Because I've started getting these sorts of questions, I thought I would put up what I know about self-publishing on this blog so at least I have something to refer people to if I ever get approached again on the subject. I may do something similar on writing and editing someday. Maybe.

Of course, I don't claim to be an expert on these sorts of things. If you're really interested in self-publishing and finding out more about the nitty gritty of producing e-books or building your brand or marketing your first novel, there are stacks and stacks of writing blogs out there that would probably answer your questions a lot better than I could. (Here, Google is your friend.) This post is just what I learned from the processing of creating and producing Kinds of Blue. I've talked a little about the process before. But I don't think I've ever explored it in more depth. So that's what I want to do here.

(A little later …) Hmm, it turns out I cannot do this in one post without it becoming an epic, so let's split this over several posts. Here's part 1:

The process

What I know about publishing generally is due to three things: firstly (and obviously), my experience working for Matthias Media; secondly, work experience in Year 10 at McGraw Hill; and thirdly, this wonderful little picture book called How a Book is Made by Aliki. (I used to read that one obsessively as a kid. It's actually pretty comprehensive; you don't expect CMYK to pop up in a book like that.)

Obviously Matthias Media was my most significant influence. There, most of my responsibilities surrounded The Briefing, but every now and then I would edit some of their products (The Daily Reading Bible , Pathway Bible Guides, occasionally a book, and so on). Also, as part of the editorial team, I'd sit in on their production development meetings, so even though my involvement was mainly at the editing stage, I learned bits and pieces about things like cover design, marketing, price points and sales. The other thing that working on The Briefing (and, in hindsight, working on Hippocampus Extensions) taught me was project management—overseeing the journey of articles from conception to print. All of this was really helpful creating Kinds of Blue.

From what I've learned most books go through the following stages:

1. Creation (i.e. the writing stage)
2. Editing
3. Production (which includes things like layout, proofreading, cover design and blurbs, and printing)
4. Marketing and distribution

Kinds of Blue wasn't quite like that; it was more like:

1. Creation/editing
2. Pitching
3. Budgeting and crowdfunding
4. Production
5. Marketing and distribution

Let me deal with each of those in turn.

Creation/editing

Usually writers produce their books and then get them edited. But because Kinds of Blue is comics, the editing would often take place at the same time as the creation.

I started by brainstorming ideas that I thought would work well for five-page comics. The whole anthology would be about depression, but I wanted to draw out different aspects of it. I wrote down things like depression and marriage (which became “The real you”), depression and music (which became “Toward the waves”), suicide (which became “Nihilo”), and so on. There were a number of ideas that I didn't end up using—either because I couldn't fit them into a five-page script or because I felt like I couldn't write about them truthfully. (I had this great idea for something about anti-depressants, but as I've never been on them, I felt like anything I wrote about them would come off sounding contrived.) Sometimes the ideas were more suited to others to write. (“Eating the blues”, which is about depression and food, might have started off that way; I can't remember whether it's something I suggested Bec could do or whether she came up with it herself.)

Then before I even started writing, I also made a separate list of people—artists—I could approach to work with me on the comics. This is because it's often easier to write a comic script when you know who you're working with. More than one comics writer has said that scripts are very much like very personal letters written by a writer to his/her artist. I think it's because you can tailor the script to the artist's style, plus you've already got some sort of relationship you can build on to communicate what's in your head. When I wrote my scripts, sometimes I had a particular artist in mind, but sometimes I only had a vague idea of who I'd like to work with. Not knowing who it was going to be made things a little scary because I wasn't sure whether what I was communicating was enough. Also, I felt like I was intruding onto territory I knew very little about: I'm a writer, not an artist, so visual stuff isn't as easy for me. I knew that my artists would bring so much more to the table than what I could envision, and I wanted to give them the freedom to do so within the constraints of the story/concept.

I also didn't quite know what I was doing as I haven't really written comic scripts before. When I worked with Dan on “Going home”, I didn't give him a full script; it was more a vague idea of what each page should be and kind of what the panels should be doing. But for Kinds of Blue, I wanted to do things “properly” (not that there is a “properly” in comics writing; there is no standard in scripting). So I studied other people's stuff—Neil Gaiman's scripts at the end of Sandman: Dream Country and 1602, issue #10 of Demo by Brian Wood, issue #1 of Chew by John Layman, something Phonogram-related, and so on. (Since then, Kieron Gillen has put the full script of The Single Club: Pull Shapes online. Also, The Comic Book Script Archive is an excellent resource for this sort of thing.)

The other thing that helped me was the seminar on collaboration that my friend Toby Trappel had done at Word by Word. (Word by Word is the writing group I used to run.) I still think about that seminar because it was so useful and so applicable to creating comics (because, obviously, for me, creating comics must involve collaboration). The parts from that seminar that I found the most useful included:

• Decide on which collaborative model you're going to use: is it the director calling the shots with input from everyone else, or is it more of an equal partnership?
• Always have a reason for why something should be the way you want it. For example, if the car must be red, explain to your collaborator why. (Answer: the red represents the rage.)
• Always communicate well with your collaborator. If you can't deliver something on time, explain why instead of avoiding the situation. Good communication is key to all successful collaborations.

I feel like I'm getting off topic. Anyway, I started writing scripts. Once I'd written them, I tried to match them up with artists that I thought would suit them. Most of the people I approached were keen to work together to the agreed deadline. Most of them were even excited about what I sent them. Some of my collaborators came from the most unexpected quarters. For example, Mike Barry was an online acquaintance. (I knew of him from Grace Not Works, which I think was one of the first Christian e-zines on the internet.) I've met him in real life, but I've only spent maybe a total of an hour or two in his company. I didn't even know he was into comics until I noticed his avatar (which he had created himself) and we got chatting. Similarly, Jemima I didn't know at all; I knew her brother because we used to go to church together and were in the same Bible study group, and I had heard of her and had perhaps met her once briefly, but it didn't occur to me to ask her because I didn't really know her.

I was up front about the fact that I was asking them to work for free. I tried to spell out the scope of the project and what we were trying to do with it so that they knew what they were in for. I probably could have outlined the benefits for them a bit better—things like it would give them experience, it would give them exposure, and they might eventually be paid (because the agreement was that we would split the profits equally among all the contributors, regardless of the size of their contribution. This meant that even though I wrote 10 of the pieces, edited everything, did all the admin and drove the project forward, I would not get any more than anyone else.)

Also, in hindsight, I think I could have outlined the comics creation process much better with my collaborators as many of them had never created comics before. From what I can gather, it normally works like this:

1. Scripting
2. Producing roughs/thumbnails
3. Pencilling
4. Inking
5. Colouring
6. Lettering
7. Production (i.e. finalising changes and uploading final art files)

My experience in editing is only in print/magazines. But after having a Twitter conversation with Charlie Beckerman (who used to work for Marvel and, it should be noted, who doesn't know me from a bar of soap, but who is nice enough to answer questions from a complete stranger), I learned that comics editors are involved at each stage of the process. That means that when the writer turns in a script, they go over it; when the artist comes up with the roughs, they go over it; when the artist turns those roughs into pencils, they go over it; and so on. They're also often the mediator between the writer and the artist.

So for each of the nine comics and one article that I wrote for the anthology, I did that in collaboration with all of my artists: they would read my script (and maybe ask some questions), then come up with roughs, and I would comment on the roughs; then they would produce pencils, and I would give them feedback on those; they would do the same for inks/colours/lettering, and so on. And at each stage, I would refer back to my original script and check things or notice things that had come out a little differently to how I envisaged (note: not a bad thing!), and why they might have done that. (Checking things against the original script was particularly important at the lettering stage. Sometimes I would even edit the lettering a little because by then, six months would have passed, giving me enough time and distance to see things a bit more objectively.) “Feeling”, for example, was very tightly scripted because I didn't know who I was going to work with at the time, and Mike didn't deviate too much from it. (Also, where he did, I thought his work was an improvement on what I'd written.) In comparison, “Toward the waves” had a looser script because Dan just likes to work that way. (Also, he brought something extra to the story; the icons representing volume were his brilliant idea, not mine!) Sometimes I did have to ask the artists go back and change things, but each time I did that, I was careful to explain why (i.e. there was a reason; it wasn't just me being a dictatorial bitch).

With the comics that Guan and Bec worked on (they produced three between the two of them), I was far less hands-on at the creation process, but I was always on their case to give me updates on where things were at. Obviously when producing art, life always gets in the way and deadlines get missed, and everyone involved in Kinds of Blue (not just Guan and Bec) had to endure me nagging them for stuff. The good part of this whole collaborative process is that it forced me to up my game; if it had just been me by myself, perhaps I would have slacked off and not seen the project to fruition—especially when things got hard. But because I was bringing together the efforts of all these people, I felt like I owed it to them to see it through to the end.

And it wasn't always smooth-sailing. We had an initial deadline of February 2010. That got moved to May 2010. Then June. I think. I forget. Part of the problem was that two of my artists had to pull out and I had to find replacements at very short notice. Fortunately Belinda Stead stepped in to do “Five tips for caring for someone with depression” (and she did such an amazing job in such a short amount of time too!) and Kathleen Jennings offered to do “Nihilo”. (Fortunately we were not starting completely from scratch; we used the original artist's layouts and a bunch of photographic references I had taken.)

I tried to get everyone onto Google Wave, thinking that it would help us all to communicate with each other, develop ideas and foster community (especially as most of the collaborators didn't know each other). It didn't really, but it helped the other collaborators to see what others were doing. Plus a few of our close friends were able to stickybeak and see what was going on! But I soon learned that each of the collaborators had their own preferred method of communication: some were happy with email (which suited me just fine!), but others I talked to face to face or I rang (even though I hate using the phone).

At the same time as all the comics were being created, I collected bios and photos from all the contributors, wrote the back cover blurb and the introduction, worked with Melanie Boreham on the cover art (she came up with the concept of the rain coming down out of the umbrella onto the girl), and tried think about how to get the whole project into print.

Then, of course, things got interrupted when Astrid was born. But I think not long after that, the entire manuscript was finished. And Bec took everything and laid it all out in InDesign, and produced a wonderful draft PDF. (Yeah, I know this bit belongs in the “Production” stage; I'll talk more about production later.)

Okay, that looks like a good spot to take a break. Stay tuned for part 2 …

Anyway, because it's a shame to put so much work into something and only use the material once, because people have been asking me about it, and also because the thing I love about speaking is not so much the speaking but the writing of the thing I'm speaking, I thought I would put the content of my talk online (but without the slideshow; I did think about using SlideShare, but then decided against it as audio takes longer to get through than text. Also, I'd have to edit the audio file as I recorded everything and I'd have to review what I said, but it's easier to edit text than audio [well, for me, anyway]). I'm going to edit it a bit to remove some of the things that irk me about written speech (e.g. overuse of sentences beginning with “And”; techniques that work well in speech that don't work so well in text, and so on). But I'm not going to convert it into a full blown article because at the moment it's not worth my time; I want to get back to the graphic novel as soon as possible.

A few things to note:

• The talk was aimed at Christians, which means they were already coming to the topic with a particular understanding of certain things.
• The talk was aimed at Christian women—more specifically, female students and/or wives of students at Moore Theological College. Many of those present were parents who had come along because they were concerned about the topic from a parenting point of view.
• The program for the evening went like this:
  • The MC interviewed Bec first, then me, establishing who we are and why we've been asked to speak on the topic (especially given that I have only been a parent for 20 months and Bec isn't a parent at all).
  • I spoke first for about 20 minutes.
  • Then Bec spoke for about 20 minutes.
  • Then we had about 20 minutes of question time.
• Because of the time limits, this is by no means comprehensive; there's a lot more I could have said about particular things.
• I've added a lot of links to material that I used to prepare this talk, so if you're interested in something in particular, it's worth looking at those.
• It ends really abruptly. It's partly because of my time limit and also partly because I didn't know how to end it. So sorry about that!

All right. Enough preamble. Here's the talk.

Survey

I'd like to start with a quick survey. How many of you:

• have a computer in your home?
• have a computer that is for your exclusive use?
• have an internet connection at home?
• own a smartphone?
• go online at least once a day?
• go online more than once a day?
• keep a blog?
• use social networking?
• use some sort of special interest social networking service?
• use some sort of instant messaging/chatroom/video chat service?
• play MMORPGs? (That stands for Massive Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games)
• share photos online?
• share your location online?

Introduction

This is Astrid. She was born in August 2010 and she has never known a world without the internet.

Okay, let's not be dramatic; Astrid is only 20 months old. She has no idea what the internet is. But she does know about the devices that connect to it.

Consider this photo: it was taken just moments after she was born on my husband's iPhone. Since then, she's had family continually pointing iPhones at her, recording photos and video. When I inherited my mother's old iPad, Astrid took to it like a duck to water, and has now mastered tap and swipe. It's her favourite “toy”. If we let her, she'd play with it all day. She's only one and a half years old, and yet I'm sure she'd like nothing more than for us to give her an iDevice of her very own!

Astrid is clearly growing up in a digital age. I feel like part of me is preparing for the future now, because I know that one day, Astrid is going to want to go online. One day she'll want to read Wikipedia. One day she'll LOL at LOLCats. One day she'll whinge about me on her blog. One day she'll want to join Facebook.

(Okay, maybe not since Ben and I are on there and who likes hanging out with their parents on social networking …)

But you get my point. I'm sure it's why you're here. Like me, you want to start thinking about this stuff now. You want to prepare.

So in this talk I'm going to speak a bit about the internet—its “lighter” side (if I can put it that way) and its darker side—and a few things you can do to guide your children and equip them for the Big Bad World Wide Web. I must apologise: because of the massive scope of the topic (because the internet is massive), I'll be speaking very generally. But if you want to ask specific things, feel free to raise them during question time.

A spoiler alert: I'm not going to be heavily prescriptive. Please regard what I say as recommendations rather than rules. My aim is to educate you so that you can make wise decisions. How you choose to parent is entirely up to you. Instead, my goal is to help you think about how to teach your kids to use the internet responsibly. I don't just mean teaching them skills and how to avoid hazards. I mean training them in how to think about it—how to think about it the way that God thinks about it—and therefore how that affects how they should behave online.

But before we get to that, let's talk a little about what this virtual world looks like.

The lighter side of the internet

I want to start with what's good about the internet because often when it comes to this topic, people focus on the negatives and forget about the positives. The result is you end up feeling like it's better to keep your kids in an internet-free bubble where the name “Justin Bieber” has no meaning.

But like anything man-made, created with the imagination, skills and abilities God chose to bless human beings with, there are good things about the internet, even though it's also been corrupted by sin.

Here are eight:

1. A place to learn

Firstly, the internet is a place to learn. Once upon a time, if you wanted to learn, you had to go where the information was—schools, universities, libraries and so on. Now you don't have to go anywhere; the information is at your fingertips!

2. A place to discover new things

Secondly, the internet is a place to discover new things. It caters to every niche market you can think of—crocheters, comic book lovers, cat owners, people who like to crochet Catwoman, etc. The internet is ripe with serendipity.

3. A place to share

Once we do find something new and wonderful, we're keen to share it with others. There's something about sharing that makes the experience of discovery all the richer—as if other people's pleasure in response to our finds somehow adds to our pleasure.

4. A place to create and publish

Speaking of sharing, fourthly, the internet is a place to create and publish. If you practise any of the creative arts (writing, drawing, composition, etc.), it's a great time to be alive. In previous generations, to get your work in front of a wider audience, you needed patronage—like a publishing or recording contract. Now you can put your work online for a potential audience of millions—with no middleman.

5. A place to play

Fifthly, the internet is a place to play. So many games! You don't even have to purchase them; many are free with advertising. Also, you don't even have to play alone; most games are social, so you can play with your friends without needing to be in the same place at the same time.

6. A place to laugh

Sixthly, the internet is a place to laugh. Okay, a lot of the humour on the internet isn't very tasteful. But then you have things like otters who look like Benedict Cumberbatch.

7. A place to socialise

Seventhly, the internet is a place to socialise. It's hard to imagine life without social networking now, isn't it. Social networking has its problems, but one of the things I love about it is it enables you keep in touch with people when time and distance separate you.

8. A place to declare God's word

Finally, the internet is a place to declare God's word—to persuade people of Jesus' Lordship and call on them to follow him. We can all do this in some way in our online communications—even with strangers, believe it or not. (I have stories. Ask me later.)

The darker side of the internet

So that's some positives. However, as we know, sin corrupts everything. The world wide web is no exception; it too is in bondage to decay, as it says in Romans 8:21.

Here are eight examples.

1. Spam

One: spam. It's everywhere—emails, text messages, instant messaging, even games—and we can't get rid of it.

2. Viruses

Two: viruses. A virus is a program designed to replicate itself. Some are benign. But others are malicious—exploiting your hardware's vulnerabilities, stealing your personal information and using your contacts to infect others.

3. Piracy

Three: piracy—copyright infringement. In the noughties, we had Napster, the music peer-to-peer file sharing service. Now in the 2010s, you can download illegal copies of almost anything—software, games, movies, TV shows, even novels.

Interesting fact: the most pirated material on the web is pornography.

4. Porn

Which leads us to example 4: porn. Porn was around long before the internet in various forms. But the internet gives it much much much wider distribution and accessibility than ever before.

And of course, related to pornography are things like cybersex and sexting.

5. Anti-God content

Fifthly, because the internet caters to every niche market you can think of, much of the content is anti-God, promoting everything from atheism to anorexia, to terrorism and cyber terrorism. Of course, this being the internet, this information is at our fingertips.

6. Anti-social behaviours

Sixthly, we have what I call anti-social behaviours: cyberbullying, cyberstalking, trolling (i.e. being deliberately inflammatory), flaming (i.e. insulting or criticising others) and defamation—all ways that people can intimidate, threaten and harm others.

Unfortunately people who engage in this sort of behaviour lose sight of the fact that their targets are also humans beings, created in God's image. They think there are no consequences—particularly if they are doing it anonymously. In addition, because they're doing these things online, it's harder to catch and convict them.

One of the more high profile cases of cyberbullying involves Megan Meier, an American 13-year-old from Missouri. She befriended someone who she thought was a boy named “Josh” on MySpace, but it was actually Lori Drew, Lori's daughter (who was a former friend of Megan's) and one of Lori's employees. They pretended to be “Josh” in order to get back at Megan for allegedly spreading gossip about Lori's daughter, and they earned her trust online only to humiliate and hurt her, telling her she was better off dead. As a result, Megan committed suicide in her bedroom closet. Lori Drew was never convicted properly for her actions, but after her trial, Missouri passed new laws against cyberbullying and cyberstalking.

7. Identity theft/fraud

Seventhly, there is identity theft and fraud—i.e. when people steal personal and financial information about you for their own benefit.

8. Anti-privacy

And finally, there is the erosion of privacy. Sites like Facebook actively encourage you to share more information in exchange for a greater social experience. Indeed, for a long time the default Facebook setting on user profiles was “public”. Daniel Lyons on The Daily Beast points out that

What's happening is that our privacy has become a kind of currency. It's what we use to pay for online services. Google charges nothing for Gmail; instead, it reads your e-mail and sends you advertisements based on keywords in your private messages.

