There's the personal deadline for the zero draft of the faerie novel, which is fast approaching (and the recalcitrant thing shows no signs of approaching its narrative end any time within that deadline). Of course, being self-imposed, that's a little flexible — but I'm loathe to mess with it, because I need to be able to stamp =30= on something approximating a draft of this thing and let it collapse under its own weight and sort itself out in a drawer for a while. It's well past time.

Then there's the bunch of short stories, most longer than short and one (hopefully) just normal short, that I've committed to writing. Those deadlines are not flexible — and, I admit, it bothers me that I don't have any words against any of these stories yet. (Well, I have a collection of notes against one of them. I did have 10,000 words on that one, but that was me feeling my way. In the wrong direction, as it turned out. C'est la writing process, eh?)

Still. I trust my process (or I'm resolutely telling myself I do), if not that I'll have time to dedicate to it.

On top of that there's the Kindle links, which I am still getting to but so inch-by-inch that it breaks my heart. I've managed to pretty up the page some, and I've just yesterday included a form so that now people can submit their own links.

This sort of workload and over-commitment is always dangerous, for me. I'm far too inclined as it is to spend my weekends on words, and when I feel I have no leeway it's too easy to forget that I need time away from the words in order to be able to work with them.

Luckily, life is compensating by throwing social engagements my way, whether I want them or not. It's almost like it's summer, and normal people don't catch cancer by venturing outdoors at this time of year. Crazy!

The four-metre-long hand-woven textile, a natural vivid gold colour, was made from the silk of more than one million female golden orb spiders collected in the highlands of Madagascar by 80 people over five years.

I remember hearing about endeavours by scientists to mass-produce spider silk. The approach, if I remember correctly, was to modify the DNA of goats so that spider silk proteins were produced in the goats' milk. I even wrote a (terrible) story around that premise during my stint at Clarion South. But I haven't heard any more on that front for years — I wonder what happened?

I never knew that anybody had collected enough spider silk by hand to weave fabric from it, which is apparently an until-now forgotten art.

The effort involved in such an endeavour — catching the spiders every morning, harnessing them into contraptions designed to extract their silk, making thread out of the silk and textile out of the fabric — the patience and time and labour that has been poured into it is … humbling.

It made me think about all the energy that I pour into my writing. Sometimes, when I'm tired, when I'm frustrated with my chronic time-poverty, it's easy to feel dispirited. About a lack of progress, or the latest mental block, or the sheer enormity of the task still to go. And I can't whinge, like I want to, because I chose this, and I keep choosing this. Every day I choose writing. (Even if it feels like a Clayton's Choice, but that's a topic for a whole different post.)

It helps me to stumble across stories like this. Tales of fascination, and the endeavours born out of and carried onwards by that fascination. Perhaps making a coat out of spider silk does nothing for us on a practical level: but I, for one, smiled when I heard of it. And felt inspired.

And now I have a new trick to add to my toolbox for when I get the grumps with the process: I shall simply consider my words to be little golden orb spiders. All I need to do is catch a few dozen a day, and coax them gently into a pleasing order.

And hope the wily bastards stay put.

Anyway! I have not been idle!

After much trawling for solutions that would allow me to add links (simply and with a minimum of headache) to the list of australian women writers on Kindle, I believe I have at last hit upon a solution. I have therefore set up a page: Australian Women Writers on Kindle.

It's currently not optimised, display-wise, and the list only has those whose names I've managed to collect links for¹, but it will grow, link by link and name by name, as I add to it in dribs and drabs over the coming evenings.

The names are sorted into sub-lists of genres (contemporary, historical, romance, speculative fiction, non fiction, memoir) and format (novels and anthologies) — which is broad, but I figured part of the fun of a reading challenge is finding something outside your comfort zone.

And now, it's totally time for a pizza dinner.

1. if your name, or the name of the author you think is missing, is not on this page but is on the blog post of the initial response, then I'm working on adding it

It is fair to say I have not been able to keep up with the response.

Originally I'd intended to go through and present the names in a lovely collated list complete with links to authors' websites and their kindle-edition books. But so far I haven't even had a chance to do more than the most cursory of vetting of names — and, too, I figure it's better to get the list out sooner rather than never.

