of the immortal Arnie: “I’ll be back.”

Love,
Me

And they're racing!

No, not the Melbourne Cup, which ran today. I’m so uninterested in horse racing I forgot all about it till it was over. Still don’t know who won. Probably some horse.

No, I’m talking about the really important race that runs every November: NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. Though really they should be considering changing it to IntNoWriMo, since it is an international event these days, with people all over the world taking part.

I was very tempted not to join in this year, through fatigue and general lack of ideas. But Drama Duck and Demon Duck were both keen to give the kids’ version a go again, and of course they wanted me to play too. Still I seesawed back and forth. The night before it started I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to do it. My idea was so weeny and had such gaping holes in it where there should be things like plot and character.

Yet there I was yesterday, typing like a demon. And I achieved a personal best – 4039 words in one day. I can still hardly believe it. If you’d asked me that morning if I thought I’d ever be able to write so many words in one day, let alone that day, with only my skeletal idea to prop me up, my answer would have been a resounding no.

Now it’s day 2, and I’m still going strong. Just waiting for the wheels to fall off. A story arc would be nice, maybe some character motivations – even a title. I’ll just have to put my trust in the process and hope that these things will come in time. So far they always have, but it’s damn scary when you’re on this side of the process, waiting for the magic to happen.

Just don’t ask me what it’s about, okay? I have Absolutely. No. Bloody. Idea.

Isn’t Nano fun??

Liar by Justine Larbalestier

Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Fish.

The astounding Liar by Justine Larbalestier reminds me of this old joke. Not because the book doesn’t make sense, but because it constantly jolts your reality, forcing you to adapt to a new idea of what the story is about. Just when you get comfortable – bam! – it does it again. And again. And again. By the time you get to the end of the book you’re reeling from the constant body blows as the story keeps shifting.

Liar is a hard book to talk about, because it’s such a mind-blowing ride you don’t want to give anything away and spoil the experience for others. It’s narrated by Micah, a girl who admits she lies all the time, but is promising to tell us, the readers, the real truth. Larbalestier takes the concept of an unreliable narrator to such extremes it leaves you wondering how she managed to keep track of her slippery, twisting story. It does your head in just trying to keep up when you’re reading it – imagine holding it all in your head long enough to write it!

Every time you think you know what’s going on, Micah begins a new section by admitting that half of what she just told you isn’t true. Now she’s going to tell you what really happened. Only when you get to the next section it’s “well, actually, I know I said that was the truth, but, no, really – this is what happened”.

And you just keep on falling for it. Well, I did, anyway. And that’s what makes this book so clever. All fiction is lies, isn’t it, by definition. Fiction is made-up stories. When we read fiction, we agree to go along with whatever version of reality the author is presenting. It’s part of the deal – you tell me a good story, and I’ll accept for the moment that talking caterpillars exist, that other planets are populated by alien species, whatever it takes.

So we come to fiction happy to swallow the biggest fattest porkies an author can come up with, in the name of entertainment. We expect to be lied to. But the unwritten rule is that the author must present the lies as truth and we’ll accept it as such for the duration of the book.

So when a book like this comes along, where the narrator keeps pulling the rug out from under us, it really throws us. Maybe I’m a slow learner, but it took at least ten of these episodes before I got it through my head that this narrator really meant it when she said she was a liar. Every time she said “actually, what I just told you was crap, but now I’m telling you the truth” I believed her, because I’m so conditioned to the way fiction works. I was almost at the end before it dawned on me that maybe I would never find out “the truth”. I kept turning pages, unable to stop, desperate to “find out what happened”, because that’s what books are normally about – finding out what happened.

Only with this book you have to figure it out for yourself. And there’s not just one possible answer. Pivotal moments in the plot may or may not have happened. Whole characters may or may not really exist. Days later I’m still thinking about it. Talk about “choose your own adventure”! But how do you weigh the “evidence” when it’s all unreliable? Maybe none of it was true??

Awesome, awesome book. It’s just been nominated for a Children’s Book Council Award, and I hope it wins. I don't know what else has been nominated, though I’m sure they’re all good books, but this is something very special. A book like this doesn’t come along very often.

Now I just wish I knew someone who’d read it so we could discuss it! It makes you want to compare notes with everyone, and see what they thought happened. I may have to force it on the Carnivore, though I suspect his accountant’s soul will not deal well with the lack of certainty.

Also, there are no car chases.

Your war correspondent checks in

Greetings from the battlefront! The war against sugar continues. It’s been two months now, so I thought it was time for an update.