The real holy grail is your list of friends. With that information, marketers can start sending more targeted messages. (Source)

Now before this talk, I hadn't thought much about the Christian perspective on privacy. After all, we have no privacy before God; he sees and know everything about us. But Christians should be pro-privacy because of the way we were created: in God's image as individuals with our own characteristics and personalities, but individuals who were created for relationship—relationship with God and with one another. Our individuality and particularity means that we have personal information that belongs to us and us alone. And part of loving others means respecting and valuing them as individuals, and therefore not misusing or abusing their personal information. Privacy laws act to protect us from other people's sinfulness. They protect us from being unfairly judged and discriminated against, and they protect us from being exploited.

Here's an example. This is an app called Girls Around Me. It's made by a Russian company called i-Free, and it was recently pulled from Apple's app store—for reasons that will soon become clear. What it does is tell you which girls are near your present location based on the last time they checked in on Facebook and Foursquare. The data is publicly available because these girls have not set their profiles to private. This means that anyone can find out information about them—their full names, ages, where they went to school, etc. All the app does is take that data and present it in a way that's more relevant to the user. Unfortunately the sort of people who would use an app like this are men who are, to put it crassly, looking to score. And they will use this info to try to do so.

Some recommendations for parenting

Okay, now that I've scared you silly with the darker side of the internet, let me make a few parenting recommendations.

As I said, lot of what I'm going to say is going to be general, rather than specific. This is partly because I haven't had first-hand experience of parenting in this area, but it's also partly because every family is different, and therefore you and your husband need to discuss and decide for yourselves what will work for your kids as opposed to someone else's kids. Over supper, please share with each other what's worked for you, or what you've heard works for other families. And please view the following as a springboard for discussion.

1. Take a varied approach

Firstly, take a varied approach. Obviously what you do and what rules you choose to enforce will change according to the ages of your children, because what may be appropriate for primary schoolers is not going to be the same for high schoolers. So exercise wisdom.

Feel free to use things like inbuilt parental controls, keylogging software (which tracks what keys are struck on a computer keyboard), filtering software and accountability software (like Covenant Eyes). But know that such tools have their disadvantages as well as advantages. Also, be mindful of the fact that you cannot rely on technology alone to keep your kids safe.

Indeed, taking measures to protect your kids may not be enough; unless you also equip them, they will be unprepared for life on the interwebs and all that that entails.

2. Stay informed

Secondly, stay informed. Keep abreast of technology and the next big internet “thing”, even if you don't use it. I know it takes time, there's a lot of information out there, and if you're not really interested in technology, the task can seem tedious. But it doesn't take much to stay aware.

For example, even though I don't play Massive Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games or MMORPGs, I understand what they are, how they work, why people like them and what their down sides are. I got this info from Wikipedia and a couple of articles. (See “Don't waste your second life” in Briefing #349, October 2007; unfortunately the article is not online.) Even better, I talked to someone who is into MMORPGs: Bec. Bec plays World of Warcraft. She gave me the lowdown on it in less than five minutes. She even logged into her account and showed me how it works. She could do the same for you.

Most importantly (and I cannot stress this enough), make sure you are familiar with the privacy settings for any service you use online. Don't assume they won't make your information public. This is particularly relevant if you post stuff about your kids; you don't want to leave a digital trail that might come back to haunt them when they're older. (Unfortunately the internet has a long memory.) Also unfortunately, services often change their layout and options, which means you have to keep on learning how to do things. (Facebook is particularly guilty of this.) But because it's important, make time to explore, or ask someone who knows more to show you around.

3. Educate

Thirdly, educate your kids about the internet. We teach them about the world around them—about colours, shapes and things, and their relationship to us; similarly, we need to educate our kids about the world wide web—what it is, what it does and what they can use it for. Teach them about the lighter side of the internet as well as the darker side. Teach them about such thing as wikis, blogs, MMORPGs, social networking, spam and viruses, but also teach them about what makes these things helpful or unhelpful, useful or downright evil. It's better that that information comes from us rather than from peers or strangers.

Also teach them about the limits of communication and how to interpret what they see and read.

4. Train

Fourthly, train your kids. Train your kids to think God's thoughts after him. Teach them God's view of the world and why—especially in the areas of personhood, sexuality and other human relationships, because those seem to be the main areas that affect online behaviour. (For an excellent piece on this, see Roger and Toni Lindeback's article in Briefing #385.) As it says in Proverbs 22:6,

Train up a child in the way he should go;
even when he is old he will not depart from it.

Tools like keyloggers, filters and accountability software are all very well, but unless we take steps to shape our children's worldviews according to God's, they will not understand why, for example, things like piracy and pornography are wrong. Hopefully by continuing to speak God's word to them and living the Christian life before them, they will learn not to treat people as objects, but will instead love their neighbours as themselves.

In addition, train them in how to use the internet. It's such a terrific resource for anyone with an enquiring mind. As I said, we are at a point unparalleled in history where all the information is at our fingertips. (This is particularly true when it comes to Bible study; there is a wealth of Christian resources online.) Teach your kids how to find the information—that is, basic research skills. Teach them to take the initiative to find things on their own.

But not just that, teach them to evaluate the information. Is it reliable? Can it be corroborated? What was the author's agenda? How should I think about it Christianly?

Furthermore, teach them what to do with the information. Get them to ask, “How can I use what I've learned? How does it apply to me? How does it fit with what I already know?”

And, of course, teach them about privacy and disclosure. What information are you giving up about yourself? Who can see it? What are the consequences of sharing this information—both for you and for other people? Teach them that privacy laws serve people by protecting them from the sinfulness of others, but they are not to be a cover for sinful behaviour.

Related to the above, train them up in the way that they should go so that they prove themselves trustworthy. When laying down the rules for internet usage, some parents may do things like insist that all devices be used in public spaces in the home, that usage is confined to particular hours of the day, that their child give them their passwords so that the parents can check up on them, or that their child comply with any keylogger/filtering/accountability software they've installed. These are good and useful rules. However, I think they should be viewed as a means to an end—the goal being that your child becomes mature enough not to need rules anymore. We parents do not want our children to stay children forever; eventually we want them to grow into fully fledged adults.

Also related to the above, train your children to be emotionally and mentally self-aware. By “emotionally self-aware”, I mean training them to recognise the emotions that they have, what has triggered these emotions and what these emotions tell them about themselves. By “mentally self-aware”, I mean helping them track their moods over time—when they feel good (and what contributes to that), when they feel low (and what contributes to that) and so on. This is hard stuff; most adults I know don't know how to do this. But the reason why I think it's important (aside from it being helpful in training oneself for godliness) is because when you are emotionally and mentally vulnerable—when you feel bad about yourself and your life—the internet can be a hugely unhelpful place. According to one Australian study, neurotic and lonely people spend more time on Facebook than non-lonely people. Furthermore, scanning other people's status updates often leaves people feeling worse about themselves, because it seems like everyone else is leading happier and more enriching lives. We need to teach our kids how to meet their emotional needs in appropriate ways—while at the same time, of course, lavishing them with love and attention so that they do not feel neglected in the family context.

5. Model

Fifthly, model. Model godliness. As Paul says in 1 Timothy 4:8, “godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come”. Model godliness in submitting to the rules of your online services. For example, don't be one of those parents who allow their children to lie about their ages so that they can join Facebook. Model godliness in your online behaviour—in what you share and post, in how you interact with others online (particularly strangers), and in how you respond to people who insult or threaten you. Model forgiveness. Model self-control so that you are not always at the mercy of your messages or electronic devices. Model ministry—in building your existing relationships, in serving others online, in building them up in Christ and sharing the gospel.

Model relationships. I don't just mean romantic relationships (i.e. marriage); I mean all relationships—acquaintances, friendships and so on. It's important for your kids to see what good relationships are supposed to look like in real life so that they learn how to form them themselves. Real relationships are difficult: they're messy, you can't control them, you can't go back and edit what you say, and you can't always present your best side to the other person to make them like you more. But real relationships are what God made us for—relationship with him and relationship with each other. Sin spoils these relationships, but through the grace of God, we can reconcile after conflict, we can repent and offer forgiveness, and we can love even in the midst of hurt and pain.

6. Enjoy

Sixthly, enjoy the internet with your children. Don't forget about the internet's lighter side! Learn about stuff together—how to grow tomatoes in your backyard, how to bake gingerbread men, or how to make a circuit board. Share fun, kid-friendly videos and links. Play games. Make stuff and publish it.

7. Glorify God

And finally, above all, glorify God in all you do online.

P.S. The results are in on the 2012 Best Australian blogs competition. Although this blog didn't win anything, I would just like to thank the 69 of you who voted in the People's Choice round. Sometimes when I put stuff out there, it's hard to know how it's being received in cyberspace, so I really appreciate your support! Here's to future blogging

Things have been a bit up and down lately. I don't want to go into details, but I don't want to gloss over it either. Ahem.

The main purpose of this post is to flag two things. Firstly, I was interviewed about Kinds of Blue for Kapow!, the comic book review show last week. Episode seven, which contains the interview, went live this morning (25:22 min). The episode focuses on women working in comics, and the interview they did with me occurs at around the 5:54-minute mark. Or you can watch it below (it goes for 3:43 min):

It was lovely to be on the show. I hadn't even heard about it until Tim McEwen (who I met at last year's ASA Comics Masterclass) retweeted something by the producer, Ben Shackleton, who was looking for local comic creators to feature as guests. (Ben also produces and directs Good Game on the ABC.) They shoot in Kings Comics on Tuesday nights, so I made a special trip into the city for that and it was a lot of fun. (Plus it was really cool meeting Al and Sonya, who host and write each episode!)

(Also, apparently I blink. A lot!)

Second thing: as I said in an earlier post, Bec and I are speaking at Moore Women this Thursday night (i.e. tomorrow!) on the topic of the internet, children and parenting. I thought at first that only members of the Moore College community could come, but it turns out that others are welcome too (as long as they're female because it's really a women's event). So come along if you're free! It's in the D Broughton Knox Common Room at Moore College, 1 King Street, Newtown, Sydney at 7:45 pm (entry via Campbell St).

Right, I'd better go finish writing my talk …

(P.S. This blog didn't make the finals of the 2012 Best Australian Blogs competition, but apparently voting in the People's Choice Awards doesn't close for another three hours. So please vote!)

But this afternoon, I am trying to rest. Then this evening, I've got BFF support group. So I thought I'd write a little post about that because it's a useful little idea that others might find helpful. It came from reading Archibald Hart's Unmasking Male Depression, which was given to us years ago by a friend around the time when Ben's depression first started becoming more problematic.

I still haven't finished the book (and I can't remember when I started it, but obviously it was before this post), and to be honest, I haven't found it hugely helpful because obviously Hart had to generalise and (obviously) not everything that characterises “male” depression characterises Ben's depression (or mine, for that matter). Really, I should have skipped to the last chapter sooner—“Living with a depressed male”—as that was way more relevant to me than anything else in the book. More specifically, one of his final points—“Build a support system for yourself”—jumped out at me one day. I was already convinced of the value of external support structures. (I've spent years going to counselling, but counselling is expensive, even with Medicare rebates.) I've never attended a support group (but that doesn't mean I'm adverse to them). It's just never occurred to me to form one myself. Then I read these words:

How can you build a support group? You have several choices. Ask a few friends if they would be willing to meet with you over tea for an hour a week. Offer to be a support to them; at the same time they will be supporting you. Believe me, there isn't a person on this planet that isn't struggling with some personal issue at any one point in time. (p. 243)

I experienced that mental thing when certain parts seem meant to be joined together just slide into place. I had already created a private Facebook group for me and four of my closest girlfriends to talk to one another; it was a logical next step for us to start meeting regularly to catch up and pray for one another. I pitched it to them (on the Facebook group) and they were enthusiastic. Even the one who would soon be moving away was keen. And so we started meeting early on this year.

We meet on a Monday night. Bible study and youth group commitments usually meant that usually Monday nights were best. We meet once a fortnight; weekly feels like too much of a burden. We eat dinner together so we don't have to worry about trying to fit that in too before/after we meet. We meet in a food court because it's cheap to have dinner together (as some of us are a little more cash-strapped) and because there is lots of variety (which means you don't have to have the same thing every time). Also, no one cares if you hog the table for several hours (whereas if you were in a restaurant, they'd be keen to turf you out).

The way it works is that we all take turns talking for a little while about how things are going in our lives and what we'd like prayer for. This usually begins as we're eating and continues as everyone finishes their meal. Others often ask questions or make comments as the speaker has her turn, which is great because it helps the speaker to clarify what she just said, or think about possible solutions to the problem she's facing, or think about the dilemma from another perspective. Hart is right; everyone is usually going through something, no matter what their situation. Just listening to one another really helps—knowing that you can say anything in that safe space and be heard. Then we try to pray for one another, which is challenging in a food court with a food court's noise level, but the way we've done it in the past is to focus on one person (usually the person sitting to the right or left of us) by typing or writing out a prayer on smartphone or paper. If it's on a smartphone, it gets emailed to the person; if it's on paper, it gets given.

Now that one of us is overseas, she posts her prayer points ahead of time to the Facebook group, and during the meeting, I take notes on my smartphone and post them to that same group later so that she remains informed about what's going on in our lives too. Then hopefully throughout the week, we are prompted to pray for one another. (I know I am.)

I like that it's a regular thing that we just do together. I like that we continue to build our relationships with one another this way—supporting one another, caring for one another, praying for one another, etc. Sometimes it feels to me like close relationships are so transient: people I was once very close to I am no longer close to (because of time or distance or lack of opportunity). However, it's perhaps also a feature of moving in Christian circles: many of the people I was close to ended up in ministry, which took them elsewhere. And maybe it's also a feature of moving between stages of life: certain friends of mine that I made when they were single or married without kids are now grappling with life with kids (which I completely understand; it's hard enough to master the challenges of parenting and running a household without the demands of everything else on top of that). I just feel now and then the urge to hold on tight to the close friends I have now—to put in the work in those relationships and nurture them so that they will last and grow—so that when I am old, grey and losing my marbles, I will still have the privilege of calling these wonderful women friends and know that our friendship has been tested by time and turbulence, and found to be true.

(P.S. Don't forget to vote!)

I was going a little early to visit a friend from school, so it worked out better for Bec to take the big suitcase and for me to just take a little one. We brought the following:

• 30 copies of Kinds of Blue (10 copies weighed 4 kg—i.e. 12 kg).
• 3,000 postcards (which was three boxes' worth. Each box was 5 kg—i.e. 15 kg)
• Two display copies
• A display book (which was basically a print-out of an earlier draft that I had done for Professor Gordon Parker of the Black Dog Institute, who later gave us an endorsement for our back cover)
• Two book stands (that were really plate stands for when I used to display our platters on top of the cupboards in the kitchen)
• Three tablecloths: the main one that I ordered from Event Linen at the last minute when I realised that the one I had wasn't going to be big enough, the one from our dining table (to cover the stuff overnight) and my black lace one to give it something a bit extra
• A sign advertising the book in a wooden photo frame
• A smaller sign advertising free postcards (also in a wooden photo frame; I thought the wood would make the display seem friendly and inviting)
• Laminated pages from the book to stick on the wall behind us using velcro dots. (I had to destroy a copy to make those, but fortunatelyit was an old display copy that was already falling apart. I got them laminated at Officeworks)
• Safety vests (which was a requirement from the Supanova people during bump and bump out)
• A cashbox with a $200 float (10 x $5, 10 x $10, 5 x $20, because we were selling the book for $25 and I figured that most people would need change for $30, $40 and $50)
• Scissors to cut open the postcard boxes (though in the end, we took most of the postcards out of the boxes as they were easier to transport that way)
• Extra velcro dots just in case
• A clipboard with a mailing list sign up sheet
• Pens
• Melbourne Showgrounds induction cards (because completing the induction training was a requirement for being on site)
• A hard copy of our exhibitor confirmation (just in case were ever asked for it; we weren't)
• A hard copy of our public liability insurance certificate. (We paid for a year's coverage since we're going to also be going to Supanova Sydney and Brisbane.)
• A hard copy of our signed health and safety form (just in case we were asked for it; again, we weren't)
• A personal note from Mike Barry to Brian Michael Bendis because I had promised Mike I'd give Bendis a copy of Kinds of Blue. (Bendis was one of the big guest stars at Supanova Melbourne. He's a comic artist and writer, and one of the architects of the Marvel universe. I am ashamed to say I have never read anything by him.)

Unfortunately while packing (and I did start early) I realised that we were going to exceed our luggage allowance by a LOT. Tiger Airways only allows 10 kg in carry-on, and you have to book check-in. I had booked 15 kg of check-in, but when I packed and weighed the bag initially, it came to 40 kg (and that wasn't even including my clothes)! I checked and Tiger Airways will only allow you to check in a maximum of 30 kg. So I culled the number of books we were taking (I had originally thought 50 copies would be good) and re-distributed some of the postcards into my carry-on. (In hindsight, I probably could have taken fewer postcards; even though 30,000 people walked through the doors for Supanova Melbourne, we were only able to hand out 1200 postcards. More about that later.)

Anyway, after revising the packing, I managed to fit one box of postcards in my carry-on, along with all my clothes and toiletries, and managed to get the big bag to under 30 kg. Then I booked extra check-in luggage to Bec ($71 including booking fee!) and dropped the big bag off to her on the day. It was easier for her to take it since she was coming later and it would save me trying to find a big enough storage locker at Southern Cross station while I went to visit my friend.

I flew down on the Thursday afternoon after dropping Astrid at childcare. (It's very sad when you know you're not going to see your child for four days and she doesn't understand what's going on—even when you keep telling her and telling her “Mummy is going on a trip so you won't see her for a little while. But then she'll come back again!” This was the longest I'd ever been away from her.) My bag was still too heavy for carry-on (bother those postcards!), so I was glad that I had booked that 15 kg of check-in as I used it anyway. Tiger Airways is squashy: it was good it was just a one-hour flight and that I had the row all to myself; I felt sorry for the passengers who were bigger than I was.

I was also hugely grateful for Melbourne's infrastructure: they make everything so easy. I booked us both SkyBus tickets online, which meant I didn't have to queue, and it was really quick getting into the city to Southern Cross station to meet my friend and her parents. I also think the new myki card is amazing; it works like Hong Kong's Octopus card, in that you put money on it that gets deducted automatically when you tap it against readers on trams and trains. Plus you can register it online so you don't forfeit your remaining balance if you lose it. If only Sydney had such a thing!

Thursday evening and Friday was spent hanging out with my friend and her parents. We had dinner in Docklands, then drove back to her place in Warragul, and then on Friday we wandered around the Dandenongs—Olinda and Sassafras—before they dropped me off at Belgrave station. It was nice to have that downtime before the intensity of the con. It was also really nice to indulge in a little shopping child-free!

Friday

I met Bec at Southern Cross station on Friday afternoon as she got off the SkyBus, lugging the two suitcases (the big one and the little one). We caught the train to Melbourne Central (again, grateful that Melbourne is pretty accessible, with clear signage and lifts aplenty, as the big suitcase was a real pain to lug around). We ate dinner there before heading to our accommodation, which in hindsight was pretty sensible as it would have been too late had we done it after.

