Cake the First:

Well, this is Fred's first happy birthday cake. It's a plain cake with cream cheese icing and fondant hearts. The icing was going to be blue but the natural colours I bought were a bit insipid (you need CHEMICALS dammit to get that really bright, really wrong blue) and the blue was kind of grey, which didn't seem a very happy birthday colour, so I went for purple instead. As far as I know she liked it, but she was a bit quiet last night. It's hard to get anything out of her about her day at creche anyway, I feel like I'm interrogating her just trying to find out if she had a good day. I need lights. I need props.
The next cake will be on Saturday. Then the final cake on Sunday. Three cakes for a third birthday. It is either fitting or excessive or both.
Three cakes. I must REALLY love her. ; )

Widget
One of my widgets (a Mac thing mentioned in one of my other entries down there) is this thing called Oblique Strategies by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. It's subtitle is 'Over one hundred worthwile dilemmas'. You click on it and it says something oblique and strategic like (hang on, let me click) 'A line has two sides'. I guess it's supposed to help you think laterally to solve creative blocks or something but jeez. A line has two sides? What the? Here's another: 'Do the last thing first.' Yes, sensei. It's like a cross between a fortune cookie and some dreadful ex-boyfriend who gives advice when you just want a timtam and a hug.
Hmmm. I think that's the key. They should put their oblique strategies on tim tams. Perfect. I think my problem is I don't want oblique strategies. I want concrete ones.

Heater
We have a very loud heater. It complains a lot. So I can be warm and deaf or cold and aurally relieved. Oooh I just bashed it up and it's quiet. Sshh...must go and write a quick novel before it works up to something again.

Eglantine
She eats sadness, she eats the hollow space of her mum's wounded heart. The cake is tantalising because it is love and frivolty and she can eat its heart until she's full to bursting. But cake can be beautiful yet dry and disappointing. The hard icing facade conceals so much.

Cake
In Rise cake is the new sex. 

More Cake
On Friday Frederique turns three and to honour this spectacular event she will have cake. She will have three cakes - one for Tuesday creche (oops must rememebr to make that one today!!), one for the kid's party on Saturday and one for the family party on Sunday. Cake, cake, cake. I'm a bit scared of all this cake. On her birthday she will have spaghetti because spaghetti is what she loves best.

Question Two
Okay I've finally answered the 'inspiration question in Random House's quesionnaire.
1.Who or what was the biggest inspiration for you to become a writer?
That’s such a huge question and it’s taken me a few days to answer. I felt it should be a chance enounter with a celebrated stranger or a book that I read that compelled me to write. But I think for me writing is just a continuation of playing. I played a lot of imaginative games as a kid, with my best friend Zoe, with my cousins, my sister and with the other kids who lived in the bushy suburb where I grew up. Every conversation Zoe and I had started with ‘Let’s say’ or ‘Let’s pretend.’ Zoe and I are still best friends. She comes around and she and Martin (my husband) and I sit around our table outside and talk about people we know and why they do the things they do. I’m very interested in other people’s motivations and actions – so this is perhaps why I tend to focus on my characters and creating a whole sense of their psychology in my writing. And I play with my kids now, my three year old is very imaginative too and it's one of the best things about being a parent - watching her playlife and dreamlife evolve.

Title
I've been tossing around some titles for Undine 3. Thematically, I like Butterfly - there's a scene in Breathe where Undine makes herself out of butterflies and then her spooky three year old brother Jasper produces a butterfly from his hands. And of course butterflies are the poster insect for chaos theory. But I wonder if it sounds a bit...well, airy fairy. You know, like I've been hanging around a certain almost three year old girl too long. Then there's Trick. It's a cool word, and kind of goes with the magic, and the character of Phoenix, who's an illusionist. But I think the title will be Rise. It goes nicely with Undine and Breathe and it sounds very uplifting for a final in a trilogy. I think it came from a Sylvia Plath poem, I've had a refrain - I can't quite recall it but a snatch of something - rolling around in my head. 'I think I might rise...' Maybe Lady Lazarus. I'll look it up and get back to you. Or to me at any rate.
I am still struggling a bit with the narrative flow, I'm finding myself easily distracted. We've been talking about me going away with the baby to get some work done...we'll see. I ahve found a $3.95 yoga class, a bit alarmingly cheap but still, it might buy me the zen I need to get my brain working.
I have a widget (mac users will know about widgets) on my dashboard (you PC users don't know what you're missing out on - I'm actually updating my blog with a widget RIGHT NOW) of Einstein quotes. I just read this one - it struck me as rather sad. 
"It's strange to be known so universally and yet so lonely."

An Author Questionnaire
Random House asked me to fill out a new questionnaire. I'm obedient, so I have done so. Here it is.