First and most obvious change: my frequent, regular headaches have lessened dramatically. Yes, I still have sinus problems, but obviously not nearly as badly as I’d assumed. Turns out those headaches were mainly sugar withdrawal symptoms.

Second, my skin looks better than it ever has since those distant days pre-puberty.

Third, I’ve lost a small amount of weight – maybe 1.5 kg. Hard to tell precisely with my erratic bathroom scales (pick a number! any number! you don’t like that one? just get off and get back on again!), but my clothes are definitely looser. Seems a pretty pathetic amount compared to how much I lost in two months on Weight Watchers, until I remember how hard Weight Watchers was. Sure, it taught you useful, sensible things about portion sizes and balanced nutrition but ye gods! I was always hungry. I remember obsessively totting up my points at night after dinner, desperately trying to figure out what, if anything, I could afford to eat before I chewed my own arm off. That and the fact that once I stopped noting and counting every single thing I put in my mouth the weight started creeping back on.

I am also pleased to report that the desperate chocolate cravings did finally abate, some time around week 6 or 7. Yesterday I even had a piece of the formerly beloved peppermint chocolate, and you know what? It was too sweet.

The world as we knew it has come to an end -- the sugar-free Chocolate Bar of Doom is actually starting to taste rather good …

The Ugly Quiltling

Once upon a time there lived an ugly quiltling. The poor little quiltling didn’t look anything like the other quilts in the family, who all laughed at it and said how ugly it was. Even its own mother didn’t love it.

The poor little quiltling would sit by the lake and watch the beautiful quilts go by, and dream of growing up to be a beautiful swan quilt.

Sadly, this never came to pass.

See? Ugly!

I’ve joined the free motion quilt-along on Christina’s blog A Few Scraps. I’ve done some free motion quilting before – mainly stippling, though I branched out into (wonky) flowers and butterflies in my last quilt.

Definitely need more practice! I thought it would be a fun way to improve, so I finally put together the ugly quiltling the other night to be my practice piece. The idea was to put together a quilt top that you wouldn’t get too attached to, so you wouldn’t worry about “ruining it” as you learned. “If at any time you think to yourself ‘My god, this is one ugly quilt’ then you have succeeded,” Christina said.

So the poor ugly quiltling will never be beautiful, but it will certainly be very useful. Heaven knows what I’ll do with it when it’s finished – no one in the family likes it either! Maybe for the dog? My tastes in fabric have certainly changed a lot since I bought those. I think they’re from my “trying to like country style because everyone else does” phase. I’m looking forward to getting started on the actual quilting part.

Back in my normal colour palette of bright and vibrant, I’ve just made a pretty handbag out of the same gorgeous bird fabric I used for Demon Duck’s apron.

I saw it on Terry’s Treasures blog, and she kindly linked to the pattern, which turned out to be very easy, though I thought it would be bigger than it turned out. Maybe I’ll make a bigger one another time. I have so many quilting irons in the fire at the moment! Not unusual for me, of course, queen of the unfinished projects.

At least I’m making progress again on Verity. Hopefully another 5,000 words or so will see me typing “The End”.

Aussiecon

As you get older it gets harder and harder to do things for the first time. I love learning new things, but trying new things? Scary! Of course, there’s always a million things you’ve never done, but by the time you’ve got some history behind you, the list of things you’re likely to ever attempt shrinks.

I can assure you, for instance, that there is no way I am EVER going to jump out of a perfectly good plane and trust my life to a concoction of silk and rope that will hopefully deploy at just the right moment to save me from being splattered across the face of the earth. Nor will I ever go scuba diving, or learn to speak Japanese (not to pick on Japanese, which I’m sure is a perfectly good language – just can’t see it ever making it on to my list of 100 Things to Do Before You Cark It). And I’ll probably never tailor a three-piece suit, or drive a semi-trailer, or get into a fist fight or a million other things, large and small.

But lately “firsts” seem to be popping up all over the place. I played my first ever game of netball, after watching the girls from the sidelines for the last three years. First ever game of any team sport, in fact. And it was awesome. Who knew sport could be so much fun?

This week I’m going for my first ever taekwondo grading. I’ll be a yellow belt! Huge, I know – it’s only one rank above absolute beginner, but I’m still excited.

And at the beginning of the month, I went to my first ever sf convention – the World Science Fiction Convention. It’s usually held somewhere in the US, but this year it was in Melbourne, so I dragged the whole family along for a long weekend. The long-suffering Carnivore carted the younger two around to all the Melbourne attractions through bucketing rain and arctic gales, while Drama Duck and I skipped around the convention centre in airconditioned comfort, having so much fun it should have been illegal.

