Month: February 2009

Some days all I can write is a ramble

By / February 15, 2009

Here I am in my house. The house is not clean, but it is Sunday and so I have a good excuse not to tackle it right now. I’m not supposed to work on Sunday. “Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy.” That commandment is harder to follow than one might think, particularly when my leisure activities are so entwined with my work. And yet the break benefits both the work and me. The kids are downstairs watching a pokemon disc we got from Netflix. We were going to watch City of Ember, but Link has a scout event at 7 pm and we don’t want him to miss the finale. City of Ember will have to wait until tomorrow. Since tomorrow is a holiday, we’ll have all day long. Except that tomorrow is also a working day for me. So much to do. The volume on the TV is too loud. Pokemon shows are always annoying at high volume. I should go turn it down, except that would require me to get up and as soon as I get up I will remember that I really ought to go fix dinner. Spaghetti is the plan for tonight. I’ve got to use up that italian sausage before it goes bad.

And so my thoughts dribble out of my brain and out through my fingers. I would love to really focus on writing something meaningful, and yet if I tangle my brain into writing I worry that I will have trouble refocusing tomorrow. Also, I’m tired. Too tired to find the insightful thoughts that must be lurking here in my head somewhere. I fell asleep in church today. Not surprising when I was awake on the wrong side of 2, 3, and 4 am last night. The caffeine I drank at 7 pm last night killed the vicious migraine, but also killed normal sleep. At least I got to snuggle Gleek for awhile. It has been months since she came crawling into our bed from bad dreams. 8 year olds tend to stay in their own beds. But last night she was scared and I got to snuggle her. I need to do it lots because before long she’ll be as big as Kiki. That would be a good segue into something insightful, but after staring blankly for several minutes, I couldn’t figure out what the insightful thing might be. Oh well.

Feeling professional

By / February 14, 2009

When I was twelve, my mother gave me some genealogy papers to copy. They were pedigree charts. I’m not sure why she asked me to copy them by hand because I’m fairly certain that copy machines already existed, but she did. I remember sitting at a small table with the book sitting in front of me. It was a Sunday afternoon and I was still in my church dress. I used a pen to carefully transfer information from one page to another. I imagined that I was in an office, doing office work. It felt so grown-up and important, even though a part of me knew that I was only playing at being grown up.

Howard and I have been publishing books for four years now. Much of the time I have felt a little bit like I did all those years ago while copying the genealogy sheets. I’ve felt like I was playing at being a publishing professional. I was like the stage magician waving my hands around and hoping that no one would notice the cards poking out from the ends of my sleeves. We tried to present a calm and professional exterior while behind the scenes all was a scramble to keep on top of things. But over the years we have learned a lot. We don’t scramble in frantic fear of getting it wrong anymore. Now we just scramble in a frantic hurry to get it done on time. And I’ve learned that the scramble is normal for the publishing industry. I still have days when I feel like I’m just pretending to be professional, but then I have a week like the one just passed. It is hard to feel anything but professional during a week when I work on book layout, participate in a newspaper interview, send off a contract, put new merchandise in the store, answer loads of email, and ship out multiple store orders.

Today Howard and I laid out plans for the book after Scrapyard. Resident Mad Scientist will take us about 4 months to compile. I took stock today and realized that we are down to our last 500 copies of Under New Management. We’re going to have to re-print that along side Resident Mad Scientist. We stood there discussing it and I had one of those “wow, I’m really a grown up now” moments. There I was planning ahead on printing two additional books and it was not stressing me out at all. Good heavens, I contract printing of things in China. I create whole layouts for books. I’m on a first name basis with people at Baen Books. When did all that happen? I still remember when the thought of owning a business was frightening to me, when I secretly hoped that Howard would just be happy collecting a paycheck. (We were only a year married, and I figured out quickly that paycheck collection was not the way to happiness for us.) How did I get from there to here? I look back and I can trace the path. It has been a long one and I am so glad that I traveled it. Am traveling. We’re far from done.

Rambling thoughts on a writing contest

By / February 14, 2009

In January I participated in a forum writing contest called Weekend Warrior. It lasted five weeks. Each Saturday morning three prompts were posted. Participants had until Sunday evening to write a story of 750 words or less. It was a good experience, but it was very hard on me. I had to quit after the third week because I’d completely drained my emotional reserves while simultaneously neglecting a bunch of house/family stuff that I felt guilty about. The scheduling for the contest was all wrong for me. If I spend Saturday feverishly writing, I end up growling at the kids who are home all day. The growling was even worse because we were all stuck inside due to icy weather. Saturday is also the day that I usually focus on getting the house clean, so my house clutter intensified over the course of three weeks. Then there was the fact that my stories were being scored against other stories. Week after week I had to face the fact that I’m not as good at this as I want to be. I wanted to wow people and I never did. In the end I had to stop. I had to rebalance myself and realize that mid-January was probably not the best time to try to stretch myself in this particular way.