1. When did you start writing?
When I was a kid, for school. My grade four teacher Mrs Street called creative writing splurge – because she wanted us to just splurge words over the page. But I didn’t always love it. In Grade One we had to write a sentence or two of ‘News’ every day – it had to be true. I mean, how much actually happens to a six year old? I went home, I played, I had sausages and potatoes for tea. Hard to spin it out for 200 odd days of school in a year. One day I hid my News book so I wouldn’t have to do it and I think it actually worked for a few days. Well that’s my memory of it anyway, however faulty. But I remember the teacher’s assistant finding it under the art table so I obviously didn’t hide it well enough.

2. Who or what was the biggest inspiration for you to become a writer?
:| It was obviously a deeply profound moment because I can't actually answer this question. Will have to think of a good story involving a chance encounter with a kindly yet impossibly famous stranger who just happened to be in the park on a wintry afternoon.

3. What are you reading at the moment?
Right now I’m reading Incurable by John Marsden. Good grief, how many ways can one girl almost die before she’s old enough to vote. I think death by cow is going overboard. Somewhat. I have a few books lined up – Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood and I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (which I’m saving for a cosy day). To my three year old, The Elephant and the Bad Baby – my own copy from childhood.

4. Who are your three favourite authors and why?
I’ve got a gazillion – so I better add the disclaimer that this list is subject to change at whim.
Rumer Godden. Because she writes beautiful books for children, teenagers and adults and because she has a lovely name. And because I get lost in her books.
Simon Armitage. Because his poems are as absorbing and character filled and as compulsively readable as a good novel.
Bob Graham. Because I read his books aloud to my little girl every day, and every day they sound more and more like poetry to me – I think his books must be night-flowering, in secret on the bookshelves when my daugher is sleeping the books grow and change. I am a bit in awe of him actually.

5. What is the best thing about being an author?
Reading kids books counts as research. I get to live with stories and characters in my head for much much longer when I write a book than when I read one and I get (some) say in what happens to them.

6. Are any of your characters taken from real life?
Oh yes. All my characters are really ME! Ha ha. But they are. Kind of. Writing’s really just a kind of acceptable disassociative disorder.

7. Where do you do your writing?
On the couch, on my laptop. Outside under the grape vine.

8. When you’re not writing what do you do?
Muck around on the Net – I am part of an online mother’s group that’s just become a big noisy shrieking gaggle of friends. Walk. Visit. I am a stay at home mum too, to Frederique, almost 3, and Una Pearl, 6 months. – I scribble when they’re asleep or distracted by snails and Daddy. They are terribly naughty, but that’s okay, so am I so we have a marvellous time.

9. What are you working on at the moment?
The third and final book in the Undine trilogy. And I’ve started a blog which may become something…another book maybe. Actually I have a few irons in a few fires.

10. If you weren’t an author what would you be?
An archaeologist – I actually started to be one, but got distracted along the way.

11. Do you have a favourite quote or motto?
“Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid” Goethe

12. What advice would you give to young writers?
Write. Write and write. Write for fun, write for yourself, write what you know, write what you love. Write the book you want to read. Find a voice, make it strong, make it distinctive, make it real.

We did some rainstomping today. Wellies and all. Fred and Una Pearl like the rain.

Where did Eglantine come from? Was she always there, walking down that corridor in a cool house in summer? Did she find me or did I find her? Does she come from within, from all my collective experiences - things I've read, seen, been, done? Or is she from without, from a kind of collective, intertextual consciousness (now that's deep)? For me writing a book is the same as reading one - I'm desperate to find out what happens next.

I think Eglantine is a little girl. The house is quiet. The baby is sleeping. Eglantine's mother is outside somewhere, pegging clothes on the line or weeding the vegetable garden. They have a big sprawling backyard, a hills hoist, some chooks. It's afternoon, hot outside but inside the house is dark and cool. Eglantine has a home haircut, but it's sweet, short with blonde tufts sticking out. She's creeping through the slumbering house, up the hallway - bare feet on floorboards. Tomorrow is Eglantine's birthday. In the kitchen on the bench is a cake, with hard pink sugary icing. Eglantine is peeking through the kitchen door, she's standing stretched up on tiptoes. She wants a taste, just a bite of pink, crystally sugar...

Autumn
It's autumn but as always Melbourne is having a last gasp of dry heat. I love this time of year in this city. It reminds me of being 21 (ten years ago, yikes) when I first moved here with 4 friends from Tasmania. We moved into a big double storey terraced house in North Fitzroy, with a Kiwi living in the shed out the back. I was reading Monkey Grip by Helen Garner and all the landmarks were ours - Edinburgh Gardens, Fitzroy pool with it's painted sign: aqua profunda. She even moved into a house on the same street we were living on.  

The late afternoon light in Melbourne in Autumn is golden. It makes my heart sing. It also makes me a tiny bit sad, but I don't know why.