Then we caught the tram to our accommodation. (We stayed in University College's academic apartments, which is where I almost always stay when I'm in Melbourne. They rent them out to get a bit of extra income. They're self-contained, nice and clean, not far from the city and most public transport, and they also provide meals.) Getting the big suitcase on the tram was a pain, but fortunately this girl took pity on me and helped (lovely Melbournians!) We arrived later than our indicated check-in time, but the tutor on duty didn't mind. He was really nice: he gave us our keys and all the info we needed, went back to find us a hair dryer (because I couldn't fit one in my suitcase), and even lugged our big suitcase up the stairs for us.

We were pretty tired by this stage. Bendis was doing a free masterclass that evening at the con, but it would have taken us too long to get out to the showgrounds, plus it was too late by this stage. So instead we walked down to the local 7-Eleven to buy supplies for breakfast (as we would be missing University College's breakfast, which starts at 8am), and spent the evening half-watching Bewitched and doing craft (crochet for Bec, knitting for me).

Saturday

I was thankful I had slept really well and had packed the bags the night before as I was ready for the con. We scoffed down breakfast and went to catch the tram, which kindly waited for us. Unfortunately that meant we missed our connecting tram. It didn't matter too much, but it did make me a little anxious. Fortunately the next tram wasn't too far away. I remarked to Bec that we were obviously on the right one as it was full of cosplayers. The con didn't open 'til 10 am, but obviously these keen beans wanted to get a good place in the line.

It was a little tricky to work out where we had to go, and we had to ask a number of volunteers before figuring out which entrance we needed for the hall. We were issued with three exhibitor passes in the form of badges, then found our table in Artists Alley (which weren't labelled), said hello to our neighbours and set up.

It was good having Bec there as she has more of a visually artistic eye than I do, so arranged everything most artfully. Here's me at the table:

We had a little time before the con opened, so Bec went in search of coffee and supplies and I prepared myself. Here was the view to either side of us:

Our neighbours to the left had come down from Cairns and were sporting lovely red hats that matched the cover of the book they were selling (it was a vampire horror novel—part of a series, I think). Our neighbour to the right was late in arriving, and we didn't actually get around to introducing ourselves properly until late on the first day. He hailed from Brisbane but had relatives in Melbourne, so decided it was worth the trip. He was selling his graphic novel Copycat. He said he drew it in two months and it nearly killed him, but he wanted to have something ready for Supanova. I bought a copy but haven't read it yet, but it sounded fun and it was apparently inspired by Scott Pilgrim.

The con opened proper and masses of people started flooding into the hall. Some of the cosplayers were just amazing—for example,

I think Sophie and her Calcifer was my favourite! (Apparently she made that dress herself.)

Bec totally got into the spirit of things and during one of her breaks, went and bought herself some cat ears and a wig:

I like to think that that brought us more attention than before. (Also, Bec looks good with pink hair.)

The aisles between the tables were quite wide, which was good for passersby (particularly those with prams and wheelchairs), but not so good for us. It meant that we had to work hard to draw attention to our book. So Bec and I spent a lot of our time trying to make eye contact with people and handing out the free postcards. Having the postcards there was just excellent as they gave people something to focus on as they walked past: on the front, it just says “Kinds of Blue: An anthology of short comics about depression”, and on the back, it says,

What does depression look like? What does depression feel like? When you're stuck in the middle of it, is there anything that actually helps? Read Kinds of Blue online for free at http://hivemindedness.com/kindsofblue

That made it catchy and digestible enough as there was a lot around to distract people's attention, plus it gave people something to take home that they could investigate later. We found that a number of people took a postcard, not really registering what our table was about, then they would read it and double back to take a look—flip through our folder or one of our display copies. People even returned later to buy the book, which was just awesome. And a number of people talked to us about depression and having it, or knowing someone who did. Several worked in mental health as counsellors or social workers, and we were able to give stacks of postcards to a number of these people to hand out to others.

However, it was tiring work. For a while we were both handing out the postcards (one of us targeted people walking right and the other targeted people walking left). Eventually we started tag teaming to give each other breaks. I think half hour to hour-long stints was about right; after that, we started to go a little nuts. The lighting in there didn't help; it was bright and glarey and headache-inducing.

We also didn't stay on the table the whole time. On the Saturday morning, I went in search of Bendis. I bought a book for him to sign that I could give to Mike but wasn't sure what to get, so in the end went with something I thought was about right (plus it's relevant since the movie will be out in a week or so!) Fortunately for me, the signing line wasn't very long, so I was able to not be away for too long. And Bendis was friendly and lovely: he signed the book and I gave him Kinds of Blue and told him about Mike, pointed out the letter and the comic that Mike and I had done together, and just from glancing at the art, Bendis told me, “It's good!”, which (I think) just about made Mike's day when I told him about it on Twitter. Also, Bendis seemed genuinely pleased that I'd given him the book, so I hope he gets a chance to read it and enjoys it. (Not that I'm expecting to; I know that people like him are insanely busy. But no one passes up free comics, right?)

Bec and I also took turns being away for different panels. I went to the Bendis/Pacheco/Billy Tan one (but it wasn't that relevant to me as I don't follow the Marvel universe), and on the Sunday, Bec went to see Wil Wheaton and I went to see Morena Baccarin and Jaimie Alexander. (The nerd in me loves that all these celebrities are on Twitter.) We wanted to give a copy to Wil Wheaton but it wasn't possible. Fortunately for us, Tim McEwen (who is one of Supanova's founders and the artistic director for the cons; I met him at the Australian Society of Authors Comics Masterclass last year) stopped by and promised he'd try to get it to Wil.

Here's a rather nice pic I snapped of Jaimie Alexander (who was super cool):

Lunch options were pretty basic: on the Saturday, we ended up both getting Dominos $5 quarter pizzas (because the other queue was too long), but on the Sunday, we tried to be a bit more prepared and get sandwiches at Coles. (That didn't work, but Bec learned that the cafe people were getting sandwich supplies at 10:30 am, so I set myself a reminder alarm to go and get them, which meant we enjoyed a relatively healthier lunch on day 2!) We had good table supplies though: we both had water, plus Bec had brought grapes and I had brought Natural Confectionary Company lollies and nuts from the Dandenongs. We shared these with our table neighbours, who were very grateful.

Towards the end of the day, I went for a little walk to scope out Artists Alley. I had met one of the guys in the Dominos queue, and seen a few of the others wandering around. (It was good having some of the postcards on me so I could give them to people on the fly.) So it was nice to get a closer look at what was on show. I met the guys at Gestalt Comics—in particular, Justin Woolley (who is a writer who does prose and comics) and Gary (whose last name I forget but he's one of the editors at Gestalt). There was someone shooting a doco on Gestalt Comics and he asked if he could film me and Gary, and then when Gary asked if he could see Kinds of Blue and buy a copy, he followed us around to our table and filmed that transaction taking place. Then he filmed me talking about Kinds of Blue for a few minutes, plus some other footage he could use as filler shots later, plus us giving permission to have our likenesses appear in his doco. I'm not sure when the doco will air. He gave me his business card so I could stay in touch and find out.

By the end of Day #1 we'd sold 10 copies and given out a whole heap of postcards. We packed up (left most of the stuff but took the books), caught the tram back into the city and went to have some dinner. I had initially been thinking Lygon St for dinner, but we were too hungry and tired to make it that far, so instead we chose the Oriental Teahouse in Melbourne Central. It was a lot nicer than I expected it to be: we had lovely mugs of tea in these cool glass mugs with inbuilt strainers (and when the tea had steeped enough, you could take the strainer out and place it on the lid so that water wouldn't go everywhere; I ended up buying one), plus dumplings, buns and noodles. (I ordered the Big Dumpling Lover meal, which was quite disconcerting because every time the waitresses came with more dumplings, they would say to us, “Big Dumpling Lover?” and I was tempted to shout back, “Look, you don't have to rub it in!”

Then because we had energy, we walked over to Lygon St to visit Koko Black (as no trip to Melbourne is complete without a visit there!) Their hot chocolate is still my favourite, and fortunately it comes in children's sizes so I can still enjoy it as well as one of their desserts.

Afterwards, we walked back to University College, which wasn't that far away. It was a nice night to be walking, even with our two suitcases on wheels. And it was good hanging out with Bec. I wondered how we'd go, given that we're both introverts and could easily have gotten quite sick of each other's company. But fortunately that didn't happen.

I packed stuff for tomorrow, then we went to bed, but unfortunately I had massive trouble sleeping because it wasn't as cold as the previous night and my doona was too heavy.

Sunday

Fortunately we were able to sleep in a little as we didn't have to be early for bump-in. So we went downstairs for University College's breakfast, then packed up, returned our keys, caught the tram into the showgrounds (and the connections were good so it didn't take so long) and prepared ourselves for Day #2.

Here's Bec in her pink wig, cat ears and sunglasses:

(Someone should seriously make her into an anime character.)

This was the day that the cosplayers decided to form a conga line and dance around the hall:

It was most entertaining to watch—like a mini parade going by!

There were just as many people on this day, as well as a lot of returnees, which meant that a lot of people said that they already had one of our postcards and didn't want another. But there were several people who had seen everything else already and bought all the stuff they wanted to buy, so they were just wandering around looking at things in between panels and signings. I felt like on Sunday we got more people stopping to look and flip through the book. Also, our sales were spread out a lot more throughout the day so that by the end, we'd sold another 16 copies, bringing our total to 26!

We also had some very lovely comments from people—people who thought it was a really cool thing that we had done (concept-wise), which made up for the people who said, “A comic on depression?” and then laughing; a couple of guys from the housing commission flats across the road who had snuck into the show (one said that flipping through our book had completely turned his day around and begged us to give him a copy because he had no money); and a girl from one of the other Artists Alley tables who told us that she thought Kinds of Blue was the best book on show there.

In the end, I think we only handed out 1200 postcards, which meant we still had to lug a box and a half of them back. But we only had two books to bring back out of the 30, so that made our luggage significantly lighter!

When the con ended, we packed and reshuffled a few things in our suitcases, then caught the last Metro train to Southern Cross station and the SkyBus to the airport. We ate at the airport (something basic and not too terrible), then hung out near our gate, sitting on the floor and recharging our phones with random power points. Our flight was running a little late, but when we finally did get on board, it was nice to be flying with Virgin as there was a little more space and they had screens on the backs of the seats in front so we could watch stuff and while away the time quickly. Back in Sydney, Bec and I parted ways and I caught a cab home with a very grumpy driver.

Here are a few things that I/we could do better for next time:

• Have three people on the table. Of course, we could only afford to send two to Melbourne, but three is better because it's hard-going and exhausting work. (We will have three for Sydney and hopefully Brisbane.) That said, it was really good doing this with Bec because we're quite similar in personality (and often thought the same thing at the same time!), we're both introverts, we're quite good at caring for each other because we understand what the other person might be feeling, and we have similar tastes in just about everything (which means that choosing food and deciding what to do with our time was really easy because we were often in agreement). We also complemented each other really well: I am more administratively minded whereas Bec is (in my opinion) way better at the relational stuff and talking to strangers, as well as being flexible and spontaneous as the occasion demands.
• Create a few more laminated signs for the wall behind us that say clearly what we're about. We definitely need a bigger one that says “Kinds of Blue: An anthology of short comics about depression” as what we had (i.e. just the cover) was too small. Also, it would be good to have a sign saying that you can read the comic online; see the postcard for details.
• Pack lunch as well as other healthy snacks. This was obviously not possible for Melbourne, but it's a no-brainer for Sydney.
• Bring deodorant. I should have remembered to on Saturday as I did get a bit sweaty and smelly. It was a combination of Melbourne being unseasonably warm, wearing non-natural fibres and being in a hall with 30,000 people (and I'm not sure the ventilation system really helped in that situation).
• Have someone sketching at the table because (as Tim says) that always generates interest: people come over to see what the artist is doing.
• Perhaps stress to people that it's cheaper for them if they buy from us at the con rather than online (as online purchases include postage).
• Wear more sensible shoes. Unfortunately my boots broke and ended up like this early in the trip:
  
  This made them slightly dangerous as they would tend to skid on certain floors. Unfortunately they were the only shoes I had brought with me so I just put up with it because the one shoe repair guy I saw said that it would take a while to fix it. (He would need to sand down the heels of both shoes and then re-sole them.) Part of me wondered whether I should buy new boots. But I loathe shoe shopping: I can never find what I want (e.g. in boots: black leather, no heel, minimal adorning) and part of me can't stand the thought of spending so much money on one thing—good money that I could have spent on books.
• Plan better for re-entry into normal life. I probably should have booked Astrid into care on the Monday to give myself a bit of recovery time but of course I didn't think that far ahead. Monday was hard: it was so lovely to see Astrid again and spend time with her, and it helped that I took a little time on the Sunday to think about what we were going to do together (i.e. plan my day, otherwise it would have been disastrous), but at the same time, it was a struggle because I knew I was low in energy, plus I felt like I had neglected house things and so was playing catch-up. (I still feel that way. Where on earth did all this laundry come from??? Also, my email inbox has quickly become a disaster zone again.) Fortunately I haven't gotten sick. (I recalled reading about con lurgy from pros on Twitter and so made sure I always had hand sanitiser nearby. [Incidentally, I thought about the pros a lot—and not just because C2E2 was on in Chicago and half my Twitter feed was about that. I am definitely not in the same league as them, but it was interesting to have undergone an experience similar to theirs and gain a little more understanding into what it's like for them.])

Right, I should wrap this post up. Let me conclude by giving massive kudos to Ben, who has been such a lovely and supportive husband in making it possible for me to go to Supanova Melbourne and spend so much time away from home and family. Plus when I returned, I discovered that not only had he gotten the car I use cleaned (inside and out), he had upgraded the operating system on my laptop to Lion. (This is a Big Thing because I haven't been able to upgrade for ages because I haven't been able to back up my hard drive. Thank goodness I managed to solve my back-up problem before I left!) That plus my new battery and power cable make it feel like I have a brand new laptop, even though it's now three years old (purchased in 2009) and therefore probably only has another two or three years left in its life cycle. Yes, my husband is a legend!

(P.S. I ought to mention that voting has opened for the People's Choice Awards section of the Sydney Writers Centre Best Australian Blogs competition. In the 11 or so years that this blog has been running, if you have enjoyed it or found it useful in anyway, please take a few minute to vote for me. [I'm the first one on the list because of the slashes in my blog name!] Voting closes on Wednesday 9 May at 5pm.)

So this week, Bec and I are heading to Supanova Melbourne to promote and sell Kinds of Blue, our anthology of short comics about depression. We've got a table in Artists Alley (Table Y, I believe!) If you're going to be there, please stop by and say hi!

I'm a little nervous about the trip—mostly because of all the unknowns and stuff I can't control (yeah, classic control freak!) But I think it will be a good experience, and anyway, Bec and I will have fun and enjoy Melbourne, even if we don't sell that many books or give out many postcards. (In my mind, it's more important that we give away those postcards; I would rather that people read us online, with some hopefully then purchasing Kinds of Blue in print, than no one reading us at all.)

Oh, and because most people who aren't nerds don't know what Supanova is, it's a pop culture convention encompassing everything from comics to movies to anime to gaming, and so on, and it runs every year in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and now Adelaide. We have budgeted this year to attend Melbourne, Sydney (in June) and Brisbane (in November).

In other news:

• The script of my graphic novel is now at 20 pages.
• My goal for mid-year is to get it to 50 pages. I think that's pretty doable, given what I've done so far! When I get to 50, I think I will apply for a Copyright Agency (Limited) Varuna scholarship with Tohby Riddle. I have no idea what to do about Astrid if I get it, but I'll deal with that problem if it becomes a problem. (Eeeek! Just checked the calendar and the dates flow directly on from Supanova Brisbane …)
• Having four half-days of relief time from Astrid care has been really good for my mental health (in that I am not getting to the end of the week and crashing like I've been doing for the last three months). It sounds stupid but I didn't even think that would happen. Silly Karen.

Speaking of which, I'd better go pick up the bub now …

I'm two weeks into the new regime I outlined in my last post, and the sadness has dissipated somewhat as I've worked through my grief. So far, I think the new regime is working well. Certainly last week rather productive: I spent the Tuesday afternoon brainstorming my talk for Moore Women (by the way, I'm speaking at Moore Women on the 10 May, if you are interested in coming along. It's on the internet, children and parenting), as well as brainstorming and writing down all my ideas for Bridget James's Diary, and then on the Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, I worked on my graphic novel (among other things) and actually completed six pages of script. (I've been using Scrivener and Anthony Johnson's comics template.) The graphic novel has been slow going—mostly because I'm still at the beginning of it and everything has to be described and set up (I've only completed nine pages of script so far). So maybe it will pick up the more I work on it. I've never done this before (and so have no idea what is a “normal” pace of writing), and this whole way of working/writing is rather alien to me. Unlike the ebb and flow of words that spring from the brain, down my arms and through my fingers typing on the keyboard, writing comics is a little more stop start because you have to take the time to think visually and make decisions about how things will be laid out on the page, what sort of perspective and composition each panel will have, and (obviously) make decisions on things like the way each character looks (and why), the way they dress (and why), their environment, and so on. Of course, you have to do that in other forms of writing too (short stories, novels, etc.), but it seems to me that in writing for comics, you have to be way more specific because you're trying to communicate something that's in your head to someone else so that they can draw it. So it matters a bit more than allowing there to be a bit of ambiguity in the minds of your readers. I do like to leave room for the artist to bring their own interpretation of the character to the work, but in this case, there are certain details about the characters that have to be specific because they're relevant to the plot.

(Huh. I write here expecting you to know what my graphic novel is actually about. But I realised over the weekend when talking to George that even my closest friends do not necessarily know. So if you're interested, go back and read this post as it explains the gist of it.)

I feel like the weeks are starting to have a nice rhythm to them. Things are starting to feel more manageable already, so I think the regime is making a huge difference. On the days when the grandparents babysit, I do get less time for writing than on the days when Astrid goes into care (and a six-hour block really feels like I have enough time and space to unwind instead of feeling hurried during my other writing slots). (Astrid also seems to be adjusting well to childcare. I was a bit worried because there were days when she wouldn't sleep during naptime, but then she did a good two-hour stint last week, so perhaps the napping will improve.) But I am starting to learn to allocate specific tasks for specific writing slots. So at the moment, I have three projects more or less on the go:

• The graphic novel (which I jokingly refer to as #OGNSpaceOpera on Twitter)
• The Moore Women talk on the internet, children and parenting
• Bridget James's Diary (but this one is mostly backburner; I'm not working on it seriously)

The Moore Women talk is due in a little over a month, so I'm trying to do a bit on it every week in the lead-up. But closer to the time, I'll probably work on it more intensively. The graphic novel doesn't have a deadline, but I would like to have at least the first part scripted by mid-year. I doubt I'll get the whole thing scripted by the end of the year as I suspect it might be too long. But if I get two parts of it scripted by the end of the year, that would be great. (Parts 1 and 3 are the most developed; Part 2 is going to require some plotting work. Parts 4 and 5 I only have vague ideas about what happens in them.) So this week I've allocated part of one writing slot to the talk and two to the graphic novel.

The last slot, however, I've realised I need to use for rest because otherwise I find myself working all the time instead of taking the time to recharge. (See, I do not practise what I preach!) It's difficult for me to rest proper because I view all non-Astrid time as being leisure, to some extent. But writing spans that grey area between work and leisure; it gives back to me in the sense that it's rewarding to have written something/created something/achieved something, however it really is like work in that it can be toilsome and difficult and exasperating. I guess it recharges just as much as it drains. But for me to keep going as a parent and a writer, I need to recharge properly.

