Let me correct that. I have moved the folder off my shelf, I now remember doing this, and it is cluttering up the dining table instead. However, this is certainly not great progress, and the end of February is fast approaching. However, I have had a good think about this and, with the help of some other outside input, have made a big decision.

At first I thought the reason I hadn’t got to these revisions was simply because I’d had a busy writing January, a busy working start to February and with it being such a short month, I was just pushed for time. But then I received some very useful feedback – the general feedback to all entrants for the TAG Hungerford award, a contest for Western Australian novelists which I entered with my Bratislava novel. They sent all entrants some general impressions from the judges which included some very relevant points to my case, I’m sure, including the fact that realist narratives formed by far the majority of the manuscripts submitted, usually relating to what appeared to be real life experiences (mine doesn’t fit this category quite as strictly as my first novel might, but still perhaps a little “too much” in some sense); there was also a particularly salient comment:

In general, there was a disappointing lack of interest in exploring and extending the
possibilities of form or language, with stylistic experiment kept to a minimum and a strong
reliance on simple, unadorned prose.

This has long bothered me about my fiction writing – for the novels I’ve written in particular – and especially after my month of poem writing in January, I’ve realised I can definitely do better. This line of thought also led me to think about the novels and career trajectories of two of my favourite Australian writers, Nikki Gemmell and Andrew McGahan. As much as I have enjoyed all of their writing, in both cases their first two novels (Shiver and Cleave for Gemmell, and 1988 and Praise for McGahan) would probably have got this kind of comment from the judges (not to say they’re not great novels – but they certainly seemed to be based on their experiences, whereas their later work seems much more, I don’t know, “imagined” somehow. Better, more literary. More “proper” writing, in a way!

What I’m leading up to is this big decision: for the time being, I’m going to put aside my first two novel manuscripts, and work on the third novel idea I have, but doing it really, really “properly”. I’ve been reluctant to get going with the agent thing because I’m not convinced they’re my best work. And I figure you really, really want to try these things out with your absolute best, rather than “poison the waters” with something you’re not 100% sure about.

So, my task for the remainder of February is relatively simple, to reschedule my month-by-month goals to take this into account. At the same time I’m going to work in some downtime and breaks because switching from month to month takes a little time – for example, just in the first day or two of each month I have to use my spare time to send out invoices and finish up other work that is simply essential, so I can’t always jump straight into the next fiction writing project, and my schedule should reflect that. And then I’m going to really get going on producing the absolute best novel I’m capable of, at least at this stage of my writing life. I’ll keep you all informed, of course!

And I did it – not once, but twice. Back in 2008 I was proud to use the novel I first wrote as a NaNoWriMo draft, Kanako’s Foreigner, to enter my first Vogel contest. I even managed to enter my Bratislava novel this year, despite having a baby in the middle of it all – but only because they delayed the closing date for a month. I felt like they’d done it just for me!

Obviously, I didn’t win the award. But the point is that these kind of awards both give me the incentive to keep working on my novels with a time pressure that submitting to agents doesn’t (as shown by my stumbling with NaNoSuMo) and there is, of course, the possibility that I could one day win and be shortlisted.

It won’t be the Vogel, though. I am now, sad to say, officially too old. Fortunately, just a couple of years ago the Scribe publishing house (who I think publish fantastic Aussie books!) launched a novel contest for those too old to enter the Vogel. I’m not sure if that was the niche they intended to fill, and perhaps the idea came from someone just like me who’d turned 35 (I haven’t yet, I hasten to add!) and wanted to feel they still had options, but I’m glad they did. The CAL Scribe Fiction Prize is now my goal for submitting an entry in 2011. I hope they run it! Interestingly, I got an email recently sharing the statistics for the entrants for this year.

Gender breakdown: 194 women, 158 men
Age breakdown: Oldest is 86, one of 11 in their 80s; 46 in their 70s; 86 in their 60s; 72 in their 50s; 89 in their 40s; 48 in their 30s.
State breakdown: ACT 25, NSW 134, NT 1, Qld 41, SA 23, Tas 8, Vic 108, WA 11, overseas 1.

Non-Aussies won’t be as fascinated by this as me but take a look at the domination of New South Wales and Victoria. Yes, they have larger populations, but just the same they’re extraordinarily over-represented. I’m determined to help Western Australia fly the novelist’s flag next time round! It’s also encouraging to see eleven entrants were in their 80s. Unlike elite sports players or famous rock stars, you really can begin to be a writer at any age, so even if I’m too old for the Vogel, I’m now almost old enough for the Scribe prize and I reckon I’ve got at least another 50 years to keep trying!

