Month: September 2008

Podcast

By / September 30, 2008 / 4 Comments

Yesterday morning, while I was waiting to go on for the television interview, I had a wonderful conversation with Dr. Paul Jenkins. He read Hold on to Your Horses and liked it so much that he asked me to participate in a podcast on the topic of impulsivity in children. That podcast took place today.

Podcasting was a much more relaxing experience than the television interview. With the interview, Julie and I had to try to cram an entire conversation into a 7 minute segment. Most conversations take longer than that to really get rolling. This podcast is just over 20 minutes long, which means there was time for the conversation to evolve and grow. There was time for one person’s comment to spark an idea in another person. It was a relief to not always have to be the one speaking. I could sit back and listen to Dr. Jenkins or Dr. Adams while I gathered my thoughts. This was my first podcasting experience, so I made some newbie mistakes. I sometimes made unnecessary/distracting affirmative noises when others were speaking. Other times I didn’t speak clearly or used gestures to carry part of my meaning. On the whole though, it is a good podcast which contains excellent thoughts for parents of impulsive children.

You can find the audio file at parental-power.com.

Mixed up thoughts of a Television Interviewee

By / September 29, 2008 / 11 Comments

I didn’t post yesterday because I spent most of the afternoon trying not to think about being interviewed on television the following morning.

I don’t have a clip to link to yet, but I will have one. They’ll be sending me a DVD and Howard will excerpt my segment from it and post it for me.

It was fascinating to be an observer in the studio. I got to see how the cameras worked and how the scenery was shifted around for the various segments of show.

Everyone was very friendly. It had a small-town feeling, which I’d expect from a local talk show. A more widely broadcast show would have been higher stress for everyone involved. I spent most of the morning just following a co-host as he clued me in to where I needed to be and what to expect.

Then suddenly it was my turn. Someone called out “30 Seconds!” some one else dashed up to me with a mike. I had to thread it up my shirt and clip it into place. I was in my seat with only seconds to spare before Julie started talking.

I only had 7 minutes on camera. It feels like it went lightning fast. I forgot to mention the stores in Salt Lake who are carrying my book. I feel bad about that. It was kind of surreal. The front of my brain was completely engaged with answering questions and trying to make sure that the most important information was covered. The back of my brain was thinking “should I look at the camera? But I’m not sure where to look. What do I do with my hands. Ack. That gesture felt awkward. Maybe my hands should be in my lap. Oh that was a good segue into where to buy books, but I think I should save that information for last. My hair is tickling my arm, but I don’t think I should touch my face or hair on camera…” And then it was over.

I haven’t watched the segment yet, even though I have the video my neighbor made. I’m afraid to watch it. I’m afraid that when I do, I’ll see all the ways I could have managed the interview better. I’ll want to be able to word things differently. I’ll see all my little ticks and habits that everyone has without realizing it. I’ll be able to hear all the places that I put in pointless space holder words like “um.” Right now the only feedback I have is Howard and my neighbors telling me I was great. I’m afraid to face the mistakes. But I’m going to. I don’t know if I’ll ever do another live television interview, but if I do, I want to have learned from this one.

The guest co-host for today’s show, Dr. Paul, has a weekly podcast. He invited me to be a guest on the podcast tomorrow. This is a much lower stress appearance for me. I’ll have more time to make sure the important information is covered, and I won’t have to worry about how I look, just how I sound. After the podcast goes live, I’ll have a link for that as well.

For now I’m changing back into my mommy clothes and I’m going to curl up on a couch to watch Blues Clues with Patch.

Stories That Bind

By / September 27, 2008 / 4 Comments

Reminder: Don’t forget to go check out my short tale Stories That Bind over at Lorelei Signal. There are only three more days before the current issue expires. You can also vote for the story to be included in the “Best of Year” anthology, or just donate to the story and the magazine. The story will continue to be available in the archives after October 1st, but I’m not sure you’ll still be able to vote for inclusion in the anthology.

The chocolate factory of the evil monkey mastermind.