I tried to just allocate part of one of my six-hour blocks to rest, and to a certain extent, that works—especially when it's late afternoon and I feel like I've come to the end of my creative energies. But I think that at times I will probably have to take an extended period of rest instead of just an hour here or there because the recuperative benefits are greater with a large and continuous chunk of time. (I wonder if everyone finds that—that is, that a concentrated period of rest is more restorative than a bit here and there, even if the total is the same.)

One of the things I have been trying consciously to do more is read books. I read a lot online (mostly articles, blog posts and social media), but somewhere along the line I stopped reading books. I stopped reading fiction because I was worried that the lure of stories would be too irresistible and take me from my responsibilities and my sleep. (I can't remember the last fiction book I read.) Short stories I could probably handle, but I just haven't. (And I still have Bec's copy of Stories sitting on my bedside table from when I borrowed it just before Astrid was born [sorry!]) Non-fiction works well, however, because it's easier to put down, but it's interesting enough to keep me engaged.

Inspired by Rachel C's example, I joined Goodreads a couple of weeks ago and have been surprised at how useful and motivational I've found it. When you join, it asks you to rate books you have read or add books to certain “shelves” (your “read”, “to read” and “currently reading” shelves, plus you can create your own, e.g. “Favourite books” or “Best books about unicorns” or whatever). It then gives you recommendations about what else to read based on your ratings and preferences. I don't have much use for these as the number of books on my “To read” list now exceeds 100. But I like that I can reorder the books on that shelf so that I remember what I want to read next. And I also like that you can post updates on what page you're up to, along with comments on how you're finding the book. I can see that function being very useful for recording quotes and other notes in interacting with a book. (I haven't been doing that, but I've been posting tidbits on Twitter.) I know it's just a virtual tool, but I definitely feel a little sense of accomplishment when I finish a book and can then rate it and move it onto my “Read” shelf.

The last book I read was For Women Only: What you need to know about the inner lives of men by Shaunti Feldhahn. I bought it from Better World Books for some ridiculously low price that included shipping on the recommendation of Ali P and the reviews she linked to. It seeks to explain the inner workings of men to women, and although the author is Christian, there isn't much theology in it. (I would have liked that—just a paragraph or two affirming God's creation, and how he created men and women to be different, and how that difference is good, because often our society wants to erase that difference and make men and women all the same.) I liked that Feldhahn really did her research—both in conducting interviews with all sorts of men (Christian and non-Christian) and also conducting a nation-wide survey of thousands of men. (The survey is available on her site, but you have to become a member to access it. Membership is free though.) I also really liked the way she explained what goes in the minds of men in such a way that I could understand it. For example, I knew more or less that being respected is important to men, but I didn't understand how important it is and how that affects other things like work, money, the desire to be a provider, and so on. (It was interesting having all those thoughts in the back of my brain while watching The Company Men [which I saw while I was in the middle of the book] as I could see all those factors at work in the lives of the main characters and why it drove them to make the decisions they did.) Obviously not everything was relevant to Ben (because not all men are the same), but I felt like I understood men a lot better when I'd finished the book.

At the moment, I'm in the middle of Half a Wife: The working family's guide to getting a life back by Gaby Hinsliff, who used to work as the political editor for The Observer. Her journalistic mindset really shows: she does talk about her own situation and the circumstances that led her to quit her full-time job and work from home. But she looks beyond that to the broader picture of what's happening at a national (in the UK) and international level in the areas of home and the rise of the new domesticity, mothers and work, fathers and work (and it shocked me just how bad fathers have it in terms of the lack of flexibility employment, the lack of options available to them should they want to rejig their hours or scale back work to spend more time with family, the way they are perceived by their peers/superiors for wanting to do so, and so on), workplace culture, family friendly employer policies (or lack of them), the impact of working hours on people's marriages (along with the impact of long commutes on marriages), how economics affect parental choices, and so on. Hinsliff sums up the issues piercingly well; at several points, I saw myself reflected in what she was writing about. I also really like how she helps me to see the broader picture, or this one particular issue from different points of view. (After reading every chapter, I find my brain almost explodes with all sorts of thoughts related to what she's been talking about.) I'm about halfway through the book now—at the point where she starts talking about the whole “half a wife” thing (that is, that most families need someone to do what she terms “wife work”, which includes things like keeping the household running, doing admin, handling logistics and so on, while still needing to keep the balance between work and intensive parenting. She says what works for her is having three days of work (she does it freelance from home and her child goes into care on those days), plus four days (including the weekend) of being at home with her child. But interestingly she advocates a similar pattern of work/parenting for fathers as well as mothers. I think in the rest of the book she unpacks how that works in practice and how workplace culture and employers can change to accommodate it and ease the pressure on working parents. I'm looking forward to finding out more.

Gah! This blog post just hit 2,000 words. I seem to make up for regularity in quantity. Apologies to the competition judges!

Firstly, I had been making preparations over the last four to five months for the possibility of returning to work. That included things like enrolling Astrid in occasional childcare; following the requirements outlined by my chosen childcentre (e.g. I spent several days putting Astrid's name on all her clothes); researching stuff like transport and the childcare rebate; putting certain plans on hold (e.g. booking holidays) until I knew what was happening, writing application letters, and so on. I knew that returning to work would be hard because all of a sudden I would be juggling three “areas” of life (if I can put it that way)—parenting, work and creativity—instead of just two. But I felt like I was preparing for that. In a way I was looking forward to understanding what life is like for the working mother. I also felt like that working part-time would help make things more sustainable for me (I mentioned in an earlier post how I felt like I wasn't coping but I don't think I explained why—maybe because I couldn't quite explain it to myself. I'll give it a go later.)

However, things haven't worked out: I don't have a job. Or rather, I don't have the job I wanted, as I wasn't just going for any job. (I have grown picky in my old age! *wink*) And because I don't have a job (and am not studying or training), I can't get the childcare rebate. When the door to that option closed firmly once and for all, it did feel a bit devastating—I guess because I am (as always) slightly sleep deprived, but also because of how long the whole process has been taking and because one possible future I had envisaged suddenly turned into vapour in my hands. The possibility closed: no longer would I have the opportunity to work in that place with those people and do that work; no longer would I have the chance to dwell in my own head child-free during long commutes; no longer would I get to grow and develop in my skills and character in that way. And so on.

So now I think, perhaps, I'm mourning that. Part of me knows that it's just a job and that it's no big deal, but part of me feels like it has to grapple with that loss in some way (what did Anne M Smollon call it? Oh right: intraphysic loss. [However, reading over that post makes me realise that material loss, relationship loss, role loss and systemic loss are also relevant here.])

Relationship loss brings me to the second thing that's been happening lately: good friends are moving away. They're all going on to wonderful things—things that I am excited about for them (some are going to Mongolia to be missionaries). But of course it's still sad because we won't get to see each other face to face as much as we did. (Social media is not the same—particularly if there is inequality of use.) In this situation, mourning is slightly odd: you don't want it to detract from all the good things that come with them moving (and it doesn't), but at the same time, your sadness lingers and isn't readily understood except by those closest to you who understand what those relationships meant to you. Compare it, for example, to death: if a friend of yours died, there would be a funeral and probably a reception afterwards, a public outpouring of grief, flowers, condolence cards, and so on. When your good friends move away, there may be events to mark that occasion (public and private; and perhaps quite a few public ones if you're in ministry—commissioning services and the like), but there isn't that public recognition of loss (at least not to the same degree). There are no condolence cards (not for either of you). There is no common outpouring of grief.

Hmm, that sounds awfully melodramatic! Here's the short version: I am sad because I miss my friends. Let's move on.

The third thing is me trying to work out what to do with this year, given that what I wanted from the work option didn't eventuate. For me, one of the hardest parts of motherhood is trying to work out the right balance of things so that life is sustainable. If I can divide my life into the following categories (and obviously the division is not that neat in some areas)—

• caring for Astrid
• nurturing my marriage
• keeping the household running
• living life as a Christian (which includes church, Bible reading, prayer, small group Bible study and the various opportunities available to me to serve God and his people)
• nurturing my relationships with my extended family and closest friends
• self-care (rest and leisure)
• creativity (knitting and writing)

—what kind of balance do I need to maintain so that I don't get to the end of my week and crash spectacularly the way I have been doing these past six months? When I was working, it seemed easier because the structure of work lent itself to nice divisions: clock on at 7:30 am (self-imposed), lunch break for an hour at around 1 pm, clock off at 4 pm, and do that for three to four days a week, fitting in household chores around that, then resting mostly on weekends or in the evenings. As a mum, my days have structure (up at around 7 am, do housework and tend to my child until her afternoon nap, which is currently shrinking to one and a half hours, then more of the same until bedtime at around 7 pm [though some household tasks have to be completed when she is asleep], and do that seven days a week except for rest periods). But the structure of my days doesn't quite lend itself to the sort of division I had before; it seems like to get the balance right, I have to carve out time from one thing and allocate it to another. Furthermore, any non-Astrid time I have is reliant on someone else; the default is currently that she stays with me unless I arrange otherwise, and the problem is the burden (and sometimes guilt) of arranging otherwise.

I realise that I can only answer that question. I have vague ideas of what would work for me (e.g. finding the equivalent of a weekend within a parenting week—two whole days made up of the sum of a few hours here and there in the evenings plus Tuesday afternoons when my in-laws come to babysit plus Friday afternoons when my mother and Peter babysits, plus any other time I can negotiate with Ben). However, I still struggle with figuring out how much is enough and how much is me running from the responsibilities of parenthood (as I am sometimes tempted to do).

I struggle with stay-at-home motherhood because

• I am an introvert. If anything, parenthood has made me more introverted because I am almost never alone: I am with a little person all day, or sometimes I'm with other people and their little people (which usually makes the hanging out with my little person a bit easier), and when I am not with my little person, I am with my husband. Those are all good things, but being an introvert means that being around other people gets draining, and I usually reach a certain point where all I want is to be alone in my own house with my own things doing nothing.
• Little people are so very demanding. They have such big needs—not just for physical care, but for emotional and mental nurturing. I find that I can do the stay-at-home mothering thing (if I can call it that) all day for one or two days in a row, but by Day #3, I am falling apart and need some relief time.
• My husband suffers from depression. It's not debilitating, but it does affect things.
• I suffer from depression on occasion (like now, on the cusp of change).
• I want to write, and writing and looking after a child don't go too well together. (But as was pointed out in The Divided Heart, some artforms do go well with childminding.)

I thought that if I got the job I wanted, I could split it across four days so that I spent half the day with Astrid and half the day in the office while she went to childcare. I thought perhaps that that would make things sustainable for me (in terms of having a bit more introvert time and non-Astrid time to recharge my batteries) while at the same time ensuring that she didn't miss out on the daily love and care I give her.

When the job was no longer an option, I then turned to Plan B, which was always to write. (No, I didn't pin everything on the job.) If I wanted to work, there are indeed other jobs and other employers who might be flexible enough to let me do the four half-days thing. But I am not sure if I am ready to go through the whole process of adapting to a new workplace, new people and new ways of working. As I said, I've also grown rather picky in my old age. I've always known what I want to do in terms of career (I've known since I was nine, I think), so why not pursue it now? I never have—not seriously anyway (though if you've been reading this blog for a while, you know that I have always written; every year closes with me having produced something). I thought perhaps I could make it work according to the four half-days model I want: in-laws babysitting on Tuesday afternoons, occasional childcare on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, and going to my mum's on Friday afternoons. I would treat the writing like a job (except I am my own boss). I might not get any writing done on all four half-days (and it's likely that I will probably have to use one of them for housework/admin/Kinds of Blue admin/rest in order to keep things sustainable). But I feel that it's important to try. What did Clare Bowditch say when faced with a similar choice to me? “What sort of example would I be setting for my children if I didn't try?” (Rachel Power, The Divided Heart, Red Dog, Fitzroy, 2008, p. 40.)

I felt better once I had made a decision about what to do this year (and it may change next year). But at the same time, I felt scared—scared because no one I know has ever done this (and I don't know what I'm doing; I studied creative writing at Uni, yes, but it didn't equip me for dealing with the publishing industry. [I often think about what one reader wrote to Neil Gaiman concerning the value of writing classes because it is so true of my degree!]), and I felt scared because it might not work. But what's the worst that can happen? I won't get published and won't be able to ever make a living from writing in the future. Well, at least I tried; there's no guarantee that if I was ever published commercially (as opposed to just self-published), I'd ever make a living anyway. People do, but it takes a lot of hard work. I am in a very good position at the moment: I don't need a job. I don't need to work. I can afford to take a risk (which at the moment, isn't really a risk; there's just the financial burden of childcare, but I have some money saved up to deal with that, and I have parental help). Part of me feels guilty about all of this—that I have an opportunity here that others don't have. But really, I should just be thankful to God that I've got the opportunity at all. And I know that the added benefit of developing my skills as a writer and having a go at putting stuff out there will also nurture me, so it is not completely about career and making a living.

Still, I fear other people's responses to me going ahead with this. I know it's stupid. I think I just need to be resigned to the fact that there will always be people who won't understand, who won't be supportive, who don't know that I write, who think writing is stupid and unnecessary, who will have opinions on what other things I ought to be doing with my time and money, who remain ignorant of the reality of my circumstances, and so on. Neil Gaiman linked to this post the other day on Twitter (it's a letter from a writer to her friends and family telling them how they can support her as a writer), and since reading it, I find myself thinking of it and the road ahead often.

Anyway, now that I've made a decision, I've started making a list of things I'd like to concentrate on this year. I've started mapping out my time and allocating bits of it to different tasks. And even in the midst of the mourning, the sadness and the flatness at all this stuff going on around me, I've quietly become excited about certain old projects I'd like to revive. (“Bridget James's Diary”, anyone?)

Another thing I did in a fit of madness one night was enter the Sydney Writers Centre Best Australian Blogs 2012 competition. I am laughing at myself because I have not updated the design of this blog in seven years, plus I haven't integrated all the different threads of my social media life (nor will I have time to before the judging starts). But anyway, yay for putting myself out there, right?

So today I want to write something about The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood (Red Dog, Fitzroy, 2008) by Rachel Power. I think of all the books I've read on parenting and motherhood, this one has to be the most useful of them all. I suppose that's partly because of who I am and my natural tendencies (so please don't expect to read it and feel the same way). But I think there are some characteristics of The Divided Heart that make it helpful for everyone.

So here goes. Again, apologies for the unstructured and rambly mind dump; I'm writing fast (thinking of Joanna Murray-Smith—I'll explain further down). And also I'll probably be repeating myself from earlier posts a fair bit, so feel free to skip those bits.

Background

I first heard about The Divided Heart from Loobylu's blog. What she wrote about it sparked enough interest in me that when I saw it in Brisbane when I went to visit Kathleen, I decided to buy it straight away. But like many books that are bought, it stayed on my shelf for several years before I even picked it up and turned to the first page. (Nick Hornby in The Polysyllabic Spree makes no apologies for his book buying habits; when people questioned his ability to get through his purchases in any sort of timely fashion, he responded that the books were investments; he'd get to them one day. [Perhaps he only said that about the poetry books. My memory is faulty and The Polysyllabic Spree is not within reach at present. Never mind.])

(I wrote all that because sometimes it's important to understand the context of one's relationship with a book. It certainly is in this case, I think.)

Anyway, it wasn't until I was pregnant with Astrid that I thought I ought to start the book, given the significance and relevance of its subject matter. The problem was, I don't think I really grasped what Power was talking about until after Astrid was born. I remember reading the first two chapters and getting frustrated by what I perceived to be Power's ultra feminist perspective. She spoke about the driving need to write and her frustration at not being able to because of the duties and cares of motherhood; I thought to myself, “Surely this is just for a season, and aren't your child's needs more important? There will be more time for writing when they're older.” She also talked about the ever shrinking time available in which to practise one's art; I thought to myself, “Why don't you just come to some sort of arrangement with your husband so that he can look after the baby while you go out and write?” She wrote much about the inequality between men and women when it came to societal perceptions and expectations of the vocation of “artist”, and how traditionally men were freed for the task of artistic creation while women kept their households running; I thought, “Surely things have changed!” Clearly I did not understand.

I stopped reading when I had Astrid because (obviously) I had bigger things on my plate. It wasn't until about three or four months after Astrid was born that I took the book up again—only to realise that I had completely forgotten what Power had said in those opening chapters, so I had to go back and re-read them. Interestingly enough, the second time around I identified more strongly with Power's experiences and perspective because I was living it. And I identified not so much with her feminism (as I have a slightly different perspective on that), but with the way she grappled with becoming a mother as well as an artist. Furthermore, the central question of The Divided Heart (which is “How do you continue to practise your art when you are a mother?” [for having children and being an artist seems largely oxymoronic]) has now become my question. So I was extremely grateful to Power for doing the hard yards of trying to answer the question so I wouldn't have to.

Contents

Most of the book is comprised of interviews that Power conducted with mothers who are also artists—photographers, musicians, actors, directors, dancers, illustrators, writers and so on. These were women who made a living from their art, which added an extra layer of complexity to the discussion because what they did also encompassed the areas of work and career. Power's interviewees include people like Clare Bowditch, Rachel Griffiths, Nikki Gemmell, Emma Matthews and Joanna Murray-Smith. I liked that not only were they drawn from a wide range of artistic backgrounds, they were also mothers at various stages of life—mothers of infants, mothers of primary schoolers, mothers of teenagers, mothers whose children were now adults and had flown the nest—and therefore their ages spanned late twenties to seniors. The net effect is of a richness of experience encompassing the whole of life—the “career span” of motherhood, if you will, from early and new motherhood to retiree/empty nester. I do admit that the writers interested me more than the others, however it surprised me how much what the non-writers said had an impact on me. (I'd elaborate more here but I mention a few of the things that stuck with me further down in this post.)