One of our first panels on the Saturday was on pitching your novel, where I was pleased to discover I knew everything the panellists were advising. The big excitement at this session, though, was meeting up with bloggy friend Jaye Patrick. Jaye and I have “known” each other ever since I did Nano for the first time in 2007, and it was great to finally meet in real life. She put me on the spot though. One of the first things she said to me was “how is Verity going?” and of course I had to admit Verity has been sadly neglected.

After lunch Drama Duck and I lined up for half an hour to make sure of a spot at Glenda Larke’s kaffeeklatsch the following day – a chance to sit around a table drinking coffee and chatting with an author for an hour about whatever you like, limited to only eight people. We were the first two people to sign up and very excited at the opportunity.

Glenda is lovely, with a great sense of humour. We attended several of her panels over the three days we were there, and she was very entertaining as well as insightful. The kaffeeklatsch was great. Drama Duck even worked up the courage to ask her a question and now has a serious case of hero worship going on. She demanded a Glenda Larke book to read after meeting her. The only one I had with me was the second book of the Watergivers trilogy and she got stuck into it straight away. Every time she came up for air she’d say “this is a really good book, Mum!”. She’d finished it before we got back to Sydney.

Other highlights included meeting George RR Martin – he’s such a Big Name in the fantasy world it’s like meeting God – and some other writers whose blogs (and work) I follow. John Scalzi is just as funny in person as on his Whatever blog. Peter V Brett made a big impression in the panel on promoting yourself and your work. He’s an introvert, like many writers, and finds self-promotion difficult. He pointed out that an introvert is not a person who can’t manage social interactions, but someone who is drained by the effort, whereas an extrovert is energised by social interaction.

I also discovered some new writers to try, like Catherynne M Valente, scarily intelligent and fiercely feminist on all the panels we saw her on. She had a rant about Shrek 4 at one stage which was very amusing but also thought-provoking. Her beef was that Shrek makes a deal with Rumpelstiltskin to change the past so he doesn’t rescue Fiona from the tower. In this new world Fiona rescues herself, and is brave, resourceful, a leader and freedom fighter – but the world is absolute crap. The message being that women must never dare to take action but must wait to be rescued by some man. Strong independent women destroy the world. I knew there was a reason I didn’t like that movie!

Russell Kirkpatrick and David Cornish gave me a new appreciation for maps in fantasy novels. I’ve always been pretty anti-map. I gave up looking at the things once I realised they were like having spoilers. Oh, there’s a huge city on the map up there? Must be important then. And there’s only one pass through the inhospitable mountains? Guess we know which way the characters are going then. But their maps are works of art, and there was much discussion of the things you could map apart from geographical features. Interesting stuff.

In fact, there was so much interesting stuff on offer it was hard to choose where to go. Every hour there were at least three panels I wanted to attend. Unable to split myself, I had to miss some that sounded awesome, but most of the ones I attended were good. Probably my favourite of the whole weekend was “Anatomy for Writers, Fighters and Tavern Brawlers”. Run by Sean McMullen, a martial arts expert as well as an author, it was not only educational but extremely funny. His poor assistant got drawn all over to show his muscles, stabbed with an umbrella masquerading as a sword and manhandled in various painful-looking ways as Russell demonstrated disarming and attacking opponents. Russell also snapped a thick board with his bare hand, which Drama Duck and I were hugely and geekily impressed with, seeing as how we’re budding martial artists ourselves. I’ve never seen anyone do that in real life.

All in all, it was a great experience, and very inspiring. I’ve started working on Verity again, after procrastinating as long as humanly possible. Yes, there have certainly been some unusual and stressful times lately, but basically I was just scared to get back on the horse after so long. Now that I have, my enthusiasm for the story is back.

In one of those serendipitous coincidences, I also found this post today by John Scalzi about making time to write: in essence, it’s really not that hard. “Do you want to write or don’t you?” he asks. “If your answer is ‘yes, but,’ then here’s a small editing tip: what you’re doing is using six letters and two words to say ‘no.’ ”

In other words, “Butt, this is Chair; Chair, meet Butt”. Time to get those two old friends reacquainted.

My secret weapon against chocolate cravings

Are you ready? I’m about to reveal my secret weapon against chocolate cravings. Please note, this is not for the fainthearted. Are you sure you want to know? I’m telling you, this is scary stuff.