And yet it really felt good to lose myself in the writing. It was fun to have a scheduled time to turn my brain over to story and plot percolation. And the deadline gave me the impetus to truly schedule the time. In theory I’m trying to make Thursday mornings my writing time, but in practice I frequently fill the time with other things instead. Next week will be completely absorbed by getting Scrapyard finished. Then there will be LTUE. Maybe after that I can settle the schedule back down. I just counted and I have five finished stories waiting for revision. I also have two projects partially drafted. It would be nice to get some of these out where they have a chance at publication. If I had not participated in the Weekend Warrior contest 4 of those stories would not exist.

The small traps in which I catch myself

By / February 13, 2009

It is strange the assumptions I can find lurking in my own brain.

I was watching a talk by Elizabeth Gilbert (Author of Eat Pray Love) and I was suddenly struck that here was a woman who has a glowing writing career and she has probably never written a single word that qualifies as Science Fiction or Fantasy. It was as if a door in my brain had opened to whole new possibilities in writing. You see, I know lots of writers, but they are overwhelmingly writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Add to that the fact that whenever the child Sandra pictured writing books, the books she pictured were Fantasy. Somehow these things combined in my head to make only my Science Fiction and Fantasy writing count. This is ludicrous. This is particularly ludicrous because in the wide world of writing and publishing, genre fiction is regarded as a tiny eddy in the great river. And yet I have been telling myself that I did not do any writing last year. Get this, I wrote a blog entry almost every single day, and yet somehow in my head those did not count as writing. The non-genre writing that my friends did counted, but somehow I was discounting my own.

And suddenly a door has opened in my head, and I realize that there are many kinds of writing that I want to do, of which Science Fiction and Fantasy are only a part. They may not even be the larger part. I want to write essays, and blog entries, and articles, and who knows what else. With this new widened perspective I peer back into the past and I remember that even child Sandra was not Fantasy Only. I remember the Children Lost on an Island adventure. I remember the couple of teen lit projects. I remember those final essays of high school which technically met the assignment, but baffled the teacher because he wasn’t sure how to grade them. I am not one thing. I am many things. I’ve always been many things. In fact this is one of the difficulties I constantly face. I want to chase all the shiny possibilities simultaneously.

And so I need to reach out more. I need to start to familiarize myself with publishing outside the eddy of genre fiction. I need to read more books that don’t contain spaceships or magic. Not all at once, because there is value and comfort in the familiar, but enough that I keep expanding my horizons. I suspect that the expansion will improve all of my writing, even the stories with magic and space ships.

And now I have yet another shiny possibility that I want to chase down right now. Instead I have stored it here so that I can find it again once I’m done scrambling to get the Schlock book done.

An experience in search of a metaphor

By / February 12, 2009

This week I’ve spoken to several people about the fact that I’m “running hot”, or maybe I just spoke to myself about it several times. Sometimes I get confused about that. But anyway, what I’m trying to communicate is that I’ve been running on high energy, accomplishing lots, and then fizzling out. The metaphor only sort of works. It doesn’t express the wideness of the experience. Perhaps it is more like the huge sails on the rigged ships of yore. In this state I have unfurled my sales in order to catch all of the available wind. It lets me travel very quickly, but the heavy wind also strains the mast and the rigging. If I keep my sails too wide, I risk doing damage to the ship itself. This one doesn’t quite work either. It does properly convey the images of failure, because when I stop working efficiently, it usually is not catastrophic. Perhaps instead it is like casting my nets wide to catch lots of fish. For awhile I can do it, but then the nets wear out and fishes start escaping through the holes. If I don’t take time to mend the nets, then I’ll end up with more holes than net. Only that is not quite it either.