Likes

Some things I liked about the book:

• The breadth and variety of experience (as I said above).
• The way that many of the mothers expressed their feelings of what it meant to be (and become) a mother. Nikki Gemmell said, “I had to rethink my whole existence” (p. 72). Joanna Murray-Smith spoke about how being a new mother rendered her nerve-endings “absolutely raw and alive to the world” (p. 87). Many spoke of their lives now in comparison to their lives before children. They articulated for me something I experienced but wasn't able to express about that passage to the third stage of life and how it changes you. (And reading about that sort of stuff was oddly cathartic during Astrid's first few months of life.) I know it's different for everyone, and yet what they said resonated with me. Even now, several years after finishing the book, I still find my thoughts on occasion drifting to something they said.
• That way that motherhood often fuelled their art, giving them access to a whole new world—different ways of seeing and being. (Power writes, “Motherhood challenges an artist's practice and identity in ways she could never have foreseen. If children plunge us into anything, it is the fullness of the present moment.” [p. 6].) One mother (I forget who, sorry) talked about how watching her children finger painting inspired a new technique for her. Another spoke about how frustrated she was about not being able to practise her art, and yet when she did, her art was all about motherhood—parenting, family, her children. Motherhood changed these women as artists in ways they didn't expect, and that change gave them something precious and unique. It was almost as if the driving force within to create dovetailed with the creative act of procreation.
• The way the interviewees spoke so candidly about their lives. I suppose it's a particular obsession of mine: the way the rest of the world lives. (Maybe it's the writer in me [she says pretentiously].) I just found it interesting, career-wise, what made some of the women make the choices they did. For example, Clare Bowditch decided to take her music more seriously just before she learned she was pregnant with her first child, and at that critical juncture, she could have buried her dreams and proceeded with the path of ordinary and “normal” motherhood. But instead (and with the crucial support of her husband whose attitude was, “No, we can make it work!”), she chose to do both—writing, recording and touring, as well as breastfeeding, changing nappies and dealing with all the sleep deprivation. Joanna Murray-Smith's story was similar (in that she was accepted into Columbia [I think it was] when she found out she was with child), but she acknowledges that for her and her husband, no one told them they couldn't so they never thought that that wasn't an option. On reflection, that idea that “No one told me I couldn't” is a recurring theme in many of their stories. I suppose this was challenging to me as for much of my life, I've received messages from people that I can't, and it's only in the last couple of years that I've started to think I can. Also, curiously enough, the same thing happened to me too: just as I was starting to take writing more seriously, I found out I was going to have Astrid. (Power remarks later in the book that “It's fascinating how often women get pregnant, seemingly by accident, at times when they need to make a major shift in their life.” [p. 179].)
• The way many of the mothers managed to sustain their artistic practice even at times when suspending it would have been the easier option. Clare Bowditch would breastfeed, then go on stage and play a gig, then race back to the hotel to put the baby to bed while her husband and the rest of the band packed up. Joanna Murray-Smith would sprint home from campus after class to breastfeed her baby. (Her husband assumed the role of primary carer in all other aspects in those days.) Later, she would write during her children's naptimes, pounding out 1,000 words in two hours. (Upon being asked, “How do you write with small children?”, Joanna Murray-Smith would say, “[F]ast.” [p. 83]. I feel like that's now my mantra.) Power herself would feverently memorise word for word passages she had composed in her head during those long, early feeds, holding out for that spare moment when she could commit those sentences to paper. (These days you could potentially tap them out letter by letter one-handed on an iPhone.) Brenda Walker cradled her son in a sling against her heart and typed on her computer over his head while he slept. Anna Maria Dell'Oso said, “We all live in limitation, that's what I've finally realised, nothing is endlessly perfect, you'll never have the perfect circumstances in which to write or produce work.” (p. 36). Inspiring as these examples were, however, they did make me feel a bit ashamed at not being so “serious” about my own artistic practices. But at the same time, we all need to acknowledge how much we can handle at any given time—that sometimes our inability to write is less of an “excuse” and more of a product of our individual circumstances and how much we are already burdened. Oh, I know there are many who rise above their circumstances to create great art, and good on them; I applaud and admire them. But I know that comparing myself to them and judging myself against their standard is counter productive.
• (Tangentially related) The way these mothers managed to fit art around their lives and their lives around their art because of their commitment to art. Here, medium makes a big difference: writing is very much a solitary and concentrated practice, whereas at certain stages of the process, depending on the outlet, you can include your children in your projects (the way Polixeni Papapetrou did with hers, making them her subjects and turning the whole thing into a collaboration so that their playfulness ended up informing her vision), or work alongside them (Helen Bodycomb, a mosaicist, talked about how she could still work while conducting conversations with her children about what they did at school that day [I think; again, my memory is faulty]), or be present with them for certain periods before going away and working on something for a specific period of time (for example, the filmmakers, who would have the wheels of certain projects turning in the back of their minds while playing and spending time with their children, but then they would go away for three or four months to work intensively on that project when it all came together).
• The way the attitudes and support (or lack of support) of the rest of the world were depicted and encapsulated in both Power's summaries of the issues and the mothers' experiences with their spouses, families, extended families and wider community. There are some who disapproved of mothers not sacrificing everything for the sake of their children, and they frowned upon these mothers for choosing not to forsake their art. But at the same time, many of the women had extremely supportive spouses and families, and they acknowledged that they could not do what they do without them. Power writes,

  To create art once you have children requires the commitment of more than one person. With kids in the mix, if I wanted to retreat, it required the cooperation of my partner … a situation I found both humbling and infuriating. (p. 14)

  When it came to extended family, the issues surrounding art, work, career, money, significance and worth became particularly complicated, depending on the attitude of one's relatives. Sarah Tomasetti (or maybe it was Franki Sparke; bother my memory!) talked about how her husband's work was valued by his relatives but hers was not, so she found it harder to ask for help and feel accepted and supported about what she did in her non-childminding hours, whereas her husband wouldn't have had to contend with any of that. The interviews didn't really outline many practical solutions to this problem, nor did they make many recommendations for how to support mothers who are artists (although Franki Sparke did talk about how Helen Garner regarded her single parents' pension as a kind of artists' grant). But again, maybe my memory is faulty there too …
• The depiction of an artistic career for a mother. Several mothers talked about the advantages an artistic career has (e.g. flexibility). Several (e.g. Rachel Griffiths) talked about how employers can support mothers (e.g. flexitime, having childcare close by and allowing children in the workplace). The practical examples showed me how it's possible, although obviously not everything that worked for them would work for me.
• The discussion surrounding how to be as a parent. Clare Bowditch spoke of modelling artistic practices to her children (“What sort of example would I be setting for my children if I didn't try?” she said of making the difficult decision to pursue a music career [p. 40].) Many mothers spoke about how parenthood requires adaptability, and therefore creativity. Many also spoke about the guilt that automatically seems to come with motherhood—some of which is falsely imposed by society. In addition, their perception of what society views to be the “perfect” mother is really interesting, because where does that come from and who gets to say? The stuff about motherhood in the 21st century—the way the world regards children, mothers, working mothers, stay at home mothers, work, career, childcare and all the rest of it—was really interesting for me because it confirmed something I'd started to think—which was that the contemporary construct of what it means to be a mother is simply that: a construct. Nowadays, the more I read around this topic, the more I see mothers who are my peers railing against this construct—pointing out its flaws and inconsistencies and calling for less perfectionism and more humanism (if that's the right word).
• (Related) The depiction of how to be a parent and an artist. “The Divided Heart” is really a most excellent title for a book like this, encapsulating so succinctly the struggle artist mothers feel. Am I an artist? Am I a mother? Do I have to choose? Does being a mother diminish me being an artist? Does being an artist diminish me being a mother? I found it vastly encouraging to see that there are women who have reconciled the two halves of their identity, forged a new path and found a way to do both. And like intrepid explorers, they have returned to inform us that doing so has opened up new paths and experiences for them—that the terrain ahead is richer and more beautiful than any of us could have imagined. Motherhood and art enhance each other instead of detracting from each other. Strange how that is so hard to see.
• The way different perspectives on motherhood are presented. I found it extremely liberating to realise that there are different ways to be a mother. I know that sounds insane, but sometimes from the literature (blogs, books, articles, etc.) you get the feeling that only one sort of mothering is “acceptable”. I certainly felt the pressure to conform even as I wasn't sure where that pressure was coming from (the world? the church? my mother's group? my family?). It's a bit like marriage: sometimes (in Christian circles anyway) I feel like I have to be a certain kind of wife in a certain kind of marriage. But as The Good Marriage helped me see, we are all individuals; of course we are going to be different in the way we are.
• (Finally) The way that self-care was discussed and advocated—self-care being part of artistic practice in the sense that many women spoke of needing to do this particular thing for themselves because their needs were continually being sacrificed for their offsprings', whereas in contrast, art was very much for themselves. If they neglected their art, they often felt the impact of that on their parenting (and vice versa). Nikki Gemmell said, “It's hard negotiating that time away from them but I have to, because I feel like I become a better mother to them if I'm allowed to write” (p. 76). (Oh man, I know how she feels!) Franki Sparke said,

  … I made myself a promise very early on—and I kept it always—that I only did things for myself when the kids were asleep or somewhere else. I never cleaned the house, I never did the shopping. The second the kids were asleep I'd drop everything and do what I wanted to do, even if that was just have a cup of coffee and read a book. (p. 277)

  This sort of thinking does not sit well with motherhood's critics because it seems selfish and neglectful. However, as I have been consistently arguing through these blog posts, self-care is essential for the task of motherhood—that if the self of the mother becomes subsumed beneath the needs of her children, her mothering suffers. The problem is there aren't any clear boundaries to indicate where you've crossed the line. In addition, because professional creative endeavours overlap into the areas of work and leisure, it can be hard to see where self-care turns into selfishness or workaholicism. (I hope that last sentence made sense. Again, I am writing fast.)

Issues

Here are a few things I had issues with:

• At times, the language gets a bit bogged down in academic style. This happens mostly in the introductory and conclusory chapters; the interview chapters are much more readable and accessible. Maybe Power's style raised my hackles because it reminded me of studying at university and wading through the muck of so many highbrow big brains who turned out to be spouting complete nonsense (not that I thought Power was spouting complete nonsense; far from it. I just think that if you can say it simply, it's better to do so for the sake of the common man).
• Power's feminist perspective pervades the book but is assumed, not supported or explained. I guess what I mean by that is that she takes it for granted that men and women are equal and ought to be treated equally, but she has no reason for thinking that except that it feels right and just that things should be that way. I suppose this is more of a problem with feminism than with Power. It's just that coming from a Christian perspective, equality between the sexes comes from creation (Genesis 1-2)—that God created man and woman in his image and likeness, and they are equal in sin and equal in redemption. (However, to flesh out the picture, they are different and have differing roles. But their difference does not negate their equality.) Thinking theologically, nowhere in the Bible does it say that a husband's career ought to have priority over a wife's. However there are many passages in the Bible that assert a husband's headship in the marriage (e.g. Ephesians 5:22-33); it's just that headship doesn't necessarily mean that a husband's career needs to take priority over his wife's. (I realise I'm dealing with these topics in a cursory manner and for that I apologise.)
• Similarly, Power views the production of art as being significant and important—and therefore, because it is significant and important, space, time and effort should be set aside for it. But why? Just because? Again, thinking theologically (and I am by no means suggesting that Power should have thought this way; I'm just responding to her worldview from mine), the Bible indicates we are creative beings because we were made in the image of the Creator: we are endowed with the skills necessary for creation because our heavenly Father rendered us that way. (Exodus 31:1-11 is a really interesting passage on this subject: in it, the Lord tells Moses that he has specially equipped Bezalel and Oholiab for the work of creating the tabernacle [that is, the place where God would dwell symbolically with his people] and its furnishings. I wouldn't say that God does this with everything we create; it's just interesting that he does so specifically in this instance.) Unfortunately we often use our creative skills for evil (e.g. Isaiah 44:9-20, where the craftsmen use their abilities to create idols to worship instead of worshipping God) or selfish gain (e.g. Luke 12:16-21, where the rich man builds himself bigger barns to store all his crops and worldly goods so he can enjoy them and treasure them instead of enjoying and treasuring God). Any act of creativity is not necessarily “good”. Some acts of creativity should probably be restrained because they are ungodly and spring from a sinful heart. Furthermore, sometimes it's wiser or more loving to sacrifice one's creative tendencies for the sake of something greater, or for the sake of someone else. In terms of parenting, we can take things to extreme—always neglecting our children in favour of art or always neglecting art in favour of our children. The gospel calls us to do neither; instead, it calls us to godliness. The interesting thing about the ethical framework the Bible advocates is that it is neither the sacrifice of the individual's needs for the sake of the community nor the sacrifice of the needs of the community for the sake of the individual, but rather what Michael Hill calls “mutual love relationships” in The How and Why of Love—that is, the individual's needs and the community's needs are both important and should be held in tension. I think what that means for parenting is that mothers must negotiate that juggling act of meeting their children's needs as well as their own, and that this must be applied to creativity. (Again, I fear I am not making sense because I'm writing about these things briefly and shallowly.)

Making art

I thought I should finish by talking a bit about my own artistic practices and how The Divided Heart challenged me. Here's some more bullet points (again, because I am writing fast!)

• I was challenged to take writing more seriously—well, even more seriously than before. It helps knowing that people have managed to do it—to make art—even during those demanding toddler years. They didn't give up. They didn't put their dreams on hold like Mr Holland's Opus. They found a way to make it work. I can too. And even if I never end up working professionally as a writer the way I want to be (that is, publishing works of fiction and non-fiction and living off the proceeds, even if it's not living well), I will have had no regrets. (It's worth noting here that when I was a little girl and dreamed of the future, I did not dream of getting married or having children; the one thing I always desired to be was a professional writer.)
• The book convinced me of the value of art to a certain extent—or rather, the value of me creating art. And therefore, because what I do has value, I feel like I am justified in asking for help and relief time so that I can spend a few precious hours working on art. This is different to having a hobby because I want to make writing work for me career-wise in the future, but I know that in order to do that, I need to make the investment now—even though now is the most difficult time to do so, in a sense. Unfortunately, I think, the result is sometimes that I don't get the balance of “work” and “rest” right. If art is more than a hobby for you, it seems to encompass the areas of both “work” and “leisure”. Often it feels like both with all its benefits and disadvantages—the thorns and thistles of work that is the result of the Fall (Genesis 3:17-18), along with the refreshment and ecstasy that comes when the stars of creativity align. I've been wondering lately if I need to devote more time to just resting (and not writing) instead of focusing so much energy into writing because often I get to the end of my week and I have nothing left. But at the same time, I also feel the same drive to write as Power does (although I do not feel as disciplined as her).
• It must be obvious by now that I was also convicted of the need for self-care in motherhood and how artistic practice fits into that. I don't feel like I have to be at the beck and call of my child all the time—that my needs must be continually sacrificed for hers. I will strive to meet her needs but I will also strive to meet mine (and hopefully the two will not conflict). I agree with Nikki Gemmell; I'm a better mother if I'm allowed to write.
• Because I think it's important for me to create art, I've been asking for help, and I am insanely grateful for those who make my art-making possible—particularly my mum and Peter, and my in-laws, who look after Astrid weekly for me. As Power said, it's both infuriating and humbling to have to rely on others. However, I think that it's good for me to be humbled in this way; thinking of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, no one succeeds in a vacuum.
• I do struggle with envy on occasion. I envy my single and married but childless friends because of all the time they have that they could put towards creative endeavours. That sounds harsh and like I'm judging what they do. I wanted more to make a comparison between different life stages; when I was single and when I was childless, I did not make the best use of my time. But then I didn't know what I had until it was gone. And I'm not saying that single people and married without children people have more free time; they don't. Everyone has the same amount of time. It's just that we fill it in different ways, and when you're married and when you're a parent, your time becomes filled with more non-negotiables because of the relationships you have. When you're married, obviously you spend time with your spouse because spending time together builds the marriage. You don't spend all your time together, but if you spent none of your time together, I'll bet your marriage would start suffering. It's the same with parenting: with the addition of kids, you need to spend quality time with both them and your spouse to nurture those relationships. (This is why, I reckon, being an introvert and a parent is so challenging.) When you are single, much more of your time is at your discretion. Sure, you may still have family obligations. But you don't have the commitment to spend time with your spouse or your kids because you have neither. (Sounds obvious, yes? Sorry, I'm labouring my point.) For me, having Astrid made my discretionary time far more finite and scarce. Now instead of taking for granted that I will get time to rest and time to indulge in leisure and creative pursuits, I have to carve it out of the time I do have—time that is mostly spent doing housework, running errands and caring for our very demanding little toddler. I know that it's only for a season, and that the opportunities and writing competitions I am passing up are not forever. I also know that a certain amount of wisdom is required regarding what I choose to work on now and what I choose to leave for another day; I can't beat myself up for not writing short stories that I can enter into competitions or submit for possible publication when I have to be working on things like beach mission talks, or when I am drained and cannot write at all because my brain has turned into complete mush from sleep deprivation or exhaustion or whatever. The important thing is to persevere. And as Anna Maria Dell'Oso said, there will never be the perfect circumstances in which to produce work. (On a related note, as I said earlier, comparing my circumstances to others' and wishing things were different is counter productive and unhelpful.)
• At the same time, limitations come with certain gifts—for example, discipline, motivation/drive to work (to a certain extent) and productivity (again, to a certain extent). I know exactly how much writing time I will get, and because I know I won't get any more (because I know I will have to stop at a certain time), that forces me to be productive. (Well, more or less; not every single writing session results in actual writing. Again, perseverance is important.) I have to make the most of the time I have for it will not come again. Furthermore, it seems to focus me: I can say to myself, “Okay, during this three-hour stint, I'm going to work on this blog post or this short story” and so on. Instead of having endless time stretching out ahead of me (which is as much of a scary prospect as a blank page at times), I know I have a window in which to accomplish something specific. Obviously sometimes the task at hand flows over the time allotted (like with my talk for the Pozible crowdfunding information evening), but at least limitations get me going, and sometimes when I'm on a roll, the creative act gets easier.
• This brings me to the fascinating topic of how to write when you have kids. (Well, it's fascinating to me.) From The Divided Heart, it seemed like the mothers who were writers did it
  • While breastfeeding;
  • When their kids napped;
  • When their kids were in school;
  • When they could get babysitting;
  • In the early hours of the morning before their kids woke up.
  At Continuum 3 (the one sci-fi/fantasy/speculative fiction con I have ever attended), Robin Hobb told me that she would scribble in a notebook while watching her children play, and get up a few hours earlier before the kids did to write. (Funny, re-reading that post made me realise that Robin Hobb was talking about all of this way before it became relevant to me; check out my notes on her Guest of Honour speech.) A couple of years ago at Supanova, Jennifer Fallon (who Robin Hobb recommended I talk to) told me the following:

  She said that you train your kids when they're young so they know that when Mummy's writing not to disturb her. She said that it's good not to do everything for them, so every once in a while, they're perfectly capable of getting their own breakfast. She also said that she used to bring her laptop into the same room as them, so they'd be watching The Wiggles and she'd be typing away. She said that that really makes you disciplined in your focus. (She also said that she wrote some of her sex scenes in that sort of setting, so now if the The Wiggles are on, it brings up disturbing images for her!)

  I hope to collect more tips and tricks as I progress as a mother and as a writer. (Thought of one today as I was walking back to my car from the library: tapping things out on the iPhone in Notes while walking [though this requires a bit of skill to make sure you don't walk into things or cross the road in front of oncoming cars]. Thank goodness for autocorrect! And thank goodness Notes automatically emails things to your account so you never lose things.) I would like to know, for example, whether writing on an iPad (with no 3G) on public transport is easy or more trouble than it's worth. (And in case you're wondering, Neil Gaiman uses Pages for writing on the iPad.) If you have any, please leave them in the comments. (I am also interested in what Suzannah Freeman's The Busy Mom’s Guide to Writing has to say.)

Right. Time to finish. It's been interesting reflecting on all of this today when I'm at a particularly interesting point in my life (possibly on the cusp of major change). I suspect I will return to these themes again and again as the years go by. Certainly I plan to keep re-reading The Divided Heart; there's something about it that feels refreshing to both my parenting and my writing. I hope it's like that for you too.