So, while with time I still plan to go through and sort by genre, and add links and book info (maybe a goodreads shelf?), for now: a very bare-bones list of Aus/NZ women writers, for your reading/researching pleasure.

Goldie Alexander
Belinda Alexandra
Jo Anderton

Philippa Ballantine
Patricia Bernard
Deborah Biancotti
Laura Bloom
Honey Brown
Alyssa Brugman
Frances Burke

Lindy Cameron
Trudi Canavan
Leslie Cannold
Isobelle Carmody
Lisa Clifford
Claire Corbett
Denise Covey
Sandy Curtis
Alison Croggon

Rowena Cory Daniells
Cecilia Dart-Thornton
Marianne de Pierres
Joy Dettman
Sara Douglass
Felicity Dowker

Hazel Edwards
Jennifer Fallon
Phillipa Fioretti
Elaine Forrestal
Kate Forsyth

Sulari Gentill
Andrea Goldsmith
Alison Goodman
Janet Gover
Posie Graeme-Evans
Kerry Greenwood
Kate Grenville

Lisa Hannett
Donna Hanson
Narelle Harris
Rhiannon Hart
Karen Healey
Lian Hearn
Lisa Heidke
Talie Helene
Nette Hilton

Anna Jacobs
Linda Jaivin
Patty Jansen
Myfanwy Jones
Toni Jordan

Deborah Kalin
Leah Kaminsky
Phyllis King

Margo Lanagan
Glenda Larke
Stephanie Laurens
Julia Leigh
Gabrielle Lord
Helen Lowe

Bren MacDibble
Melina Marchetta
Juliet Marillier
Sophie Masson
Colleen McCullough
Kirstyn McDermott
Fiona McGregor
Monica McInerny
Fiona McIntosh
Maggie McKellar
Juliet McKenna
Foz Meadows
Gillian Mears
Hazel Menehira
Jennifer Mills
Liane Moriarty
Kate Morton
Nicole Murphy

Malla Nunn

Kate Orman
Caroline Overington

Amanda Pillar
Gillian Pollack

Tansy Rayner Roberts
Sally Rippin
Jane Routley
Penni Russon

Angela Savage
Mandy Sayer
Katherine Scholes
Jessica Shirvington
Angela Slatter
Cat Sparks
Lucy Sussex

Anna Tambour
Rachael Treasure

Mary Victoria

Kaaron Warren
Kim Westwood
Felicity White
Anne Whitfield
Kim Wilkins
Lili Wilkinson
Janet Woods
A.K. Wrox

NOTE: The names listed have, in most cases, been volunteered on behalf of the author. If you spot something incorrect — or think someone is missing from this page (as there undoubtedly is!) — please email me with the correct information, including any appropriate links. Thanks!

And since I haven't actually managed to start the challenge for myself yet, and since I'd been toying with the idea of starting a twitter list of aussie women authors only to find I didn't need to because Elizabeth has one started, I thought this might be something I could do to help.

So!

If you are — or know of — an Australian female author with books available on the Kindle in the Aus/NZ region, let me know.

Leave me a comment here, or send me a twitter reply/dm (my username over there is debkalin), or email me and I'll set up a post or page with the collated information. Links to author's websites (and/or straight to the Kindle store) would of course be appreciated, but for those who forget to/can't provide one, I'll do my best to hunt out what I can on that front. Genre information for the author and/or book might not go astray either, for the benefit of those seeking books to review.

I suspect I need to write this story very, very quickly — or else very, very slowly.

Probably I will do neither of these things.

So naturally this week threw me two non-writing day curveballs in the form of a 3-hour round trip to get the hail damage on the car assessed on Thursday, and a dizzy spell on Friday. So today has been all about catching up (on the faerie novel, at least). Sometimes, writing every day does not mean writing daily.

Eh. Whatever works, right?

I "met" this fellow at the Tiergarten Schönbrunn: he's a Marabou, a species of bird of which I had never heard before that day. He's part of the stork family, and he's from Africa.

And he has a magnificent get-off-my-damn-lawn! dance the like of which I have never seen before. Wings akimbo, he would cover the length of each wall of his enclosure in a sliding-hopping-gliding motion in heartbeats.

Do storks dance in courtship, or is it only the crane family who do that?

I wonder if the poor, magnificent fellow was simply bored, and passing the time?

I'd love to see him in the wild.