By / September 26, 2008 / 6 Comments

We had to order more magnet sets to fill the orders that came in with the orders for Teraport Wars books. The magnets do not arrive at our house in neatly bagged sets. They arrive in a huge box of loose magnets. I’ve found that the best way to turn loose magnets into sets is to first stick magnets back-to-back in pairs; Biohazard/Schlock Mercenary, Corrosive Agents/Naked Singularities, High Voltage/Flammable, and Radioactive Emissions/Microwave Lasers. I then line up four stacks of pairs and put four pairs per bag. Creating the system took some thought, but the implication is boring and repetitive. So I decided to pay my kids to do it for me.

Gleek and Link have a bookfair at school next week and they wanted money to spend. So they happily sat down to start sticking magnets together. They started strong, but their enthusiasm waned after about 15 minutes. Fortunately at this point two of my backyard neighbor’s kids and Patch showed up. I set up stations for each of the kids and then I hovered over them all as a quality control officer. My neighbor’s kids thought that this was the coolest job ever. In fact, my neighbor’s 9 year old son began spouting trivia about Schlock Mercenary cartoons, complete with quoted dialog. This startled me because I’m pretty sure he knows the strip better than we do.

After awhile someone mentioned that putting the magnets together was similar to a chocolate making process that they’d watched on a How It’s Made episode. All of the magnets were instantly transformed into chocolates and the children became chocolate factory workers. But this was insufficiently interesting because they then decided that the chocolate factory was in fact owned by The Evil Monkey Mastermind (Howard). I supplied them with the word “minion” and the game was good to go. They spoke in nasal evil voices as they clipped magnets and put them in bags. They particularly liked the phrase “evil monkey mastermind” (it is fun to say, you try it) but they sometimes spoonerized it. Howard happened to walk through just as someone was saying “evil master monkeymind.” Howard objected to having the brain of a monkey and admonished the minions to get it right next time. It turns out that the way they all became minions was by eating the poisoned chocolate. After eating poisoned chocolate, you become a minion for life and have to make more chocolate to catch more minions.

The minions worked for over an hour until all the loose magnets were bagged. Then I paid them and they ran off to play while I double checked all the bags to make sure that none had duplicates. Only two bags had errors, now corrected. The minions did good work and they all begged to be able to do it again sometime because it was the best job ever.

Shipping Phase 3: Inventory Preparation

By / July 8, 2011 / 8 Comments

Phase 1: Collecting orders
Phase 2: Sorting

Phase 3: Inventory Preparation
This phase of shipping preparation runs concurrently with phase 2 and phase 4. This is because the lion’s share of the work during this phase is done by Howard or other volunteers rather than me. It is during this phase that I make sure we have all the supplies and inventory necessary to fulfill all the orders.

This phase begins when a truck pulls into our driveway and drops of pallets of books. We make arrangements to have 3/5 of the books transported to the storage unit. Those books become our inventory for the next couple of years. The rest of the books have to be signed and sketched for shipping. We arrange a day to have a volunteer come help us. This time we shanghaied a neighbor. He would bring a box of books into the house, open it up, and put all the books into a neat stack on our kitchen counter. Howard grabs the stack and starts signing the covers. Every so often the neighbor would grab the stacks of signed books and deliver them to the kitchen table. I am sitting at the table with the sketch stamp and a tall pile of sketch papers. The papers have all be cut to be narrower than the book, but taller than the book. At the top of each sketch paper is the name of the character to be sketched in that book. I grab a stack of books and I put a stamp and a sketch paper just inside the back cover. The primary reason for the sketch papers is so that we can tell without opening the book what character has been sketched inside. This becomes critically important during the packing phase of shipping. The books get boxed back up and the exterior of each box is labeled with the character that is sketched on the books inside. I try to put only one type of sketch per box to prevent confusion during the packing phase. Because Howard and the neighbor moved faster than me, I sometimes had to box up signed but not-yet-stamped books and stack them to be stamped later. “Later” turned out to be 4 days later this time.

After signing over 1400 books, Howard’s hand had to rest before moving in the next section of work. All those boxes of signed and stamped books were hauled down to Dragon’s Keep. Then Howard opened up the boxes of books, drew a picture in each book, and boxed them back up. This time we had 1000 sketch editions. We allotted three weeks of time for Howard to do the sketching. He’s trying to do about 100 per day. Many of the signed books did not need to be stamped or sketched. These just remain in boxes waiting for the shipping day.

