This weekend, Squawk, the pterosaur and I tripped up to Sydney for the Aurealis Awards. We went partly because "First They Came…" was shortlisted, and mostly because I wanted to be part of the scene. To prove to myself that having a child hadn't fundamentally changed my commitment to my writing (even if it has shifted around my writing process, available time, sleep levels, patience, general location, living arrangements, diet, tea addiction, slavish devotion to twitter and all things internet related, ability to think, and just, you know, everything).

I still can't decide whether going was a mistake.

I had a truly fabulous time, and got to catch up with friends I haven't seen in years, and even to meet new friends and to connect in person with people I've only known via the internet before now. After the isolation of the first months of motherhood, being able to frock up and play with the grown-ups was reinvigorating.

But at the same time, the whole experience has left me riddled with guilt. First for disrupting poor Squawk, whose four month old brain hasn't yet learnt the soothing patterns of predictability. For her, nothing is familiar, and sleep is hard to come by because her brain is constantly being bombarded. I mean, a plastic giraffe that squeaks when you happen to push its stomach the right way is brain-bending to a baby. You should see what cellophane does to her ability to control her limbs. The other night I showed her that you could take two cups and tap them together to make a noise, and that revelation was so alarming and world-enlarging that she damn near thrashed herself right out of the bath.

My brain knows how to filter out information it doesn't need, such as the way light bounces off lino, or background babble. Being in an unfamiliar room is no problem, because I know how I got there and how long I'm staying and that I can leave when it all gets too much. I know what's roughly going to happen each day — but Squawk's "days" are usually only 2 or so hours long and they're all pretty varied. Sometimes it's light when she wakes up, sometimes it's not. Sometimes she feeds straight away, sometimes she feeds just before sleep, and sometimes she doesn't feed at all.

She's so little that she's quite simply lost in the detail of this world and its adult-sized patterns.

And this weekend I took her out of her comforting home, threw away all her familiar routines, and dumped her in the middle of a raucous party. One that was four days long, by her reckoning of days, and came straight after a trip that was also four of her days long.

I spent most of the awards ceremony itself mentally kicking myself for what I'd done to her.

To give credit where it's due, Squawk behaved with admirable aplomb. She never once got stroppy with her sleep deprivation, didn't panic at strangers plucking her out of my arms, and she sat through the ceremony without real protest. She did maintain a fairly constant low-grade eerie moaning mutter that had those nearby turning to check whether they were about to die — which promptly had me feeling anxious about spoiling everyone else's ceremony experience into the bargain.

So after the ceremony I left her tucked up in a hotel room with her Nanna, safely away from all the noise. And promptly felt guilty for abandoning her. There she was, needing to tell me what the day had done to her synapses and wanting only something as simple as a cuddle from me or the pterosaur to help her get to sleep, and she had neither. I was downstairs, so worried about her, and so tired myself, that I barely managed a coherent sentence, stuffed up pretty much every conversation I attempted, and didn't manage to find the courage to talk to even half as many people as I'd have liked.

I comforted myself with the thought that I'd be able to catch up with everyone I'd missed at breakfast. But I spent pretty much all of the night comforting poor Squawk, who was so wired that she spent every second of her sleep moaning. Breakfast therefore found me so tired (and hungry — in looking after Squawk I forgot to eat any dinner myself) that I forgot to say hello to people, forgot to say goodbye, I even forgot how to manage my utensils.

I took her because I wanted to be normal, and present.¹ To be both a writer and a mother. And mostly, I feel I achieved only an effed-up version of each of them. So busy being a mother I couldn't interact with the writers on a normal level, and so busy being a writer I couldn't be a proper mother.

To everyone who took the time to chat with me, and to put up with my laggy responses as if they were normal, my sincere thanks. To everyone I missed, my apologies. (Or should that be the other way around?) I can see I'm going to have to work on this balance thing.

1. And because we're both using my breasts. Where I go, she goes.

So in lieu of intelligent content, I shall share with you the playlist to which I wrote the cherry crow children.

The official list is over at my last.fm profile.

Unofficially, the playlist was pretty much always drowned out by Squawk. Sometime during the last month she discovered the pram pig, which plays a new song every time you tug on its feet:

I'd take the damn thing off her, but she giggles and grins at it so much I don't have the heart.

I sat down at 10am. There were breaks (Squawk did require feeding, after all, and bathing and putting to bed, and a couple of times my brain required ten minutes to whinge/vent/whine/tantrum/daze out), but by and large it was me and the desk/couch and the laptop and my ipod and the sheer force of my will.