At the same time, however, I'm a lot more time-poor—or rather, I prioritise my non-Astrid time so that I'm focusing on writing (of which blogging is a part but not the whole) and resting (so that I'm more energised for the time I do spend with Astrid). This means that any time I spend blogging is backed by a conscious choice to work on this rather than something else. (It's the tyranny of life: it forces you to choose because you are limited. I wonder if in heaven we will truly be limitless and thus able to pursue all the roads we fancy in the duration of our eternal life.)

Today I choose not to work on the Writing Projét Dujour, but instead review a couple of books that I've found helpful—for parenting, yes, but also for marriage, art, creativity and writing. I'm reviewing them fast (I'm just trying to capture my initial thoughts about them instead of crafting a “proper” review the way I would for some sort of publication), so I'm probably going to miss a lot. But hopefully you will get the gist of why I think they're helpful. Anyways, here goes.

The first is Babyproofing Your Marriage by Stacie Cockrell, Cathy O'Neill and Julia Stone. I've talked about this book before, but I think I mentioned it when I was only part-way through it. I found it through Babyology, who also did a brief review of it, and their post was enough to get me looking for it on the web and reading excerpts before deciding the subject matter was important enough for me to purchase myself a copy.

Why did I think the subject matter was important? It's the only book I've come across that's about the impact of babies on marriages. (If you've heard of any others, please let me know in the comments!) The transition to the third “stage” of life (married to married with kids) is hard (and hard to describe beyond painfully simple adjectives like “hard”). I think it's significant that Judith Wallerstein names it as the third task procreating marriages must master in order to be successful (see The Good Marriage):

To embrace the daunting roles of parents and to absorb the impact of Her Majesty the Baby's dramatic entrance. A the same time the couple must work to protect their own privacy.

All parents go through this adjustment, whether they're open to talking about it or not. It's just that most of them are not. I suspect that people's closemouthedness on the subject is for several reasons:

• The adjustment inevitably involves conflict between you and your spouse because becoming parents opens up new areas of conflict hithertho unexplored.
• The conflict makes newbie parents feel like crap because they think they ought to be doing well at this whole parenting thing. After all, they've read all the books and thought about the theories, so why are things going wrong between them?
• The world makes you think that having a child completes a marriage—that things will only better the more your family grows. Then when things don't, you start wondering if there's something wrong with your family (or if there's something wrong with you).
• Any discussion regarding the specifics of this period of change (from husband and wife to father and mother) inevitably involves the specifics of your spouse—how she is as a mother, what he does as a father, and so on, and airing that sort of subject matter outside the marriage always feels like a form of betrayal.

The thing is (I think, anyway) this sort of closemouthedness isn't doing our society any favours. It gives people unrealistic expectations about parenthood—so that when people become parents, they feel disillusioned and disappointed about what they've gotten themselves into. (This TED talk by Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman comes to mind: they end with a plea for parents to be more open with each other and the world for this very reason.) It also causes struggling parents to put up a front and pretend everything's okay instead of being honest because they are afraid of the negative consequences of honesty (e.g. judgement, condemnation, other negative things people might think about them upon learning about this, that or the other).

Anyway, what I love about Babyproofing Your Marriage is that it tells it like it is in all its ugly and painful glory. The book starts by describing the whole mess—what a marriage often looks like after the first baby's arrival in comparison to what it was like before, and what's happened to both husband and wife. Then the bulk of the book's chapters focus on these major areas of conflict—

• Scorekeeping (who does what and how much)
• Sex (I love the subheading of this chapter: “Coitus non-existus”)
• Grandparents (both sets)
• What happens when you have more kids
• Priorities

—before summing up and helping you feel like your marriage and your parenting isn't as bad as you think it is.

This is what I love about it:

• It made me feel like we weren't the only parents in the world going through this because (as I said) all parents seem to go through it to varying degrees.
• It made me feel like we weren't the worst parents in the world.
• It captured how things look from both the wife's and husband's perspectives really well. (Obviously for me the husband's perspective was fascinating.)
• Some of the solutions were really helpful (particularly in the chapter on scorekeeping). I didn't agree with all of the solutions, but I thought the thinking behind their approach was good.
• I loved the little quotes they included from other husbands and wives. Some of them were really witty. Some totally nailed it. But some were just interesting because they gave you a tiny glimpse into their marriages and how they operate (which is something I also appreciated about The Good Marriage).
• It's really funny to read in places. (However, Christian readers should note that it's coming from a non-Christian worldview and therefore there will be things you won't agree with.)
• It's really quick to read: the writing style is engaging and chatty (and a bit American and self-help-y), but because it's well written and oh so relevant, it makes you want to keep reading.
• It contains bits I'm still thinking about—for example,

  Marriage is one of the few things we can ignore without immediate and dire consequences. If we ignore our job, we’ll get fired. If we ignore our kids, they’ll starve. But if we ignore our relationship, our spouse can live off the scraps for a pretty long time. (p. 242)

• I loved the chapter on having more kids because it helped you see the terrain ahead—what life is like and how other parents handle it (that's the “giving in” and “surrendering to the chaos” part). I love the table they've got in there that lists the number of children you have across the top, and then down the side it has things like “Number of children's birthday presents you will have to purchase in any one year”, “Number of children the grandparents will be willing to look after” (the answer always being “one at a time”).
• I loved the honesty—not just from the three authors but also from others they interviewed. It was refreshing, helpful and often very funny. It made me want to be the same.
• It provides much-needed perspective—that is, that the early years children's lives are demanding, yes, but then the day comes when they all the leave the nest and the child-free years stretch ahead of you (which is one of Wallerstein's other tasks to be mastered: learning to be a couple again during the retirement years when your children have grown up and gone). The season of parenting feels long, but in comparison to the rest of your life, it's brief. So enjoy it.

I want to finish off this bitsy review by mentioning one more thing: don't read this book before you have a baby. It won't really be helpful to you then because it will be like reading marriage books before you get married and thinking, “My husband and I won't be like that. We won't fight. We'll be good communicators. We're good at resolving conflict,” and then you get married and experience married life with all its pimples and go, “Oh.” One person I know who read the book before she had kids found it really negative and unhelpful. I personally think it becomes more useful at around the six month mark—when you've had a bit of time to see how having a baby and becoming a parent has affected your life and your relationship with your spouse. (By then, however, you may have no time to read …)

Okay, time to end this. I leave you with two bits of further reading:

• Annelise's review
• Two's company, three's hard work: This SMH article sums up the issues well.

I also didn't keep as many notes as I did on what was going on. (That's not to say that there wasn't stuff going on. Buh: double negative.) Anyways, here goes (and apologies as always for the scatty nature of this post; I started writing it two months ago and am only updating it now):

Toddlerdom

Physicality

Now that Astrid is walking, most of the changes are not so obvious and are therefore harder to quantify. Physically, she's very mobile—not quite running but very close to it. She can't jump yet (not sure when kids can do that), but she can certainly climb: she's learned to climb stairs (going up, and then gradually she's started learning how to go down; however, when she's upright, she relies on us a lot to go up and down as she can't manage it by herself), climb our furniture (she climbs on our armchairs and lounges and sometimes higher than that if we don't stop her), etc. She can also spin on the spot in circles, which is very cute to watch.

Because she's still fairly limited physically, when we go to the playground, she spends an awful lot of time watching other kids—almost studying them to work out how they do what they do. She's pretty independent: I'm sure she can't wait to do more.

I think something is happening in her brain that is allowing her to work at imitating others; I've noticed, for example, during Music Time, she's started clapping her hands or doing things with the wooden rods that the adults do. She's never done that before!

Teeth-wise, she's up to 12—four incisors top and bottom (with the fourth bottom one coming through last), two top molars, two bottom molars, and the four teeth that appear between the molars and incisors. The molars were hard: she cried a lot with the pain of them (they came through at the same time), and even though she didn't complain much about them during the day, she certainly did around bedtime and through the night. For several weeks, we were putting her to bed after dosing her with Panadol and rubbing Bonjella on her gums, and we'd given her a teething ring from the fridge (sometimes two) and even a bottle of cold water so that she would have some respite from the pain and drift off. Oh yeah, and we went through a lot of teething rusks again.

Talking

What else? Oh yes: Astrid is speaking quite a lot now—and not just baby talk either. She knows actual words and what they mean. Her first words in order were:

1. Mama (when she was almost 11 months old)
2. Dada (but she now says “Daddy”. Strangely, she says “Daddy” all the time—even when Daddy is not around)
3. That (probably because she would point to things and I would say to her, “What's that?”)
4. No (which she would pronounce as a cross between “none” and “nein”)
5. Row (as in “Row, row, row your boat …”)

I lost track of the order after that. But words she knows now include:

• Baby
• Dog (which she used to pronounce as “gock”)
• Sock (which she also used to pronounce as “gock”)
• Duck (which she used to pronounce as “guck”)
• Cat (well, she used to say “Wow” as in “Miaow”; but she knows what you mean when you say “cat”)
• Sheep (as above, only she says “Baa”)
• Turtle
• Car
• Pool (she always points out the pool when we're near it for some reason)
• Ball
• Bye (which she often pronounces as “Baa”)
• Pipe (because of the pipes that run along the ceiling of the garage)
• Door
• Shoes
• Po po (the Chinese word for maternal grandmother; not sure how it's spelt but it sounds like “paw paw”)
• Door
• Wall
• Wow

She also seems to understand “Oma” and “Opa” (which is how we address Ben's parents with her), but she doesn't see them as often so doesn't say that as much.

When we're out and about, I find I often name things for her and ask her to repeat them (“Can you say ‘milk’?”). It's made me realise that some words are harder to say than others. Words that begin with “d” are harder for her, as are words that start with two consonants. I know there's some sort of scientific theory about all of this; I guess I never thought about speech until now.

(Interesting tidbit: I was talking to a girl who studied speech pathology the other day and she said that “g” and “d” are opposite sounds, which is why kids often get them mixed up. Also, “p” and “b” sounds are made the same way, but one uses the lungs and one does not. “S” and “r” are one of the last sounds kids master.)

The other funny thing about communicating Astrid is that often I know what she wants even if she can't express it. She often points to things and makes grunting noises like she wants this or that, or she wants this particular toy switched on. When we say no to her, she gets very upset, which I sometimes find very comical because to her, it's like the end of the world. Still, as they say, such boundaries are good for toddlers.

Oh, just thought of something else (sorry; no time to go back and edit!): now Astrid is doing the toddler-y thing of requesting that the same books be read every day. Her current favourites are The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle (which she pronounces as “Pater!”) and Where is the Green Sheep? by Mem Fox. (Incidentally, you really ought to read Mem Fox's speech on the making of that book; it's just gold.) I think the appeal of the caterpillar book is the holes in the pages, and the appeal of the sheep book is that it's really simple—so simple that she can often fill in the words herself as we're reading it.

Bother: thought of another thing. Now that I'm making Astrid walk more, I've been counting the stairs as we go up and down them. (We live on the third floor, hence there's a lot of counting.) Because of this (and possibly The Very Hungry Caterpillar), Astrid has started saying numbers, and can sometimes count by herself, say, from two to six, or four to eight. So weird. She really is her own little person!

Playing

It might just be me, but it seems to me that Astrid is a lot better at playing independently now. It's not all the time, but sometimes she is quite content to do her own thing—particularly in the morning when I am completely spaced out and am struggling just to eat breakfast and get going. She's good at getting her own toys out of the various places where we've put them (some in a toy box, some in what used to be my old cradle, some in a drawer in her room, some on top of Ben's keyboard speaker). She's not up to imaginative play yet (I think that comes later), but she does seem to always be quite busy, doing things—whether it be pulling things out of things, putting things into other things, moving things to different rooms, and so on. I noticed in the last three months or so that she's even started hugging her stuffed toys now, instead of just dumping them on the floor. In the lead-up to Christmas, our cleaning lady bought a couple of presents for her, and one of them was a doll with a soft body but hard head, arms, hands, legs, feet, etc.; ever since I gave it to Astrid, she's barely put it down. I don't know what it is about it, but she really likes that doll. (I find it odd because I used to hate dolls.) But I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that her doll looks more human than her other toys.

Astrid also loves books. I am proud that I've managed to infect her with my bibliophilia. Much of the time she spends playing involves pulling the board books or cloth books off their shelves and looking through them. Before she was born, I bought her almost a full set of the Dorling Kindersley “My first …” board books (e.g. My First Word; we have ABC, Animals, Body, Colours, Numbers, Opposites, Things that go and Word). I'm not sure if I had them when I was little (I don't have them now so I assume I didn't), but I remember them from working at Dymocks: something about all that nice clip-art on white backgrounds with text labels attached appealed to me. I wanted Astrid to have books like that. Amazingly, she really likes them! She points to things on the page and we say what they are. She can even recognise certain things and say the words herself. Some of the pictures are a bit out-of-date (e.g. televisions look a lot different now), but overall I think the books are quite useful; I took the Animals one to the zoo and tried to use it to help Astrid to make the connection between what she was seeing in pens and what she was seeing on the page.

When I go to have my shower in the morning, often I leave her in her cot with a stack of books, and she happily flips through them one by one, pointing at things and babbling to herself. I read to her every day—usually a book and a story from a children's Bible before her midday nap, and then a story (or three) before bed at night.

(Incidental note: you really notice the difference between a good picture book and a not-so-good one—particularly with the language. I never read them as a child but I have come to love Maurice Sendak's books—not just because of the fantastic illustrations and plots, but also because of the way he writes; his words just sing, and there's something about them that gets lodged in your head. In contrast, modern works like Guess How Much I Love You? [which I think is pretty much a saccharine pissing contest] and even Lost and Found lack that kind of musicality.)

Aside from the reading, Astrid's favourite toys these days include: Duplo, the ride-on dinosaur we bought her for her birthday (though she still can't manoeuvre it very well herself), old cordless phones (she likes pressing buttons), a toy flip phone that plays music and says “Hello!” and “Goodbye!” (which we keep in the car), the Smurfs and the Smurf house that Ben's parents gave him once for Christmas (um, yes, Astrid knows the word “Smurf” now. Also, “Fraggle” …), sand toys (shovel, rake and plastic watering can), and very very recently, she's taken to pushing one of her dolls around in the toy stroller Ben's parents gave her for her birthday. (She's getting better at steering too!)

We tend to go out a lot from day to day, but when we are home, I keep working at introducing Astrid to new play experiences. Mary put me onto the Imagination Tree blog, which has some really lovely ideas for play written by a mum who used to be an early childhood worker. I particularly love what she writes about play in this post. This is something I don't feel like I'm particularly good at it, so it's great to get pointers.

Last thing for this section: Astrid is now ticklish (mwahahaha!)

Bother: thought of something else. I usually try to limit the amount of screen time Astrid has so she's not watching TV all day. But it's been interesting to see how fast she's grown attached to our gadgets. She knows the words for “iPhone” and “iPad” now, and is starting to show a preference to certain apps. I've started making sure there is stuff she enjoys on my phone (apps, games, short videos) for those times when we're stuck waiting somewhere and she gets restless. Sometimes, however, if I am at the end of my tether, I do put on the TV. I've found that Miniscules works really well because the clips are short (usually averaging 5 minutes in length), there is no dialogue and the plots are quite easy to follow. She can watch quite a few of those before getting bored, however it only works on the TV, not on the iPad/iPhone.

Sleeping

Astrid's been down to one nap a day for quite a while now. She usually sleeps for about two hours from 12-2 pm, but sometimes she's flexible and I can stretch her out until later. However, I have to make sure that she is up by 4:30 pm or so, otherwise she'll be too awake for her 7 pm bedtime.

Fortunately for us, she normally wakes around 7 am (though on beach mission, she was waking between 6 and 6:30 am—probably because of the amount of light in the room). I realise how lucky I am to have this; most babies wake way earlier than she does!

She is still able to fall asleep in the car (and fortunately she did so on the way to and from beach mission), but I think she prefers her room because she often doesn't sleep in the car when I expect her to. I haven't seen her fall asleep in the pram for ages, but then I've been getting her to walk more these days.

Eating

These days, Astrid eats what we eat. I'm so thankful that she's a lot better with textures now than she was before! Maybe the new teeth have something to do with it. Also, I weaned her completely at around 15 months (and was very unsentimental about it and then felt bad because I was unsentimental about it … stupid motherhood feelings). She went easily, but the battle then was trying to make sure she had an appetite for her main meals. Even now, I'm still a bit paranoid about when she has morning and afternoon tea, and what she has for those meals, because sometimes if she's eaten too much, she'll refuse lunch and dinner. I wish the baby books had talked a bit more about eating battles because I certainly wasn't prepared for them. And I know everyone says often toddlers seem like they live on thin air, but even so, toddlers (like everyone else) often prefer to eat stuff they like that isn't so good for them, so obviously I want to encourage Astrid to eat nutritious things first and foremost, then when she's finished that, offering less healthy things as a treat. That's part of teaching her good lessons about food, right?

That said, there are days when, like any toddler, she will refuse things we know she likes, and we just have to let it go. Sometimes we can encourage her to eat by giving her some control (e.g. giving her her own spoon, or letting her feed us, which she finds endlessly amusing). But sometimes it's a flat-out refusal, and we just live with it and move onto the next meal.

Ben and I now have a cooking roster going whereby we make at least five portions—two for us for one night, two for us for the next night, then one for Astrid that gets split into four for lunch and dinner for the next couple of days. Sometimes the system gets a bit messed up (in which case, we rely on packaged baby food every now and then), but fortunately for us, she's pretty good with vegetables, so all we need to do is cook her some broccoli, carrots, mushrooms, peas and corn, plus and egg cooked in the microwave, and she's quite happy with that.

One thing that was an unintended result is that I am trying more new recipes instead of cooking the same thing over and over again. We've had to modify what we make anyway because some things Astrid can't eat (e.g. spicy food) and some things she really doesn't like (e.g. foods with flavours that are too strong). These days, I have a bit more time to explore new recipes and experiment a bit with things I want to cook (trying to work out the “principles” of, say, frittata or pasta bake). But I've also been thinking about this quote by Gaby Hinsliff—

Home takes on an awful lot more significance when you are suddenly spending much of your time there, instead of being part of a bigger and more sociable world. (Source)

—and I can see the truth of it in my life: suddenly I care more about cooking (well, marginally more; I still dislike it) because I care about what I am feeding her.

Here is an approximation of what Astrid usually has for each meal:

• Breakfast (at around 7:00-7:30 am): A bowl of rice bubbles with milk, or sometimes we give her Nutri-Grain because it's big enough for her to pick up by herself. Sometimes we give her toast with butter too, but she's not too keen on that and will never eat more than a quarter of it. She'll also have some milk.
• Morning tea (at around 9:30-10:00 am): Some sort of combination of the following: fresh fruit, sultanas (and other dried fruit in little pieces), Rafferty's Garden fruit bars, a biscuit, rice crackers, Happy Baby Food organic puffs, etc. And water or milk (haven't introduced her to juice yet).
• Lunch (at around 11am): Something we've cooked the night before plus fresh fruit plus yoghurt (though sometimes she refuses the yoghurt) plus something nice she likes to eat (usually rice crackers). Oh, and milk.
• Afternoon tea (which depends on when she wakes because if she wakes later, she doesn't get it): Same as morning tea.
• Dinner (at around 5:30-6:00 pm): Same as lunch.

Mommy-dom

What, me? A parent?