While Howard is doing the sketching, I take some time to double check our physical inventory against the reports generated by our store. In theory our store will only sell what we have, but anyone who has run inventory will tell you that things get lost and misplaced. In this case I made several orders to various suppliers to make sure we have the necessary inventory. As the new inventory comes in, I stack it all in boxes. It will all need to be transported down to Dragon’s Keep for the packing phase. I also make a count of the types of boxes and need and what quantities. The different shipping methods have different boxing requirements. The majority of our orders are a single book in a fold-up box. Larger orders go out in 2″, 3″, or 4″ boxes that we order through Uline.com. The flat rate orders require special boxes that I have to acquire from the post office. I place orders now, so that the packing materials will be here before the big shipping day.

Next phase: Phase 4 Printing Postage.

Long week almost over

By / September 25, 2008

The books are all stamped and ready for Howard to draw. For the first time all week, I’ve reached the afternoon feeling like I have done enough. There are still piles of things left to do, but I’ve already accomplished the big “Must do today” list and have started on the “As soon as possible” list.

In hindsight, this week was a very hard one. Last night I got to the end of the day, knowing that I’d done an excellent job managing everything the day threw at me, and yet I was still tripping (literally) over tasks that were incomplete. I was so tired, I didn’t even have energy to feel guilty about being grouchy at the kids. The fact that the kids very obviously earned the grouchiness, also helped with the not feeling guilty.

Today has been better. Tomorrow will be as well.

Mission Accomplished

By / September 24, 2008

Hold on to Your Horses and the Schlock books can now be purchased from both The King’s English Bookshop and Sam Weller’s Books in Salt Lake City. This includes copies of the The Teraport Wars. All of the books are signed. I’m not sure if there will be any signings at those locations, but I have begun the necessary communication to make that happen. Now we cross our fingers and hope that the books sell so it can be an ongoing consignment relationship rather than one where the store politely hands back our books at the end of the 3-6 months. There was an author picking up her books a the same time I was dropping mine off. She did not look thrilled to have only sold one book in six months.

Now that I know that consignment relationships with independent bookstores are fairly easy, I’m going to need to do more research. I should definitely see if I can place some books in the area where Angela lives.

Cold calls and forgotten tasks

By / September 23, 2008

The cold calls to the bookstores turned out differently than I expected. I got no reaction to the words “television interview”, but the minute I said “consignment” a flood of information about qualifications and forms flowed out. So tomorrow I’m taking a trip up to Salt Lake to fill out forms and drop off books. Hopefully while I’m there I’ll also be able to set up some book signings for both Howard and I. That will be tomorrow’s adventure.

I figured out what I forgot to do yesterday. I didn’t prepare the number sheet so that Howard could cross of sketch editions as he draws them. Fortunately this did not impact today’s work since Howard really needed to rest his hand for awhile. I made up the number sheet and delivered it to Howard along with a stack of stamped and ready-to-be-drawn-in books.

I’m still very tired. The tired was not helped by Patch deciding to climb into bed with me around 2 am. He tossed and turned and kept waking me up. Fortunately I was able to catch a nap today.

So tired

By / September 22, 2008 / 11 Comments

Our garage is now empty of pallets of books. This is because we hauled 2800 lbs of books into the house, had Howard sign them, the stacked the books to wait for sketches. I did all the re-stacking. This means I personally hefted over one ton of books today.

A nice Schlock fan with a forklift and a large truck helped us move the remainder of the books over to our storage unit. I should say our New storage unit, because our old one was far too small. So we also moved all of the stuff from the old unit into the bigger one.

I’m so tired I can hardly think straight, but I think I got all of today’s critical tasks done.

Tomorrow I need to get on the phone to a couple of independent bookstores and say “Hi. I’m going to be on TV and I would love to be able to say that people can buy the book at your store. Would you be willing to stock my book? Oh and while you’re stocking books, you should take a look at these Schlock books too, because they’re awesome and you should stock them too. And maybe we could arrange some author signings in the store.” Only I hope that tomorrow I’ll think of a much smoother way to say all of that.