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I'll put today's WHM post up in US time (ie tomorrow morning) and tomorrow's post up later. Today's post requires a bit of formatting and I could either have done it or I could have done work. I so needed to do a few hours work.

My capacity to write and edit and research increases, day by day, but some stuff with deadlines coming soon was getting rather behind and so I made a call. What's odd is that my earlier posts didn't get in the way of WHM - it was the editing. I can do some things fairly easily and other things make my eye work harder and then I get the spider leaping across my vision again. So typing is easier than editing and editing is easier than html and it's all easier this week than last week. I'm making more errors this week, but that's not my eye's fault!

I will catch up with things! What's more, I will catch up with people. I finally managed to book a bus to Sydney for the Aurealis Awards. I shall cheer everyone on with great gusto. That gives me until May to completely catch up with the lost ten days. And I'm already caught up with the Beastly part of this weekend (and last week was a quiet week for the Beast, thank goodness, so it's only everything else that's fallen behind - 'only' everything else!)- and many of my messed notes are roughly sorted - and I have ordered replacements for enough of the Medieval replicas so I don't have to madly improvise my next workshop (well, I do, but less so). I feel a lot happier now that I'm not staggering from crisis to crisis. Suddenly all I want to do is sleep. I haven't had much sleep recently and teh sleep I have had has been full of strange visions (burglary does that, I discovered - everything around me feels askew and uncomfortable).

So, when I wake up, it will still be Saturday (by a twist of the imagination) and you will read what the wonderful Lisa Hannett has to say!

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Lisa's post will come when it's ready. Sorry for the wait, but there were formatting issues. I could probably have solved them if life were normal, but my life is not normal today, so I have asked Lisa for help. It's worth the wait!

Today's post will be up in a moment (no formatting issues!) and Lisa's will be along later. Right now, I'm fixing Kylie's post - mostly to add her missing bio. And then I am due along hot and fragrant bath!

Women's History Month - guest post by Sue Isle

I've been sitting here in my study looking around at the books for inspiration. You're never completely on your own when you live with books. If a person never read anything, how would they be able to write? Everything I've read has inspired me in some way. Even if I absolutely hated certain books, which was the case with some of the books I was required to read through school and university, they still shaped how I turned out as a writer and maybe as a person.

Still, when you're asked to write about writers who have inspired you, it's generally accepted that they're writers you like.

The thought of "women's writing" actually annoys the hell out of me, as I've never liked the idea of segregating half the community into an unnecessary subcategory. When I encounter people who think being female causes one to think or write a certain way, I have to fight the urge to smack them repeatedly with a nice hardback copy of War and Peace. [That's still the heaviest book in my library.] With great self control, I didn't smack the workmate who said wasn't science fiction for boys, upon hearing that I wrote the stuff. There's writing. There are authors. Deal with it.

Okay. What have I got here? Ruth Park. The Harp in the South. That book is from high school, I think, and the fact that it's still here means it somehow survived the butchery that is high school literature analysis. With most of them, I could never bear to open the book again. I've read one other book of hers, Swords and Crowns and Rings (title from memory) which was a mainstream novel about a dwarf. It wasn't much more cheerful than Harp, but even so, she was very good about writing stories full of awful things (family tragedies and terrible poverty etc) which nevertheless contained hope and even humour and could depict a time and place so clearly that I felt I'd been there.

I'm primarily into science fiction, but I also read a lot of historicals. Other times, either way. I find those more interesting than reading about the here and now. That's why I've got Rosemary Sutcliffe, Ellis Peters, Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte in my library alongside C.J. Cherryh, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Barbara Hambly. All of them depict their worlds so clearly I can see them and go back to them again and again because there's always something new.

The book I always name when asked for ONE favourite (which is like taking one chocolate) is Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and not always for the big picture reasons; depiction of prejudice, hope for the future and so on. It's another survivor from high school and what I remember liking then was the creativity of the children. They invented games the way I did, with characters and storylines, sometimes borrowing from movie serials but always uniquely theirs. They get into awful trouble when their father catches them acting out the real-life drama of their neighbours, who imprisoned their mentally-ill son in their house. Young Jem imagines lurid scenarios of Boo Radley's life but his father Atticus comes out with one of the most chilling lines I've ever read, relayed by viewpoint character Scout, that no, there were other ways of turning people into ghosts.

The theme mentioned artists or musicians which have inspired me, as well as writers, but I'm afraid I don't know too much about the first two. My favourite music type is folk, because I enjoy songs which tell stories, so I've listened to a lot of music from folk musicians, some famous and others unknown beyond the folkies club they played in. From that I discovered filk, the sf and fantasy variations. Often it was created and played by sf authors, sometimes by fans who became famous as filkers. These include people like Leslie Fish, who wrote cheerful, anarchic pieces about the fall of human civilisation, such as "Black Powder and Alcohol/When the states and the cities fall/When your back is against the wall!" Fantastic stuff, highly recommended to have playing while one writes one's Nobel Prizewinning epic about the zombie apocalypse. Hey, a person can dream.

Right now, as I write, I've discovered the writing of Kerry Greenwood, the Phyrne Fisher books set in 1920s Melbourne! These are a lot of fun and a great inspiration. This is the 1920s we should have had. Phryne Fisher for Prime Minister!

I'm supposed to put in a bio, I see. This always makes my brain freeze up. I always have to go and get the last thing I wrote a bio for and remind myself, though I have trouble stopping once I do get started. This was for Nightsiders (2011), the book of stories and one novella that's part of the Twelve Planets series from Twelfth Planet Press and I was allowed to rabbit on for a whole page there. Shorter version: I live in Perth, Western Australia and am very fond of it, despite what I do to it in my fiction, predicting its almost-demise from climate change. I've written quite a few short stories for various magazines, plus two short books, but am now more interested in longer forms.

I have a Live Journal blog, Apocalypse With Rats and believe that online writing may be the way of the future.

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Today I'm thinking about Shoah. Most people save that for the official remembrance day, but the official remembrance day is always on or near my birthday, so I think about it earlier. Also, Donna and I were talking about the different ways people dealt with their tattoos the other night (because the Phryne Fisher episode had characters from the Jewish Melbourne that was my family's Melbourne - and the world of the novel and TV was nothing like my family's world) and so it's on my mind. In my childhood, I didn't know who were survivors and who weren't, for they all wore long sleeves and we were told it would be cheeky to ask about their childhood. A special kind of courtesy was instilled in me that helped family friends move on. Donna was saying that her experience was quite different - she knew people who showed their numbers.

What strikes me always and ever that there is nothing distinctive about Shoah survivors compared to other humans (any of the survivors - not the Jewish ones alone): there was absolutely no reason they were persecuted. All the reasons for persecution were cultural inventions. They were all human beings.

It wasn't any apparent differences or real threats that caused so much pain. It was imagined differences and perceived threats. It was a misplaced sense of privilege on the part of the persecutors and a really warped understanding of the relative importance of human beings. That sense of privilege and of relative worth led to a bully culture and one where the capacity to kill was given to the bullies.

Every year I mourn the millions who were murdered. This year is no exception.

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I have some very good news. I can see for long enough to write! I just did my BiblioBuffet article for next week. It might be a complete fiasco, but I wrote it and the spider did not dance across my vision. And last night I completed this week's work on the Beast (it was a light week for the Beast, for which I am very thankful). I am reclaiming my life, and it feels very, very good.

Now the spider is making its presence known, however, so I'd better get off the computer for a bit.

Women's History Month: guest post from Lisa L Hannett

( Lisa talks about Rita Hall behind this cut. )