When my focus is wide, I move fast. I process multiple streams of information. I track many trains of thought and manage them all. As an example, this morning I answered email, wrote a blog entry, put a new item into the store, arranged for printing of the email, and did the last touch of contact on a contract. I required two computers and 30 minutes to accomplish all of that. The tasks were all interlinked. The item in the store was part of the blog entry and required an email to a supplier. The contract contacting was also reflected in the blog post. It was very much like fast paced juggling. It is a high energy, adrenaline charged state, but I can not stay there for long because I become fatigued. Then instead of catching all those balls I keep turning around to discover that one bounced off the floor while I wasn’t looking and others are just gone. Did I throw them too hard? Did they roll off into the corner? I have no idea. Also with my brain opened wide for multi-track processing, I pick up a lot of noise. I accumulate piles of information, but am not able to process it. Quickly it all turns into a meaningless wash. This is when I have to deliberately step back, limit my inputs, and reconfigure my brain to be able to focus on a single thing instead of many things at once. Transitioning from one to the other is not easy. Particularly when being hyped on adrenaline leaves me cold and shaky. I managed it with a hot bath and a nap. Unfortunately I was awakened before I had completed the decompression process. Kids need stuff. Often.

But now I am ready to settle down and focus on one or two big tasks rather than a dozen small ones. The only problem being that I’ve run out of work hours. Now I’m into mommy hours. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep the focus until tomorrow morning so I can get the copy edits and footnote boxes put into Scrapyard.






Good things

By / February 12, 2009

It seems that February has been very good for many of my online friends. I know people who’ve landed deals for novels, people who are getting editorial letters, people who are having twins, people whose novels are selling really well, and people whose first ARCs have gone out. I also know some people for whom February has been truly sucktastic, but on the whole most of my friends seem bursting with good news. We here at the Tayler house fully intend to add to the good news side of the scale.

1. We signed the contract with our printer for The Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance. We’re due to deliver files to them by February 20th. This is past our hoped for Valentine’s finish date, but it is still awesome to be so close to being done. We’re also going to create slipcases which hold the first five Schlock Mercenary books. This means that we’ll be able to sell boxed sets. We’ll also be selling the boxes separately for folks who already have the books and want a shiny box to keep them in.

2. We have new posters in the store. These include a special edition print on translucent Cell paper which is beautiful. Also a new Rule 35 poster “That which does not kill me has made a tactical error”. We intend to make the rule posters available as 8 x 10 prints when we open book preordering.

3. Last Monday a very nice reporter for our local paper came and interviewed Howard for an hour or so. The result showed up on the front page of our local paper this morning. We now know which of our neighbors takes the paper because we can track who has emailed or called to congratulate us. You can read the article online. I’m in the article too.

4. This is the big one, and it is news that we’ve been sitting on since last August. Baen Books will be selling electronic versions of the first four Schlock Mercenary books. We hope to have these available in March. All of the cartoon archives will remain online, we’ll still be selling print books, but this opens up the e-reader market for Schlock Mercenary. It also provides a way for fans outside of North America to buy the books and bonus material without having to pay to ship paper across the ocean. We’re very excited to be working with the good folks at Baen. They’ve been marvelous to us.

25 random things about me

By / February 11, 2009

This meme has been running around facebook and because of it I’ve learned some cool new things about people.  So I’ve decided to give it a try.

25 Random Things About Me

1.  I never wanted to live in Utah or raise my kids here, but after 15 years I’m so firmly rooted that I’m not sure we’ll ever leave.

2.  Remember that one Calvin and Hobbes comic that was done in a Picasso-esque style where multiple perspectives of the same objects were shown?  The inside of my head is like that constantly.  I sometimes have trouble shutting out alternate perspectives so that I can make decisions.

3.  When I was a child, I frequently worried about the feelings of inanimate objects.  I made sure that none of my toys felt neglected.  I had trouble getting rid of things because I didn’t want them to feel unloved. I still sometimes think about the feelings of inanimate objects.  When I restock books, I add to the bottom of the stack so all the books get a turn to be sent out.  I know that this is silly, and sometimes I don’t think about it at all, but other times I do.

4. I am the middlemost child of seven siblings.
5.  I was an assistant in the Junior High library when they were switching from pocket card tracking to barcode tracking for checked out books.  I got to put barcodes on many books and help with all the cataloging.  This was the same library where I misused my assistant powers to sneak books out of the library without checking them out so that I could keep the books.  I later repented of my book stealing ways, returned as many of the books as I could find, and made a cash donation to cover the cost of those that I couldn’t.

6.  Last year I wrote over 80,000 words in my blog.  That is more words than some novels.  Apparently I am wordy.

7.  I know first-hand that skin really does peel off as a result of radiation burns.  (I had six weeks of radiation therapy in 1999 to kill a tumor.)