Forty minutes later and one of the major culprits standing between me and a quick post, namely a default featured image, is … well, not fixed to my liking, but there's a band-aid in place. That will do for the short-term. It will have to. Given my tendency to manufacture projects on which I can spend weeks procrastinating, I'm rather proud of myself for going for the band-aid solution. And for waiting until I'd gotten today's wordcount before attempting it. (Well, I got wordcount on one of my two projects, at least.)

Now, I'm off to get wordcount on the other project. And to kvetch about the weather. Which looks like this:

I've hit that spot in writing a novel where the whole thing feels trivial and trifling. Although if I'm honest, it's a feeling that's been plaguing me since I can't remember when; and because I have a nasty habit of high expectations, and wanting everything I attempt to be (at least subjectively) worthwhile, the pressure for this novel to be spectacular is beginning to effect my ability to actually write the damn thing.

This novel has been difficult from the get-go, and I've come up with a hundred reasons why, and ways to fix it, but somehow none of them seem quite to explain everything. When I was writing Shadow Queen, I had a certainty that there was something about that book that would work, not just for me but for other people. Which turned into a bit of a superstition because it went on to sell, and sit on actual bookstore shelves for other people to read. So it's been bugging me that, for a long time, I haven't had a similar certainty about the faerie novel.

But superstition is not going to stop me from finishing it, for the closure if for nothing else. Perhaps that certainty will become apparent during the rewrites — it isn't wise for a writer to trust her own mindset or judgement when she's a long way into the hard slog of a novel, after all, and it's still a story I'm enjoying, which means it's still a story I believe in. (Although I have given myself permission to skip such pesky things as transitions and leave them for the next draft.)

As if to reward me for such self-enlightenment, the internet has since been sending me little reminders. One was a conversation about the power of the square bracket (hello transition which reads simply: [they go here]!), and the other was a post by John Barnes on the effort of quality:

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing poorly at first.

I've seen this advice before, of course, more often in other guises. Give yourself permission to write a shoddy first draft. Write first, edit later. You can edit shit, but you can't edit a blank page.

The post has other gems as well — I particularly liked the remark that fiction doesn't depict nearly enough failure. As an engineer and a writer, I know what it's like to smack my head against a variety of brick walls and seemingly end up nowhere, so that trying apparently-fruitless approaches seems viable and failures teach you more about your task than achievements ever could.

The last reminder (so far) has been a startling realisation, just yesterday, of what's wrong with the faeries: I don't want them to be faeries. Somewhere in this draft I'd gotten too caught up in everybody else's mythologies, and they lost their vibrancy for me. So fixing that will change everything. Again. (I've lost count of how many fundamental everything-changing realisations I've had to slog through 100,000 words for in this book.) (This time, I shall be very good and NOT go back to the start again; I shall simply make a note in the margin for the next draft and, pretending it's fixed already, and forge ahead.)

Out of curiosity, the other day I had occasion to count all the hours and words I've spent on the faerie novel to date.

The answer? 483 hours, spread over a stint of days that add up to about 3 and a quarter years. (The first word was written in 2007.) In total, I've written 168,000 words of manuscript draft, 141,000 of them from scratch. (At one point I reached 95,000 words before scrapping all of them because of a startling realisation that made them redundant. That hurt. So far it looks like I've managed to salvage about 20,000 of those 95,000, but it was in such an altered form it may as well have been from scratch as well.)

Having said that, by the time I was done with Shadow Queen (including all publication-level edits etc), I'd spent 1,143 hours, and Shadow Bound cost me 871 hours.

So looks like I'm still only halfway at best on this sucker. Onward and upward.

Getting to the restaurant, which was in the old town, meant crossing the bridge of the Sainted Spiders.

We tried to count how many spiders lived in the Saint's shadow, but there were simply too many.

Now, I come from Australia. More, I grew up in Sydney Funnel Web territory. I once found a scorpion on my bed. By which I mean, I'm not in general alarmed or made squeamish by the presence of creepy crawlies, so long as they maintain a respectful distance.¹

But one thing Slovenia taught me is that there is something deeply and innately shudder-inducing about spiders tolerating each other's presence.

1. The distance required to qualify as respectful is related to legs. Six is the "sweet spot"; the greater the deviation from that number, the further away they have to be.