As you've probably noticed from these posts, alongside Astrid's development has been my development as a mother and parent. It's interesting to me how many of us are on this journey (or maybe I just never noticed it before because I don't frequent that many mommy blogs). It seems like the state of modern motherhood is in crisis—as if this generation is caught up in some existential struggle to resolve what is acceptable—what is “normal”. Part of me finds it fascinating; the other part of me is frustrated with the debate because I don't understand why we have to keep talking about these things—why it's still such a big deal whether or not a mum works or not, whether a mum breastfeeds or not, whether a mum exposes her children to television or not, and so on. The media often doesn't help; sometimes it seems to me that the journalists are little imps who knowingly push certain buttons just to get a reaction from readers, and all in the name of selling newspapers and the like. *Sigh* anyway, here a few pieces that I found really interesting in the last couple months:

• “Two's company, three's hard work” by Jacinta Tynan, The Sydney Morning Herald 28 November 2011.
• “Couples, careers, children: how do you make it all work?” by Gaby Hinsliff, The Guardian, 16 December 2011. (It's an excerpt from a book of hers that I want to read: Half A Wife: The Working Family's Guide To Getting A Life Back. [Later: Oh sad! I just saw that the article is gone because of copyright. It was very good anyway.])
• “The child king” by Amanda Hooton, Essential Baby 30 January 2012. (This originally appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald's Good Weekend magazine; the online article is an edited version of that.)

Things I've learned in the last six months:

• All parents are different (duh). Some mothers are cut out for full-time stay-at-home mothering; some are not.
• Parenting teaches you stacks about yourself. (Well, I knew that earlier.) What it's taught me is that I am not cut out for full-time stay-at-home mothering. (I can hear George mentally saying “Duh!” as she reads this post.) I wish I had known that about myself earlier. I don't think I had really thought about it before launching into parenting.
• Everyone asks themselves “Am I really cut out to be a parent?” but few admit that to others.
• Everyone's circumstances are different, and it causes them to do different things to suit their family situation. Why we/society pass so much judgement on others for their choices is just mind-boggling. (By the way, most unfortunately, Christians are no exception in this matter. Well, certain Christians anyway.)
• Looking after young children is so emotionally demanding because their emotional needs are so large. Personally I find looking after young children more demanding than working.

That's probably enough scattergun thoughts for now. More later perhaps.

The Mommy Holiday

I was going to report back on my Mommy Holiday. I enjoyed it, and certain things worked really well (getting babysitters in, minimising the housework—often by doing it earlier, socialising with friends, doing nice things like getting a haircut [and highlights for the first time!], going to the movies and so on, as well as interesting things like attending the Australian Society of Authors Comics Masterclass). However, I wouldn't exactly call the holiday “restful” because I did lots of activities (instead of having quiet time), I went out a fair bit with people (instead of having alone time), and I was also going through that post-adrenaline slump sort of thing that always happen when I take holidays (which means that two weeks is better than one for me, but I couldn't really do a Mommy Holiday for two weeks).

Hmm, I should probably look at scheduling another one for this year …

Day to day, week to week

What we do from day to day, week to week, hasn't changed hugely from last year (though, of course, it changed during the school holidays because things like Music Time and Bible study weren't running). I guess one of the big change is that my in-laws have agreed to come babysit regularly. So now our days usually consist of a morning activity and an afternoon activity, with the middle consisting of lunch and Astrid's nap:

Somehow other housework (e.g. laundry, cooking, cleaning, more laundry) happens around all of that.

We tend to go out a lot because we get a bit bored at home. But when are home, like I said, I try to make things interesting for her. I've introduced her to drawing with toddler crayons, playing with playdough, doing water play on the balcony with containers (bought her an art smock to keep her dry because changing her clothes got tiresome; art smocks can be so very expensive! I got one for her from MadeIt), and so on. When we play, I realise how much I've come to despise mess. It's not that I'm really neat because in certain sections of the house (e.g. my “desk” [which is currently the dining table—how very Austen!]), I'm extremely messy and have to make time to clear things out. It's just that I don't like creating messiness with things such as food, paint, playdough, etc.—I don't like having to clean it up. It probably says something about my OCD tendencies. (Here's another example:

Notice how the nappies are arranged by colour.) Anyways, I know kids learn by being messy so I have to get over it—or at least create a space where I won't care if Astrid's messy.

Childcare

I mentioned above that I've started Astrid at childcare. It's partly because there's a possibility I may go back to work this year (see below for more about that), but it's also to make things more sustainable for me. I know that from the above timetable it looks like I have plenty of time to myself, but, like I said earlier, everyone's family circumstances are different, and I've learned that mine are challenging (to say the least): I can handle a toddler for most days of the week just fine, and I can handle having a spouse who suffers from depression just fine (and I have done so just fine in the past, as you well know if you've been reading this blog for a while). But putting the two together makes things hard, and one of the things the past six months has taught me is that I am not coping too well. I am in perpetual maintenance mode. Childcare was something someone suggested to me ages ago, but of course, being in maintenance mode meant that it took me forever to actually doing something about it.

Here's what I learned about childcare (in case you're interested):

• There are different types: long daycare (which is what the majority of parents seem to use; often the kids are in for long periods of time); family daycare (which is run out of people's homes and often includes the carers' own children); and occasional care (which is for short periods of time—e.g. three hours, six hours, and so on). Long daycare usually has waiting lists, and obviously you don't have to leave your kid there for all the hours listed, but you still pay the same amount regardless of the amount of time your child is there ($75-$100 a day). From what I can gather, family daycare can sometimes be more flexible about time, but most tend to operate on the kids-in-all-day model. Occasional care was more what I wanted anyway, and the good thing about that is that the places I rang only took bookings for several weeks in advance so there were no waiting lists.
• mychild.gov.au is a good site to start your search for childcare in your area. (Here I discovered that there wasn't a lot close by; it was all a suburb or two away.)
• The government offers a child care rebate provided you meet the work, training, study test. (Currently I don't.)
• If your child has never been in childcare before, they recommend bringing them for short play sessions of 30 minutes or so in the lead-up to the first major session. That way they can familiarise themselves with the environment, get to know the carers, the carers get to know you, etc. It only took Astrid two of these short play sessions to acclimatise. However, she's only been in for two three-hour sessions since; I'm not sure how she'll go with longer ones yet.
• Some parents decide not to use childcare because they want to take every opportunity to nurture, mould and shape their children during their formative years. Which is fair enough; you never get those years again. (And my hat goes off to you if you can do it without going nuts—particularly if you have more than one child.)
• Some parents, however, make it work by getting to know the staff, getting to know the other children, finding out who their child likes playing with, spending a little time (say 15 minutes) at the beginning and the end of each childcare session to watch and interact with their child in the centre environment.
• Some parents who are usually stay-at-home parents will use occasional care to give them a bit of a break from the intensity and relentlessness of full-time care.

Working mum

I get frustrated about the whole stay-at-home mum vs. working mum debate because I think so much depends on personal circumstances and personality. Given the way our society is, I don't understand why you can pass judgement on whether a mum chooses to do this or that; looking after a young child full-time pretty much on your own is terrifically hard. It's demanding, it's draining, it's often relentless and it can often be all-consuming. Not every mum can do it, and if you can't, that shouldn't be considered a failure on your part. (I'm not saying that people have been saying that to me; I'm just reaction to the judgemental attitude I see in the media/in books/in other people sometimes.)

Like I said, I've been in perpetual maintenance mode for a long time now. I still haven't worked out how to make life sustainable. At the moment, I tend to get to Friday and Saturday, and I just hit the wall and can't cope anymore. That's even with two regular non-Astrid times built into my week. I find myself feeling excessively tired and drained, and therefore more irritable, less patient, more prone to anger, etc. But I also know that that is partly because much of my non-Astrid time is spent doing “work”-type things—writing (which straddles the fine line between “work” and “hobby”) or admin or some such thing (e.g. stuff to do with Kinds of Blue). I'm not exactly resting. (Perhaps I should be … but, you know, the writing! The writing! I should really blog about The Divided Heart sometime … I know I've been saying that for years …) In addition, Ben's work can fluctuate wildly: sometimes there is very little on his plate, then other weeks everyone wants him to do things and he's working around the clock, which means that his rest time is diminished, which means that I try to help him rest during the times he can rest by taking Astrid out for some mummy-daughter time, etc.

At the moment, I think perhaps working might help. Working will certainly help with the cost of childcare, plus getting out of the home and among peers might also be beneficial for my mental health. Working might also bring some stability to my life. I only want to work part-time (and ideally spread things out so I'm working half-days and spending the other half with Astrid).

But at the time same, I'm worried about whether I'll be able to manage both work and parenting (as with work and art, you do experience that divided heart—something I felt keenly while working on the mailout and launch for Kinds of Blue). I'm worried about what will happen when the demands of both exceed my capacity to meet those demands. I'm worried it won't work out (but then I suppose I could just quit). I'm worried about what I'll do if it doesn't work out. But at the same time, the writer in me is interested to know what this world is like—how working mothers do it—and what sort of working mother I will be.

I guess that's material for another post! If it happens.

Right, need to finish this off and go to bed. Sorry, no obligatory photo of Astrid; my photos are in a mess on my hard drive and have been for the past six months!

I am hopeless at self-promotion! But since other people are starting to visit this blog, I should flag that I am appearing at Pozible's Let's Talk Crowdfunding event this Thursday, 16 February, along with other successful crowdfunders like Sam Buckingham and Kate Toon (who I will be meeting on the night!) I'll be talking about Kinds of Blue and its journey to publication. So if you are interested in the business of crowdfunding (which is, for the uninitiated, when you get a whole bunch of people together to contribute financially towards a specific cause), please come along (it's free!), but don't forget to RSVP! (RSVP using the above link, not to me.)

To give you a bit of context, our team ran a kids holiday program at one of the local schools. (This makes the term “beach mission” misleading since we were in schools the whole time and never made it to the beach.) I was part of the section responsible for looking after the adults—that is, any of the parents who decided to stick around for a coffee while their child was in the program. The first 45 minutes would just be for chatting and getting to know one another. Then at around 10:15 am, one of the members of our section would give a five-minute summary about what the kids were learning in the program that day (i.e. Monday = creation; Tuesday = sin; Wednesday = Jesus; Thursday = resurrection; Friday = heaven). After that, one of the members of our team would give a short (usually 10-minute) talk. I did two—one on parenting and rest, and the other on parenting and marriage. The parenting and marriage one won't be put online, but here's the parenting and rest one:

Introduction

So today I'm going to talk a bit about parenting and rest.

I know what you're thinking:

• “Rest? What's that?”
• “Parenting and rest? Isn't that slightly oxymoronic?”
• “Rest is for when the kids are all grown up and have flown the nest. It's called retirement.”

Jokes aside, I hope in the next little while to convince you that rest is not only an important part of parenting, but also that good parenting can't really happen without rest.

Our story

That is certainly the case for me and my husband Ben. We've been married for nearly 12 years. We have a little girl named Astrid who is almost 17 months old. We also have a fourth invisible “member of the family”: depression. My husband (and he wouldn't mind you knowing this about him, by the way) has struggled with depression for a number of years, and so have I. Speaking very generally (and feel free to talk me about this later if you like), Ben's depression is more on the genetic/chemical side of the spectrum, whereas mine is more situational. My mood is usually affected by external circumstances, which means that when things improve, I do too.

I'm also a classic introvert—in the sense that I tend to regain energy through being alone. This means that I find looking after our daughter hugely challenging: usually what happens in any given week is that I go and go and go until I hit the wall—often on a Saturday. And then I have to spend a significant chunk of time alone or else I go crazy.

For us, making a rest a priority doesn't cure our depression. But it keeps things manageable so that life continues to tick along without either of us running off screaming into the sunset.

What is rest?

But what do I mean by “rest”? Sleep? Holidays? Going out for coffee? What are we talking about here?

In the Bible, the concept of rest is derived from God. The people of Israel—God's people—were instructed to rest and do no work on the seventh day (that is, the Sabbath) because God rested from his work of creation on the seventh day. The Sabbath was a day of refreshment—a day on which they ceased toiling, enjoyed the fruit of their labours and worshipped God.

Furthermore, the idea of God's rest encapsulated something that I'm sure everyone dreamed about in the ancient world: rest from one's enemies. Peace. Respite from all that assails you.

In the New Testament, these ideas are applied to the end times. Here, God's rest refers to heaven—a heaven that entails the end of our bitter toil, peace (for God has crushed his enemies, who are also our enemies), delighting in the fruit of God's new creation and eternal fellowship with the Divine. But the only way you can enter that rest is through Jesus, because it's his sacrifice of himself on your behalf that makes it possible for you to enjoy that rest. As we're still waiting for Jesus to return to judge the living and the dead, resting now looks forward to that final “resting place”. By resting, we express our trust in God's sovereignty, goodness and ability to fulfill his promises.

So when I say “rest”, I am referring to sleep, holidays and going out for coffee. But I'm also talking about things like exercise, leisure, socialising and creative pursuits—things that refresh us—things that are a good part of God's creation that are meant to be enjoyed.

Why rest?

So why rest? Why, apart from the fact that resting sounds very appealing? Here are seven reasons.

1. Firstly, because God says to. It's funny: you'd think that not resting wouldn't be such a big deal to God. Yet in the Old Testament, there were huge penalties for disobeying God's command.¹ I think it shows just how serious God is about rest. Rest is a wonderful and precious gift from God. God is not a workaholic or a harsh taskmaster; he wants us to take the time to stop and enjoy things—his world, his people and, above all, himself.
2. Secondly, why rest? Because parenting is a marathon, not a sprint. You need to re-fuel every now and then in order to keep going—to keep going with the daily routine, the endless housework, the fatigue, the sibling rivalry, and so on. If you don't rest, you'll burn out. And you won't make it to the finish line.
3. Thirdly, why rest? Because lack of rest can lead to poor physical health. God created us as humans, not machines. We are not capable of going and going without a break. People who get enough regular sleep are less likely to get sick. Given that most kids tend to be little germ sponges, you want to have as many defences against colds, flu and gastro as you can. Furthermore, people who are sleep-deprived tend to have the same levels of performances as people who are intoxicated. Lose two hours of sleep out of eight and it's like you've had two or three beers; lose four and it's like you've had five beers; lose a whole night and it's like you've had 10 beers.² Still want to get behind the wheel of a car?
4. Fourthly, why rest? Because lack of rest can lead to poor mental health. When you're tired and overworked, it's easy to despair and think there's no way out. But when you've slept well and had a little time to yourself, it's amazing how much better everything seems.
5. Fifthly why rest? Because resting will make you a better spouse. A well-rested wife is a happier wife, and a happy wife tends to make her husband happier too because she has more to give to him. In contrast, a ridiculously busy and stressed out wife tends to stress out her husband as well. Well-rested parents also tend to relate to each other much better, and are less likely to snap at each other, argue or lose their tempers.
6. Sixthly why rest? Because resting regularly will make you a better parent. A well-rested mum is a happier, less stressed, less irritable, more patient, more tolerant and more energetic mum. A well-rested mum is also better able to meet the emotional needs of her children. Strangely mothers are often the ones who set the tone for family life: if mum is feeling stressed, upset or anxious, the kids tend to pick up on it, internalise it and then reflect it back in bad behaviour.
7. And finally, seventhly, why rest? Because resting regularly sets a good example to your kids. It shows them that rest is important—that life isn't just about work, work and more work. My parents are workaholics who rarely take holidays. As a result, I am very bad at rest, and the impact of this on both my husband and child is pretty awful.

How to rest

Right: hopefully I've convinced you of the importance of rest. But I'm sure you must be thinking, “That's all very well, but how on earth do you find time to rest in between looking after the kids, doing housework and making sure the wheels don't fall off everything?”

Here I am hoping we can help each other. I can tell you what I do, but what I do may not work for you because my personality leans towards structure, organisation and planning. If you're more of a spontaneous and unstructured person, I'd love to know how you do it because I'm sure you think about it in much more creative ways than I do.

So this is what I do:

• At the beginning of each week, usually on a Sunday afternoon, I sit down, look at the calendar and see what's going on in the week ahead.
• I open a text file on my computer. (I like to use this program called Evernote because then I can sync it with my phone.) In this file, I list the days of the week as headings. Then under each day, I list all the things that are happening and then all the things I need to do—for example,

  MONDAY

  • Playgroup 9:30 am
  • Laundry
  • Vacuum
  • Mop kitchen and bathroom floors

• After doing all that, I schedule in rest time. Every week I usually get two fixed rest periods: Tuesday afternoons, when my in-laws come and babysit, and Friday afternoons, when I take Astrid to my mum's house. (I use both of these rest periods to write. Just as an aside, if you're interested in the topic of motherhood and creativity, check out The Divided Heart by Rachel Power.) But sometimes I also ask Ben to take Astrid out for a couple of hours on the weekend so I can have the house to myself. Or I arrange to see a movie in the evening with a friend. Or I call for extra babysitters when Ben and I want to do something special together—or when I have something big I need to finish (for example, this talk!) I also get to sleep in a little on Mondays and Fridays when Ben gets up to feed Astrid breakfast.
• When I've finished filling out the text file, Ben and I take a look at it together. (This usually happens after dinner on a Sunday night when Astrid's gone to bed.) We look at it together to make sure we're both on the same page: he knows what's happening and what I need him to do, and I know what his week is going to be like and also when he will take some alone time. (He and I have a standing agreement that he can go out with his friends one evening a week, then sleep in a bit the following day.)
• During this time, we also work out which night will be “date night”. It's never worked for us to say Friday is date night or Saturday is date night; sometimes there are things on Fridays and Saturdays that can't be moved. We're also not very good at doing date night, but this process reminds us to slot it in and keep working at it.
• In terms of other stuff beyond weekly planning, I try to keep rest on the agenda by noting in the calendar things that I might like to do or go to as they come to my attention. For example, I really love movies and usually have a bit of an idea of what's coming out when. Every now and then when I think of it, I'll put release dates into the calendar to remind me about the things I want to see. Then if I have time, I'll arrange to go with a friend.
• The other thing I do is a little strange: I keep a list of things somewhere that I call my Rest and Relaxation list. It's just a list of things I like to do—watching TV, watching movies/DVDs, reading, knitting, bookbinding, eating good food, shopping, visiting the art gallery, listening to live music, going to the theatre, going for a walk, exploring new places, and so on. The reason why I keep this list is because sometimes I forget what I enjoy doing—particularly when I am feeling low and nothing seems fun.
• Holidays are harder, and they're something Ben and I need to keep working on. Theoretically we should set aside time to plan for holidays at the beginning of the year—even if we just end up having a staycation. In practice, that never works!
• I did, however, manage to have what I called a “Mommy Holiday” last November during a period when Ben could not get leave and I felt like I was burning out. It went for a week and the rules were:
  1. Minimise all housework (which meant getting some of it done before Mommy Holiday)
  2. Use disposable nappies
  3. Call in all babysitting favours
  4. Plan to do something nice every day
  5. Make time for all aspects of rest—sleep, exercise, leisure, socialising, creativity, etc.

An aside

Just as an aside before I finish this talk and hand things over to you: I think we mothers can often be very harsh with ourselves, thinking things like

• “Other people have it harder than I do and manage to do it all with far less help. I just need to put in more effort.”
• “I need to be less lazy.”
• “I need to be less of a wuss and just suck it up.”