I wrote the ending at 1am. It hurt. I have no actual idea, even today, what is on the page. I can't bear to look. I simply emailed my publisher the attachment accompanied by the sentence: "I have literally not checked the Scrivener export to make sure it's not gibberish."

Because professional is how I roll. Clearly.¹

Yesterday and today, I've been, in the words of Gorey, conscious, but very little more.

Turns out, part of the problem I was having with this story was that I was trying to cram what turned out to be 21,000 words of story into only 12,000 words. (The fact that what I considered to be the inciting incident kept happening at the 7,000 mark should perhaps have been my first clue. When I couldn't collapse that 7,000 down into anything leaner than 2,000? Another clue.)

The other part of the problem, of course, was trying to write around a baby. Who just happened to roll her 3-month and 4-month growth spurts in together, with a head-cold² in the middle of it all for shits and giggles. Did you know the 4 month growth spurt is renowned for making parents want to walk in front of oncoming traffic? Neither did I. I swear it's like the faeries passed by one night and swapped the baby for a changeling. The effing happiest changeling in the world, who only wants to gaze adoringly at people and make them laugh, but SHE WILL NOT SLEEP. EVER. AGAIN.

If you'll excuse me, I'm afraid I need to collapse now. And then start work on the next story.

1. In my defense, I would ordinarily hide from the manuscript for at least a week, before doing a final edit, and then maybe even hiding it for another week before handing it in. However, I'm on a tight deadline, and I have my publisher's permission to misbehave just this once.
2. A head cold may not sound like much of a problem. But in the shit I never knew department, turns out babies are obligate nose breathers. And if their little nose is too congested to breathe through, not only can they not breathe, they can't feed. Or sleep. They can, however, cry.

I am so relieved. I was beginning to wonder if I didn't have a workable idea at all. Turns out it was simply a case of exhaustion and time poverty. Getting a break on that front has given me the valuable thinking time I needed to get some ideas breeding.¹

Now I just need to actually churn the words out (and therein discover precisely how much I still don't know), and hope the story passes muster.

1. Which is not to say Squawk is sleeping any better. She's not. It's just that during the days she's currently being babysat by her Nanna so I can focus on wordcraft.

(This story being the cherry crow children).¹

Now I just have to get there. I don't actually know that bit. Yet.

1. I'm scared to stop and count how many words I've written, thrown out, dragged back in, rewritten, edited, revised, and just generally stared at. Least efficient process ever.

I have songs about burps (they're nasty); nappy changes (they're awesome); boredom grizzles; the fear of sleeping; the necessity of sleeping; the insidious and all-too-easily-missed-or-mistaken nature of weariness; socks that won't stay on; the loveliness of whichever drink bottle, chandelier or featureless wall she currently finds fascinating — you name it, I've probably sung about it. An awful lot of my songs are, lately, to the tune of "If you're happy and you know it…"

I am so. utterly. sick. of myself.

Anyrate, that's all beside the point, because in checking my phone I found not only the time, but a rather attention-grabbing tweet:

Of course I then had to google and you guys:

"First They Came…" has been short-listed for an Aurealis Award!

I am so chuffed that even though I got Squawk safely back to sleep, and even though you must always, always, always sleep when the baby is sleeping, I haven't been able to close my eyes for the buzzing in my blood. I pretty much currently look like this (sans the rabbits):

I can't lie: this photo was taken well before hearing the news. I really do get this excited by finding Red Tulip Elegant Rabbits in white chocolate. Especially since my local supermarket only started stocking Easter chocolate a week ago (omg why you make me wait so long?) and they've treacherously elected not to stock the white one at all (omg why you hate me, coles?).

I'm currently wearing a splinted brace on each wrist, a compression band on my right forearm to alleviate the tennis elbow, and I think I need to add a brace to my left knee as well. I'm more neoprene now than woman…

But, to balance things out, the world has been sending me happy-making news regarding my story, "First They Came…". There's some news I'm not yet at liberty to discuss, but among that I can talk about is this wondrous review by Tsana Dolichva:

A really beautiful story that subverts expectation in unexpected ways. It started as a tale of a Melbourne in which shyness had been classed a disease, but it ended as so much more.

…I know which future Twelve Planet collection I'm most looking forward to now.

The story has also been nominated for a Ditmar, and I have to admit the thought of anybody reckoning the story as worthy of attention makes me stupidly happy. (For those keeping count, it's also eligible for the Chronos Awards.)

Given its theme, it seems supremely fitting that the way this story is gathering attention is quietly, gently, quietly.

Dragonfly, a photo by Moyan_Brenn on Flickr.

Taken during the Melbourne Zombie Shuffle 2010