However, in the spirit of visualising success, it probably doesn’t hurt to daydream about the cover of your published novel, does it? I’ve often imagined how fun it would be to go into my favourite bookshops, find my novel in the K section (near Thomas Kenneally, I’ve always thought – an Aussie novelist whose surname would come just after mine) and shuffle it around into a more prominent position. The only thing missing in this scenario is I’ve never actually thought about what my book would look like, until now.

There’s one good reason why I should have nothing to do with the design of my book cover (and I suspect that this may be true in the case of many writers – it’s not always the case that the blessing of being good with words is accompanied by the talent of being good with pictures, too!). It would look awful. It would not sell, I suspect. But I still want to dream. So I decided to spend a few minutes drafting up my book covers, just so I’ve got something to look at. Please indulge me, and if you’ve got your own books in the pipeline (or even just ideas for them), go ahead and create your own book cover too, and let me know. We can create a whole library of virtual books that don’t really exist – yet!

I did promise you all, about three weeks ago (less than a month, which I consider a positive thing), that I would shortly be submitting either or both of my novels to agents (not both at once, of course), and that I would be getting queries out within the month.

Well, I have made a serious attempt at getting a list of agents together, only to be a tad disheartened to find how few there are in Australia (I’d rather look here first … I think there’s something a little Australia-centric about my novels) and then to let life and its other joys overtake my priorities once again.

However, this morning I woke up to an email with the subject line “Your novels” (of course that got my attention), and when I opened it, I realised I had to get a serious move on. It came from someone who I taught in my blogging course the other week (and, it should be said, is also a dear old friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in something like decades). It said:

OK sunshine

If I can manage to blog then I reckon you can send those novels to lots and lots of agents!!! I am sure they are brilliant and you will only die wondering otherwise.

If you just read the second paragraph, then that’s quite a fair exchange. It’s the “OK sunshine” that makes me feel like her foot is dangerously near my bottom. But so it should be because as a master procrastinator I do need a few good kicks sometimes!

So, I WILL make progress TODAY. Funnily enough, NaNoWriMo just started yesterday (National Novel Writing Month for the uninitiated, and the way I got my first novel drafted a few years ago) and I crazily put it on my to do list (with a lot of question marks and exclamation marks) for yesterday, just in case I decided that I would have enough time to squeeze in writing another novel just now. Obviously that’s impossible (I can’t give up what little sleep I have) but I have decided to create my own NaNoSuMo – National Novel Submitting Month – which does sound a little like a scary Japanese wrestling tournament, so I will just imagine that if I don’t get my novels off to agents soon then there will be oversized, less-polite-than-usual Japanese guys ready to punish me.

Dedicated readers (all two of you) will know that I have two manuscript drafts sitting on my hard drive. Sitting in my metaphorical bottom drawer, so to speak.

The first, Kanako’s Foreigner, made it into the top 100 of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award the year before last, out of nearly 10,000 entries, and got some nice comments from a Publisher’s Weekly reviewer who had actually read the whole manuscript, and even got an agent asking to see the whole thing (she politely, kindly passed). Therefore, my logical brain is trying to convince me, it can’t be complete rubbish.

The second, Bratislava, only made it into the top 1000 of the Amazon contest the following year, although I actually think it’s considerably better than the first one.

So, if I am going to submit to an agent … strike that. So, now that I AM GOING TO submit to an agent, I have to decide which one to try with. It’s clear to me that it’s unprofessional to say “here are two kind of okay novels I’ve written, I don’t know which ones better so what do you think?”. Obviously I need to go with one and tell them it’s the best thing ever. The problem (and cause for procrastination) today is: which one will I use??? Yes, that warrants three question marks, even though I hate multiple punctuation.

Heart says #2, head says #1. Or get a long enough list of potential agents that I can split the difference and send them both out to a few different agents. Eek. I hate this sort of stuff. But I have finally appreciated that nobody is going to walk into my study (if they could find their way through the mess to get in) and fire up my hard drive and get a copy of said novels off there and publish them.

Anyway, my optimistic title for this post includes “here comes my novel”. This is action. I’m going to do it. Some mini-steps or goals to put in my favourite to-do list:

1. Create a list of potential agents. I’ve got plenty of ideas on how to do this, and consider this the easy part. In the process I’ll check their individual requirements for a first contact (query only, synopsis, sample chapter(s) and so on).
2. Write query letter/synopsis/anything else that seems to be required.
3. Start sending queries off to agents.

