Hot on the heels of Cherry Crow Children and its stories picking up four Ditmar nominations, this morning brought me a flurry of Facebook notifications and the news that it's also picked up no less than SIX Aurealis Award nominations:

The Wages of Honey, The Miseducation of Mara Lys and The Cherry Crow Children of Haverny Wood are each shortlisted for Best Horror Novella
The Miseducation of Mara Lys is shortlisted for Best Young Adult Short Story
The Briskwater Mare is shortlisted for Best Horror Short Story, and
Cherry Crow Children itself is shortlisted for Best Collection

I didn't even know I wrote horror.

Over on Facebook Alisa has just reminded me of the Embiggen podcast where I first met most of the other Twelve Planet authors, and listened to them talk about their (published, award-winning) collections while I sat, tiny and horrified and totally drowning in the deep end of the big kids pool. This is what I said of it at the time:

It was great fun to record, and absolutely fascinating to get an insight into everyone else's collections, actual or still planned, so it's well worth the listen. My own collection is still very much nebulous, so there's no much to glean about the stories I'll produce, but you do get an insight into how I work: namely, panicked.

Panicked. Heh. I'd just thrown out 40,000 words of The Briskwater Mare and started from scratch yet again, and still had two more stories to write (The Cherry Crow Children of Haverny Wood, and The Miseducation of Mara Lys). Plus, I was pregnant with Squawk — but had yet to tell anyone, even my parents, and was quaking with the certainty that babies and stories don't mix and how was I going to deliver anything worthy of the Twelve Planet series?

Thank all that's thankable for publishers like Alisa, who commit to making such initiatives possible, even if it means waiting 3 years longer for a book than she expected to.

To everyone who nominated, and to everyone who helped make this book a reality, and to everyone who think it belongs in the top 10 of any list, I'm truly humbled. Thank you.