Okay then. Here it is. When I have desperate chocolate cravings, I know it’s time to bring out the big guns. Nothing stops those cravings like this baby …

Dark chocolate!!

I promise you, one mouthful of this will turn you off chocolate for life (or in my case, at least for the rest of the day).

I hear rumours that some people actually like dark chocolate, and all I can say is: diversity is a good thing and the world is full of wonders and isn’t it lovely that we’re all different but – Good God! What is wrong with you?? This stuff tastes indescribably bad. It is an affront to the very name of chocolate.

Not that I’m picking on this particular chocolate bar. I’m sure it’s no more vile than any other dark chocolate. I knew when I bought it it was a long shot, but I was hoping my love for all things peppermint might overcome my dislike of dark chocolate. No such luck, alas. This abomination has been living in my fridge for over two weeks. In chocolate bar years that’s a lifetime, since the lifespan of most chocolate that enters this house can be measured in moments.

So why am I eating it if it tastes so bad? It’s all part of my fiendish plan to defeat the Demon Sugar. I’m finding chocolate the hardest thing to give up, so I’m trying to recondition my automatic response to it. Like Pavlov’s dog – you know, every time he served the dog dinner he rang a bell, till eventually the dog would salivate at the sound of the bell even if there was no dinner with it?

This should work the same way. If every time I crave chocolate I have this disgusting travesty of a chocolate bar, eventually I should skip straight to the part where I want to wash my mouth out just at the thought of eating chocolate. Right? Right??

Sigh.

I promise to stop obsessing about food soon. Next post I’ll tell you all about my adventures in the arctic wasteland otherwise known as Melbourne at the World Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention.

Thud!

That sound you heard was me falling off the sugar wagon.

What can I say? It was a kids’ party. There were cupcakes and honey joys (yum!). I had to cook the damn things, see them, smell them. Just. Could. Not. Resist.

Yes, Demon Duck’s so-called “sleepover” party was a sleepless night of sugar-fuelled madness. And that was just me. You should have seen the kids. A raging success, in other words, though we paid for it for days afterwards with grumpy, exhausted children. She had a ball, which is the main thing, I guess. The things we go through for our children.

I decided the guests would cook their own pizzas for dinner. So in a fit of madness I went out and bought some gorgeous bright fabrics.

You can’t cook pizza without a pretty apron, can you? Oh, right, you can. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, which has been my defence for a lot of stupidly time-consuming endeavours over the years. I have to admit I was kinda over aprons by the time I finished all nine of them.

And then the night before the party we went shopping for lolly bags and couldn’t find anything suitable. No problem! I’ll make those too. Just hang on a moment while I duck into this handy phone booth and change into my Supermum outfit. Oh, yeah, and I made a red-and-white checked tablecloth too, to give the dining room more of a “pizza parlour” feel.

Actually the lolly bags weren’t that time-consuming. And they did look cute. It would just be nice if I occasionally had these brainwaves some time other than the eleventh hour.

Here they are with the aprons. Just pretend you don’t see my ironing board in the corner of that photo, okay?

So anyway, about that sugar. A couple of those honey joys committed suicide right in my mouth. And a cupcake. And maybe a Mint Slice. And two or mumble mumble five little homemade ginger biscuits. So the day after the party I got Brave and Ruthless and gave away the remaining party food. Didn’t want any more suicides on my conscience.

The funny thing is, I used to eat biscuits every day and crave cake all the time. But apart from this one party aberration I haven’t missed those at all since I started my war on sugar. It’s chocolate I miss the most. Chocolate is the hardest to go without, and the thing I still crave (and occasionally give in to those cravings).

It’s been almost a month now. On the plus side, I’ve cut my sugar intake drastically. The most obvious reward for that is fewer headaches. On the down side, I still haven’t managed to kick the chocolate habit and therefore am still experiencing cravings. I know I need to grow a set and go cold turkey already. I’m just prolonging the agony, sneaking myself bits of chocolate now and then. How hard can it be to face a future without chocolate?

Whimper …

Whose crappy idea was it anyway to make all the bad stuff taste so good, and so much of the good stuff taste bad? I mean, really – brussel sprouts? Lamb’s fry? What kid ever wants to eat those? How much easier would it be if things had been better designed?

You wouldn’t catch little Johnny sneaking his food under the table to the dog if it was yummy healthy Smarties on his plate instead of peas. No, those plates would be licked clean. Dinner time would no longer be a war zone.

“Eat up your lovely chocolate, darling, or you’ll never grow up to be a big strong boy.”

Ah, yes. If I ruled the world, things would be much more efficient.