I’m guessing that like the rest of the business world, literary agents don’t do too much new business in December, and since we’ve already got part way into October that means I need to get wriggling! Potential agent list by the end of the week and then start getting queries out before the end of the month. I promise. Please hold me to that and revoke my chocolate supply if I don’t do it. Thanks. Oh and wish me luck. I’m quite sure I’ll send stuff off to an agent and they’ll laugh so hard at my poor attempt at writing I’ll be able to hear them from here.

So as you know I’ve now got a baby, and it probably won’t surprise you at all to hear that this means finding time to write is trickier than ever. I seem to be getting a few windows of opportunity at the end of the day but these windows seem to be quickly filled with doing the writing that pays the bills (necessary) and feeling extraordinarily tired (unavoidable). But rather than waiting until my little boy has grown up – although that sometimes seems the easiest solution to the “when to write” dilemma – I would really like to get a new writing routine going.

I’ve been trying to come up with some good times to get going on my third novel. You may recall I mentioned plotting out a novella and I’m thinking that in fact, it’s probably big enough to become a proper novel instead. Of course, I’m thinking that without even going back and reading all the notes I’ve written because I just don’t have time, but that’s the current thinking. And I’m excited about the ideas within it. For short, let’s just refer to it as my Trans-Siberian novel, but that’s really leaving out a whole lot of important ideas – you’ll just have to wait though, dear reader!

For thinking, plotting and brainstorming, I think there are quite enough moments in the day, as long as I don’t need to write anything down at the time. Out walking while I’m pushing the pram, for example, is quite a relaxing time and probably ideal for brainstorming. Surprisingly, when I’m trying to calm down a crying baby, I also sometimes feel like I’m in a bit of a trance and thinking about something quite removed from the actual crying – sometimes I suddenly notice that my little boy is almost asleep in my arms and I kind of missed what happened in between, being so deep in thought about something else! So why not make this something else my next novel, I figure.

But for actual writing, that’s a bit trickier. Night time is not my creative time, so I really don’t think I can make that work, even if it is the easiest time of the day to find a few spare minutes. I’m thinking cafes. That’s why there’s the very cute hot chocolate picture at the top of this post, although my friend had a latte with a fish on top which was even more impressive. (All at the John Street Cafe, if you’re interested). My plan would go like this: get a parking spot quite far away from one of my favourite cafes. Walk my baby all the way there in the pram so he falls asleep. In the noise of the cafe (curiously, and apparently many babies are like this), he’ll probably stay asleep. I can get a hot chocolate and some writing time. Some very civilised writing time.

This is my current plan, and I just need to schedule a moment to actually do this. I’m surprised how busy life is when you’re not going to some kind of face-to-face employment – I still have a hard time fitting in appointments. But I feel I just need to treat writing like an appointment and then get the momentum going. Otherwise I really won’t get to my next novel draft until my boy is off at school. What do you think? Do you write in cafes or other public places, and how does it go? I’ve never really tried.

And don’t think I’ve forgotten the first two novel drafts, and the need to revise them finally and get them off to agents. I haven’t, but I just haven’t come up with a good plan for that yet. I think half the problem is my usual procrastination, and the other half is probably fear. Don’t worry, I’ll get to it. Baby steps. Get it?!

In the meantime, I’ve actually been getting a little editing and rewriting done. The writing gods really blessed me this year by moving the closing date of the Allen & Unwin Vogel award – it’s a contest for Australian novelists under the age of 35 – from 31 May to 30 June. It’s been the end of May for as long as I can remember, but thank goodness they gave me an extra month or there’s no chance that I would have some small revisions of Bratislava ready.

Having a baby is better than putting your novel in a drawer – rather than just forgetting bits of the novel, the upheaval of a first baby means I have utterly lost any knowledge of my novel and as I re-read it now, it’s truly like somebody else wrote it. I’ve also had my trusted reader-friend go through it and as usual her feedback has been invaluable (thanks, Claire – I owe you!). Over the past few weeks, bit by bit, I’ve been revising a chapter or two at a time and I’ll soon be ready to submit it for the Vogel. Oh, the other piece of luck there is they’re now accepting electronic submissions – last time I entered two years ago you had to send in a printed copy of your manuscript which obviously a) takes me longer to prepare and b) takes longer to arrive at their offices. Since this is the last year I’ll be young enough to enter I’m glad for all these mercies which will mean I (fingers crossed) can get my entry in on time.

So, my big tip for achieving a better rewrite, by getting “fresh eyes”, is to write your novel, put it away and have a baby, then go back to it. Obviously this would limit the number of novels you could rewrite in your lifetime, and probably is a bit tricky for men, but just so you know, that’s my piece of advice for today. Let me know if it works for you!