Let me encourage you to view your circumstances objectively. Don't compare your situation to others'; it's like comparing apples to oranges, and it's never helpful. You are you: no on else has your family, your in-laws, your husband, your kids, your income and your temperament. You need to work out what will make things sustainable for you. How can rest can help you keep going with the business of being a mum/wife/worker/superwoman, etc.? Only you can answer that question.

Over to you

Okay, enough about me. Over to you.

• How has the way you rest changed since having kids?
• How do you make time for rest? (I'm really interested in how you make time for exercise as that's something I'm supremely bad at.)
• What sorts of things do you enjoy doing when you rest? What would be on your Rest and Relaxation list? (Think of the categories I mentioned earlier: sleep, exercise, leisure, socialising, creativity.)
• How do you plan holidays?
• How do you keep rest on the agenda?

Endnotes

¹ cf. Exodus 31:14, 35:2; Numbers 15:32-36.

2 Jennifer Ackerman, Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2007, p. 166.

I realised something the other day about why I have issues with cooking and why I think I suck at it: it's because I don't understand the principles behind each recipe. (People think I'm a foodie because I take so many pictures of food, and therefore assume that I can cook and cook well. Not so: I love eating food; I hate cooking, and if I had enough money, I would totally hire a personal chef.)

What do I mean by “principles”? Take quiche, for example: quiche was the first dish I ever learned how to make. People are surprised when I tell them that but that's because they think quiche is hard. I say to them, “It's not hard; I can make it!” But I can say that because I've made it so many times, I understand the principles behind quiche. Here's the recipe I use for quiche. I can't remember where I got it from, so apologies if I am violating someone's copyright:

Ham, mushroom and corn quiche

Ingredients

• ham (about 4-6 slices chopped into little bits)
• 3 mushrooms sliced
• half a cup of frozen corn
• 1 sheet of square puff pastry
• 5-6 beaten eggs (depending on the size of your quiche dish)
• about 300 ml milk (the amount of milk should match the amount of eggs)
• 3 tsp dried basil
• pepper to taste
• enough grated cheese to cover the bottom of the quiche dish

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180°C (200°C if your oven isn’t very strong).
2. Grease quiche dish with margarine/butter and line with puff pastry (make sure it's defrosted first. You can cut off the corners that stick out and use them to patch up other areas).
3. Cover the base with grated cheese.
4. Fry ham, corn and mushrooms in margarine/butter and then spread evenly on top of the cheese.
5. Combine eggs, milk, basil and pepper, and pour on top of everything else in the quiche dish.
6. Bake in oven for about 50 mins.

You can even modify the recipe to make mini quiches in muffin tins if you want:

Now, this is what I mean about the principles behind quiche: this is what you need to know about the way quiche cooks if you ever want to modify the recipe:

• Whatever you use for filling (be it ham, mushroom, corn, chicken, asparagus, sweet potato, broccoli or whatever takes your fancy) has to be cooked properly before you put the quiche in the oven.
• The main part of the quiche is the egg and milk combo.
• When the quiche is in the oven, what happens is the cheese melts and rises to the top and browns, the egg and milk mixture turn solid, and the filling is caught in that much like insects in amber.

Most recipes don't explain that. I guess someone decreed long ago they don't need to since whenever I read recipes these days, they're often stripped down to the bare essentials. But then because they don't explain why the instructions say to do this or do that, I end up stuffing it up because I don't understand, or sometimes I substitute something for something and then it all goes wrong and I don't understand why.

For example, take this Taste.com.au recipe for chicken pasta bake: step four reads:

Melt butter in a saucepan over medium heat until foaming. Add flour. Cook, stirring with a wooden spoon, for 1 to 2 minutes or until mixture bubbles. Remove from heat. Stir in milk until smooth. Return to heat. Cook, stirring, for 4 to 5 minutes or until mixture boils and thickens. Stir in tasty cheese. Season with salt and pepper.

It's the part where you make the cheese sauce. When I first made this recipe, I didn't have any flour (because I don't bake). But for some reason, I had cornflour so I thought why not use that? (See, this is why I suck at cooking.) But I didn't understand why it said to melt the butter and mix it with flour before stirring in the milk: why not mix it all in together? My friends had to explain to me it was because the flour would get all clumpy in the milk, and that these instructions were standard when you were making white sauce. Well, there you go! I didn't know that. No cookbook has ever explained that to me. Where would I have even learned that? Certainly not high school Home Economics.

Even so, knowing that hasn't helped me to master pasta bake; I thought I would make one that had a tomato-based sauce and it was a total disaster.

Risotto, on the other hand, I can do—but only through the cheating method where you use a rice cooker instead of standing at the stove for hours, stirring and pouring, stirring and pouring. Somehow I understand the principles of risotto—namely:

• Whatever you want to put into the risotto—mushrooms, sweet potato, carrots, chicken, zucchini, capsicum, etc.—has to be cooked first. I would sometimes grill the capsicum, peel off the skin and then chop it up. Carrots and sweet potato I would often steam in the rice cooker. (It is rather embarrassing how long it took me to work out that root vegetables need much longer to cook than some other vegetables like mushrooms and zucchini.)
• You have to use the right kind of rice (like arborio), and the rice has to be made using some sort of stock (usually chicken).
• Once the “filling” is cooked and the rice is cooked, you combine it all together and sprinkle cheese all through it on a low heat so the cheese melts but does not burn on the bottom. For extra flavouring, add pepper, parsley, lemon juice or verjuice.

Do you understand what I mean? (*Sigh*. Maybe I need a special cookbook written just for me.)

Anyway, that revelation has helped me have more confidence in cooking, I think. Recently I decided to try a new recipe because I wanted to make shepherd's pie but realised we had no potatoes. (Potatoes are not a standard root vegetable at our house.) We did, however, have sweet potatoes, so I wondered if there happened to be a recipe for shepherd's pie with sweet potato. Turns out there is. The thing is, it had all sorts of weird ingredients in it, like hemp milk (but fortunately the recipe said you could use normal milk), artichoke hearts (which I assumed were just a kind of filling that could be substituted for something else), raw organic agave nectar (which I ignored, but then learned that it was basically to make it sweet so then the second time I made this dish I used honey instead) and fruity olive oil (didn't have any so used normal olive oil). Oh, and the first time I made the dish, I had no nutmeg so used Moroccan seasoning instead. (I'm sure if my grandmother had made this sort of food, she'd be rolling in her grave, but both my grandmothers were Chinese and pretty much just made Chinese food.) Oh, and I didn't have those sort of tomatoes so just used normal tinned ones.

Anyway, it could have been another culinary disaster, but it wasn't. I think it was because I sort of understand the principles underlying shepherd's pie though—namely:

• Anything you want to put in the filling with the mince has to be thoroughly cooked before the whole thing goes in the oven. So I steamed the carrots in the rice cooker first (or maybe I microwaved them; I forget. I've since discovered that the microwavable rice cooker steamer thing I have can do carrots in 15 minutes, whereas in the rice cooker, they normally take twice as long). And I fried zucchini, mince, peas and corn after cooking the mince and the onions. And then once everything had been cooked, I added the seasoning—the balsamic vinegar, honey, thyme, basil, parsley, cinnamon, salt and pepper (and I think I added oregano too for fun). All that lined the bottom of the baking dish.
• Then on top I spooned the mashed sweet potato. I steamed the sweet potato in the rice cooker first (it takes about 25 minutes or so, according to the steaming chart that came with it. I am thankful for the steaming chart because otherwise I would have no idea how long things take to cook. Apparently sweet potato cooks faster than carrots; who knew?) Then I mashed it with a potato masher, mixing in the sat, pepper, nutmeg, olive oil and milk.
• With ordinary shepherd's pie, you put cheese on top of the potato. I didn't do it with this recipe, but I wonder what it would have been like if I had.
• Put the whole lot in the oven for 25 minutes.

So while I certainly don't claim to be a Masterchef and even though I think I still have stacks and stacks to learn about cooking (e.g. I cannot do roasts. And I cannot make a soft-boiled egg to save my life), I feel like I'm starting to get somewhere. I still don't enjoy cooking. But I like to think that I have a bit more of an inkling about what I'm doing.

Now if I could only understand the principles behind exercise …

Money, money, money

I worry how this post will be received. I don't want to come across as being cheap for cheapness' sake. But at the same time, I don't want to come across as being greedy or covetous or overly focussed on leisure. I guess I worry that what I say will not be received the way I intend because you, my dear reader, may not share my perspective on and attitude towards money.

Ah money! That's a contentious broad topic on which I wrote half a blog post and then discarded. In terms of elementals, I pretty much agree with Tony Payne's Cash Values studies on money—that God owns all the money, but he graciously shares his wealth with us so that we may serve him with it; that things become problematic when you start worshipping money instead of God; that the Bible advocates prudence, wisdom and generosity in the way you use your money; that money is a tool by which you live (and pay your bills); and that one of the financial priorities of all Christians is to support those in gospel ministry so that they can get on with the specialised task of building God's kingdom in a more intensive manner.

However, with the third point—prudence, wisdom and generosity—I sometimes feel that I am a lot more relaxed in the way I use my money than other Christians. I recognise that in terms of material things, God has given me much. I also recognise that my family background has influenced my attitudes a great deal. When I was growing up, we never went without. One could even argue that we kids were pretty much spoiled. And yet my parents taught me to save and be (somewhat) disciplined with money. But at the same time, being cheap was never considered a virtue; if you had a problem that could be solved with money, it was never a waste to use money (if you had it, that is) to solve it. In contrast, I get the feeling that in the families of other people I know, their default position was to try to solve the problem themselves instead of throwing money at it. But in my personal opinion, one approach is not necessarily better or more godly than the other.

Generally speaking, most Christians are poor—or at least poorer than the majority of the population. It's partly to do with the way they use their money (e.g. in giving much of it away—to ministry work, to charitable work, to those in need). It's also partly to do with the fact that they serve and worship the true and living God, not material things. All of this is admirable and wonderful. However, sometimes this way of living translates into beliefs about money and the way people ought to spend their money that I think is rather ungodly—as if poverty were a virtue in and of itself. The rich are viewed with suspicion (perhaps with Proverbs and 1 Timothy 6 in mind), and anything the rich do is pounced upon and examined through this particular lens.

So I notice that often I feel like I'm being judged for what I do and the way I spend my money (not that I'm hugely public about that and not that anyone has said anything in particular). I know that you can't jump to conclusions about what someone else thinks of you and what you do; unless they reveal to you that that is what they think, you can never be sure so it's best not to assume. However, it can be hard sometimes for me to avoid thinking that someone else has formed an opinion about me and my spending habits just from comments they may utter or their facial expressions. I think that's why I am often automatically or unconsciously on the defensive when I talk about things like this—as if I have to justify everything.

Justifying a habit

I don't have to justify everything. But I wonder if it's worth trying to do so for the sake of argument. Or whatever. Basically, surrounding the topic of cheaper movie tickets is the related topics of rest, leisure, and Christians and art.

Rest

I think movie-watching partly falls under the category of rest and the theology of rest. In the Ten Commandments, we are commanded to rest because God rested on the seventh day from his work of creation (Exodus 20:8-11). It was supposed to be a day of enjoyment and fellowship—with God and with his people. The human body is frail and mortal; it can only be pushed so far before it breaks. Rest is essential not only for our physical, mental and emotional health, but also for our godliness: when we are well-rested, we are more patient, more compassionate, more forgiving, slower to anger and less irritable. In addition, resting demonstrates our trust in God—our confidence that he is in control and will carry on without us (because he doesn't need us). I keep thinking of this article which originally appeared in Christianity Today, which argued that perhaps the best way to love your neighbour was to get a good night's sleep.

“Rest”, I think, entails more than just sleep. It also encompasses exercise, leisure and, to a certain extent (because this also overlaps with work), creative pursuits.

Leisure

By “leisure”, I'm thinking of the things in life you enjoy. For me, it's reading, (some forms of) shopping, walking around looking at things, going to concerts/plays/musicals/gigs, spending time with friends and, of course, watching movies. (And TV.) I love the experience of going to the cinema—seeing something on the big screen with the surround sound, the popcorn, the trailers … really, just insert the content and themes of my five-page comic “Reel life” in this section and you get the picture. I don't expect everyone to enjoy movies as much as I do (and certainly I seem to be more in tune with what's coming out soon, what's currently shooting, what's considered “good” and what's not than most people I know). (I know I also tend to watch a lot more than most people I know.) But I don't understand people who elevate one artform over another—as if books are somehow inherently superior to the popular artforms (like pop music and television) just because they contain words.

For the time-poor (and being a parent of a young child, I am very much time-poor in the leisure department), movies are compact and easily consumable. I find that ever since Astrid was born, I have neglected reading (much as I love it) simply because reading takes up more time and requires more brain space (in that when you read, you need to keep the world of the book you are reading in your head for the next time you take it up again; it is near impossible to read a whole book in one sitting when you have kids [unless it's a picture book]). Going to the cinema also gets me out of the house for a couple of hours, giving me a fairly decent break, as well as feeding and nourishing my appetites for story, art and culture.

Christians and art

Which leads me to my next topic: Christians and art. It's a contentious one, and there are many passionate beliefs on both sides (the sides being those who have a more relaxed attitude towards the arts and those who have a more stringent view). Part of it, I think, has to do with the overlap of the ages—that we live in the world, even though we are members of God's kingdom, which hasn't quite reached its fullness and won't until Jesus returns, and so we are not of the world. Many Christians I know tend to view art with a great deal of suspicion—which makes it doubly hard, I think, to withstand the shadow of others' judgementalism if you are a Christian and an artist, for anything you do will always be critiqued and critiqued extremely closely. Furthermore, members of your audience who are Christian, if they know that you are a Christian too, will have very strong opinions about what you've created—and what you ought to have done (being a Christian artist—whatever that means in their minds)—opinions rooted in their own views on Christians and art.

For example, sometimes I get the feeling that if you are a Christian writer, you can only write about Christians. Or you can only allow your characters to commit moral actions—as if, as a Christian writer, you can never write about sin and sinners with any sort of verisimilitude. I can only imagine the sort of complaint letters Frank Peretti received because of the scene in Prophet (which really is only one extremely brief and discrete paragraph) in which his non-Christian protagonist has a one night stand with another character. I suspect that part of the outrage comes from the attitude that a Christian ought not to know so much about sin. But we live in the world (though not of the world), and as a writer and a Christian, you are always observing life around you with all its flaws, and I think if you are seeking to be faithful to God, you will do well to represent human nature in all its fallenness without whitewashing any of it—as if we mere mortals could ever aspire to the holiness and majesty of the divine.

Anyway, I digress. One thing more, then onto what this post is really about.

The artist and the critic

I enjoy watching movies as a leisure/rest thing, but at the same time, I am always critiquing and learning as I watch (as I do with all artforms—to varying degrees, of course; I feel I am not as educated when it comes to music). Movies teach me about narrative, storytelling, emotion and characters. I do not speak the language of film (and I don't think I ever will; I admire the collaboration that goes into making a movie, but I don't think I have the mentality to ever put my creative energies into producing that sort of art). But as a writer, I appreciate the writerly/narrative aspects of film that intersect with writing and the visual aspects of film that intersect with comics. (The former is more important to me, however; I'm not that visually minded.)

I tend to watch a fairly wide variety of things—documentaries, dramas, romcoms, superhero films, adaptations, animation, and so on. There are different things about each genre that interest me. For example, with adaptations, I'm fascinated by how the makers have translated a story from one medium to another, and whether they've been successful/unsuccessful (and why). With romcoms, I'm interested in the narrative and what makes it ring true emotionally (and whether they have managed to capture the true nature of love and convey that successfully to the audience). (IMHO, the best romcoms are less about the romance and more about the heroine's transformation/realisation about herself; the romance is really secondary and almost a metaphor for the internal journey of the character in a Jungian sense … I digress.)

So movies feed the creative part of me as well as functioning to refresh and rejuvenate me. I do not watch for the sake of watching; there is a point to all this consumption.

I don't know why I feel surrounded by all this judgementalism; just who is judging me? And why? Why do I need to be defensive?

Never pay full price again!

So we come to the meat of this post: how to obtain cheaper movie tickets. A standard adult ticket these days costs around AUD 18 (more if you're attending a specialty screening—3D, Gold Class, IMAX, etc.) That's pretty steep! But it doesn't have to cost that much. In fact, the cinemas and distributors make it very easy to see things for less:

• Go to a cheaper cinema: There are a few still around—for example, Randwick Ritz and Beverly Hills (though the latter is still a bit pricey).
• Go on a cheaper night: Most cinemas have cheap Tuesdays.
• Join the club: Particularly if you live in Sydney's Inner West and you see movies fairly frequently, it's worth it to join the Dendy and the Palace. For the Dendy, adult membership is $24 for two years, renewing for two years is $22, member tickets are always $12 (no matter what session, and you can buy one for a friend), you get special ticket prices to member screenings, and they send you the occasional voucher in the mail to use at the candy bar for cheaper popcorn and drinks. Oh, and if you see four movies there in a three-month period, you get your fifth ticket free. For the Palace, it's $28 for two years, they give you a complimentary ticket (well, two if you're choosing membership for two years), they send you another complimentary ticket on your birthday, they invite you to members screenings and members tickets are only $13. So even if you only go to that cinema twice a year, it's completely worth it. Event Cinemas and Hoyts don't have as good a club program, in my opinion, but they do have “movie of the week” $10 tickets for members (usually close to the end of a film's run). They do have special members screenings; it's just that they're usually for films I'm not interested in. Event Cinemas also have this points program whereby you get points for every film you see, and then when you've accumulated a certain amount, you get a free ticket.
• If you're on Twitter, you really ought to follow Hopscotch (well, if you like the films they distribute). (This is their Facebook page.) They often do giveaways as a promotional tool to drum up interest in their films—free passes, passes to preview screenings, two for one passes, and so on. Sometimes these go to the first 100 who send them their details; sometimes you have to do things like send them a photo that reminds you of Paris (for Midnight in Paris).
• Hopscotch and a few other distributors also tend to give free tickets to their industry partners to give away to their target audience. I'm on the mailing lists of a few organisations like the Australian Ballet, the Sydney Opera House, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Sydney Writers Festival and so on, and often at the bottom of their newsletters, they have competitions to win tickets. Again, sometimes they're for specific screenings. Sometimes they're two for one passes. Sometimes they're double passes valid for the entire run of the film. I often enter for the films I'm interested in, and it's surprised me the number of times I've been sent a pass. I've received passes for The Lives of Others, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, The Soloist, The Forbidden Kingdom, District 9—well, you get the picture: quite a wide variety of films.
• Finally, our health fund gives members discounts on movie tickets for Event Cinemas and Hoyts. At the moment, it's AUD 10.50 plus booking fee, plus they send you codes that you can use when booking tickets online. The whole system is so sophisticated now, you just need to have the barcode on your phone for them to scan; no need to print them out. I can't remember what the expiry date is on those tickets (six months? A year?), but I go often enough for it not to be a problem.

One last thing: always read the fine print. Unfortunately some passes and tickets cannot be used for certain sessions (most significantly Saturday after 5 pm, which is really the worst time to go the cinema anyway: all those people!) Check and double check before you head to the box office. And enjoy!