When it's good to have a sister who is a bookseller

1. Birthday time
2. Christmas time
3. All the time!!!!

Here is part of my stash from yesterday's birthday, my all time favourite - Anne Gracie. I've been waiting for this book for months and here it is, just in time for my birthday. Thanks Anne - thanks Jill!

If you ever want some wonderful reading at extremely competitive pricing - she's your girl. Years and years of research have gone into her business, she really knows her stuff! There's nothing she can't find if you want something really obscure (which I have - often).

www.romancedirect.com.au

Vacuum Bag Wrongtown

I went too far
I did too much
and the softies paid for it.

Wrap me up and call me slacker

Well...not really!

I mean, I've been very very busy since my last post waaaay back on the 27th of March.

Lots of things, but chiefly... I had a baby!

Along the way here's what i've learned since March 27:

PUPPS make your skin itch so bad that you'd cheerfully take to it with a Steelo.

All your obstatrician will do is look at them and say 'oh, are they still there are they? annoying.'

My chiropractor can work magic turning a breech baby.

Don't tell your husband how far apart your contractions are or he'll have you in hospital before you can say 'did my water break or am i just incontinent?'

Nothing is as comfortable as sitting on the toilet in labor.

At least until the wind changes direction and the rain comes in through the louvre window. Then perhaps it's time to tell you husband how close the contractions really are and hot foot it into hospital.

They expect you to *work* during your birthing time! Like, get up, walk around, do the hokey pokey. Visions of me having grapes peeled and reclining on a sofa GONE.

When you go to hospital, you can take all the blankets, lamps and teddy bears you like, but in the end you'll spend your twelve hours having face plant time with a pillow.

Hypnobabies is better than any drug in the known world.

Midwives don't believe you can be so relaxed in labor and tell you later they thought you were 'fluffing around'. FLUFFING AROUND MY ARSE!!! Did these women have any idea how long and hard i worked for two months to get myself to that state of catatonia without drugs? The hours of meditation, staring at my navel around the clock, and saying so many positive affirmations that I had enough for my own 365 day calendar.

I never expected labor to feel like such a beautiful journey that me and my little girl made together. I'm sure we'll never be as connected as we were for those twelve hours.

My friends really do love me.

My sister really is an angel.

No amount of breast feeding classes can prepare you for the real thing.

No amount of people saying 'ha ha, you won't sleep much now!' can prepare you for waking every four hours and wrangling with express pumps and nipple shields and hungry little bubbie.

No amount of 40 week pregnancies could prepare me for how much i love my little girl.

Revision

So, finally, finally the revision is getting very close to being done.
Oh, not the *final* revision - but the nuts and bolts - all my ducks in a row revision.
85% there in fact.
Hallelujah!

It hasn't really been so difficult - it was just not being able to achieve as much as I normally can due to feeling tired after work - but I've stopped working now - so going great guns.

It's wonderful not to have to schlep my massive stomach into work and waddle around there trying to look/sound/be professional. I can just mess around in my pajamas, drinking tea and being happy about things in general.

Hilariously, I was banging my head on the desk wondering WHY oh WHY all those words weren't piling up to something more impressive in the page count stakes, when I realised I had the manuscript on TNR in a small size. Upped it to Courier New 12 point and voila! I was MUCH further along than I realised. Which is just as well, because I didn't have a whole lot more story to tell.

More soon as I unclog my blogbrain.

Damn towel. Damn sense of smell.

It's hot here today. 39 degrees. The kind of hot where concrete radiates heat for hours after sundown, where we tip ice into the evaporative cooler and pretend like it's an air conditioner, where even having a lamp on makes it unbearable, where I have a shower because I can't stand it for another second.

So there I was having my 'can't stand it' shower. Popped out, wrapped myself in a towel that felt like it had come out of a hot box. Dried my face, breathing in, as you normally do after you breathe out.

But when I breathed in, the towel smelled just like my mother.

Not my mother's perfume, and not any bad smell, but the beautiful smell that was uniquely hers and no-one elses, warm, sweet and a little bit musky. Suddenly, I'm a child laying in bed, she's bending over to kiss me goodnight and i breathe her in.

I held my breath, hoping somehow to keep it inside me, knowing it was a trick of the mind and on my next breath it would be gone. But no, it was still there when I breathed in again, and again and again. I breathed it in until I felt stupid. I miss her right now, being pregnant and not having her here to tell me it's all going to be okay, that it doesn't matter if I can't breast feed or any number of the things I'm stressing about. I'd like to say that her scent in that towel (was it me? Do i smell like her and didn't realise?) made it seem okay for just a moment, like she was there with me and always will be. But the truth is that it didn't. It just made me miss her like it all happened yesterday.

New Year - Woot!

Last week - bumper week. No work, just play play play all the time.Went to the beach, sat up late reading books and eating chocolate. Walked in the sand. Made/burned some banana bread beyond recognition. Got up early early to write while everyone else slept off their red wine.

Manuscript VERY happy with the love, care and attention given to it. By the pale morning light, manuscript says 'I forgive you! we're friends again, in fact, I think i love you'.

Words, if not flow, definitely trundle along in an orderly fashion. Feel joy akin to cartwheeling along aforementioned sand. Unfortunately, massive belly prohibits cartwheeling across the sand and instead lends itself to feeling like beached whale.

Listened to a few hours of Eric Meisel talking about creativity. Felt happy that I found this FANTASTIC NEW WONDERFUL way of building a creativity practice in the new year when everything is fresh and good.

UNTIL

Fast forward to this week.Back at day job. Blerk week for the manuscript with only a trickle of words every day. Manuscript wonders where I've gone, and how I could've deserted it so quickly after we obviously connected. Feel like a heel and send manuscript some flowers and chocolate.
Silence on the other end of the line.
Lifting head off pillow seems like gargantuan task, even without red wine.

Moral of the story - go and live at the beach.

Headlong rush into christmas

Busy week, people, in which I:

Celebrated thanksgiving a little late with Matilda and friends. We made candied yams (!). Ate so much I had to take a day off work to recover.

Continued with reviso by getting up early and tapping on the spanking new laptop. Went back to the place with aniseed flavoured coffee, promising myself I'd just have a muffin, but habit kicked in and I ordered coffee. It was STILL BAD.

Deleted scenes from book thus reducing my books page count to a dismal number that feels like ten.

Worked. If you can call it that when all I seem to do is stagger from the coffee machine to the printer to my desk and back again.

Saw the new James Bond movie. Boy flick done - next up - girl flick AUSTRALIA. Hoping it won't be lame and that all that Hugh will make up for any atrocities.

Fell in love with a new puppy, and after much internal wrangling, decided I like it's new mumma too much to pop it into my handbag.

Started my christmas shopping. I can recommend bringing TJ along on shopping expeditions because not only does he carry all the bags, he stops you dithering and forces decisions like a Major General.

BBQ today at one of TJ's favourite people's place. No-one does a BBQ like a bunch of chefs. Once again, continued the theme of eating too much.

Have belly the size of a large watermelon.