• The World Beneathby Cate Kennedy

However, I’m still going to announce The World Beneath as my book of the month, because it really was excellent. If it hadn’t been, I would never have found the time to read it this month! I’ve seen Cate Kennedy speak at writers’ festivals and she impresses me so much because she’s absolutely down-to-earth, and makes me feel like I, too, could actually publish a novel too – though probably not as good as hers.

While I’m at it, since April is over (oops – by more than a week!), let me give you an update on my writing for the month. You might be able to guess it was a bit of a slow month. However, one big improvement is that post-pregnancy, my poor carpal tunnel-affected wrists and fingers have improved considerably and I can stay back at the keyboard a lot longer. I did manage a significant piece of writing during April, but it was just for me – a summary, I guess, of the whole process of conceiving and giving birth my son, so that I don’t forget details of the experience. It was really refreshing firstly, to be able to sit at the keyboard and type for that long (interrupted by a crying baby rather than by pain), and it’s also been a long time since I wrote something “beautiful” that was for my eyes only – and it was a lot of fun.

Noticing that we are well into May is a bit scary, though – the Allen & Unwin/Australian/Vogel award closes on 31 May, and this year is the last year I’ll be eligible to submit a novel for the prize. After that I’ll (eek) be too old! This means that I really need to find some time to finalise the edits I want to make to my Bratislava novel. Soon. I’m not quite sure how I’ll do it, but they say the first six weeks with a newborn are the craziest and they’re nearly over, so I’m hoping I’ll find a few spare hours somewhere, somehow. And I’m also hoping that come the end of May, I’ll be able to report back with a bit more reading and writing progress than I had in April.

Yes, you could call this a thinly-disguised excuse for posting a picture of my gorgeous new baby. Ruben is much more handsome than a picture of either of my novels as they currently stand. But in fact, it’s actually true that after his birth, I decided that the process of bringing him into the world was considerably easier than the process of bringing a novel into the world.

Sure, it took us a few years to actually “get” Ruben, and my pregnancy wasn’t easy – especially for my writing, since it gave me carpal tunnel syndrome and I couldn’t even type. But Ruben is now here, and he’s growing up strong and healthy. He’s a month old already!

But my novels are still, well, still in the womb, so to speak. Getting them from conception through to a “ready” product has been hard enough, but getting them out into the real world – in other words, getting them published – well, that’s the really tricky bit. And that’s something I hope to work harder on once my little boy doesn’t need me 24/7. (Yeah, so maybe in 18 years or so!)

Well, the deadline has arrived, and I haven’t even procrastinated too much, because I have already submitted my entry for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award for 2010: the novel now titled Bratislava. Three cheers for me! Interestingly, in the process of my revisions I went through a folder I had labelled “Bratislava novel” and found a most interesting file which seemed to be the very first idea I ever had for the novel, and it went like this:

I’m not quite sure what, but I really want to write a novel set in Bratislava. I think it would be one of those slightly chaotic stories with lots of different characters whose stories eventually all intertwine. I guess because Bratislava seems to me a chaotic city with so many stories and different histories.

Now that’s exactly how it ended up, with three characters telling their own stories which eventually intermingle, but to be honest, I had no idea why it was like that: now I know! And I still agree that it’s an appropriate way to tell a story set in Bratislava.

Some of you have been wondering aloud about what the novel’s actually about, and since I have had to write a short summary as a pitch for the ABNA contest, I thought I might share part of it with you here:

Bratislava: A Novel

It’s a decade after the demise of communism and three young people stand in the town square of Bratislava: a Slovak, a Korean and an Australian. Bratislava follows the story of how they met, what this multicultural friendship means to them and how it helps them to find their next steps in life. With fried cheese lunches, art gallery excursions to Vienna and shirtless tram drivers, this mainstream fiction novel reminds us that cultural differences are no barrier to friendship, and that regardless of where you come from, people face the same challenges in life.

Bratislava is set in the Slovak capital of Bratislava while the country is trying to find its Western feet, in the years after the Berlin Wall fell. This unique setting of a city being invaded by Western companies provides the impetus for the arrival of Rebecca, an English teacher helping Slovak employees get up to speed with a language only slowly replacing Russian in their curriculum, and Hyun, a Korean student who is lured to Bratislava by a girl, but stays after falling in love with the Slovak language. Raised in eastern Slovakia, Alenka moved to Bratislava to pursue a teaching career, but abandons this when the salary makes it impossible to pay the rent. With alternating chapters told by Rebecca, Hyun and Alenka, Bratislava follows their journeys as they battle with the usual questions asked by twenty-somethings about settling down, finding the right career and dealing with the ups and downs of love.

Let me know what you think: would you want to read this novel if you read this summary? I really hope so!