8.  I love birds, flowers, and books.

9.  I turned 36 this year and will argue with anyone who tries to make jokes about anniversaries of my 29th birthday or who deliberately guesses me young.  I earned those years, don’t try to steal them from me.

10.  I love looking at clothing, mostly on people.  I’m constantly analyzing what I think looks good and what does not.  This is not about thinking less of people for what they are wearing, it is about analyzing combinations of lines and fabrics and patterns and shapes. I want to be one of those people who always looks good, and yet I almost never wear make-up or jewelry and I’m extremely prone to forgetting to brush my hair before going in public.  Also, I like being comfortable, so I’m pretty sure that I’m not doing so well on the “always look good” thing.  I think I do all right for events such as church, it’s the daily stuff where I get distracted and forget to do it.

11.  In my 5th grade yearbook I declared my intention to be a lion tamer when I grew up.  Now I’m the mother of four kids which is almost the same thing.

12.  I am most comfortable in friendships that build gradually from lots of friendly interactions over an extended period of time.  Proximity makes a big difference, fortunately for me the internet has provided proximity between me and people all over the world.  My circle of friends is now much larger that I would have imagined possible a decade ago.

13.  It still feels weird to be able to say “a decade ago” and be talking about something that happened to me as an adult.

14.  I am fully capable of drawing other people out to help maintain a conversation.  This is a carefully learned skill, not something that comes naturally to me.  I am far more comfortable sitting on the edge of a lively conversation and just listening until I have something useful to add.  Conversations are fascinating to watch.  All sorts of social power plays and nuances are there to be seen.

15.  I like small children and babies, but I’m really glad not to be taking care of one 24/7 anymore.

16.  Most of the flowers I love best remind me of someone or some place in particular.  Marigolds, roses, and sweet peas are my mother.  Petunias and lilacs are my grandmother.  Tulips a college roommate and my cousin.  Bougainvilla is Africa.  Poppies are California.  Day Lilies are a neighbor who moved away years ago.  Hyacinths and Lilies are springtime, particularly if I can get them to bloom indoors mid-winter.  The list goes on, but I’ll stop now.  My gardens are full of memories.

17.  I still have my baby blanket from when I was a child.  I occasionally loan it to one of my kids when they’re in need of extra comfort.

18.  I never had a favorite color growing up and was always frustrated that people kept making me pick one.  I didn’t want just one color.  I wanted them all.  I still like all of the colors, but I have preference for green.  Not sure when that changed.

19.  I never used to have a favorite season.  I liked them all.  I know exactly when this changed.  Now I don’t like Winter at all and I love Spring.  I need to practice liking Winter again because I’m going to have to deal with it periodically for a long time to come.

20.  I grew up hating math, now I do all the accounting and book keeping for our family and two (tiny) corporations.  And I find joy and satisfaction when all the numbers line up.  I get stressed when I’m having to juggle depletion of reserves rather than accumulation, but that is just the financial squirrel in me.  I find great joy in stashing money into savings accounts or in paying off big bills.

21.  I love sourdough bread, but my efforts to make it have had very mixed results. 

22.  I rarely express my opinions about politics or social issues on the internet.  The lack of body language and voice tone cues make me very leery about offending people or starting an argument.  I’m much more comfortable discussing these things in person.  But someday there will be a time or an issue when I feel I must make a stand.  I don’t look forward to it.

23.  I am terrified of riding ferris wheels.  The last time I went on one, my oldest child was four.  She had a great time.  I spent the whole ride in white knuckled prayer that I would survive.  Roller coasters are fine, but ferris wheels are scary.  Not rational, but true.

24.  If you name a Disney movie made prior to the year 2000 I can probably sing you a song from it.  I actually played this game once with co-workers at my college job.  I challenged them to think of a Disney movie that I didn’t know a song for.  I won. I’m not sure I could still win that competition. During my childhood years I learned songs without even thinking about it and I saw lots of Disney movies.

25.  It took me two weeks to create this list.  I had to weigh each item to find the perfect balance of things that might be interesting to others but which will not be embarrassing or too revealing.

Too brain tired to think up a good post title

By / February 10, 2009

This morning was great. I was focused and got piles of stuff done. I assembled the final cover layout for Scrapyard. I also did a tweaking pass through the innards. I even filled up some more white spaces with art that I’d scrounged from Howard’s office. I also handled email and contacts for several ongoing communications. Howard and I were handing each other tasks constantly all morning long. I love how we’ve learned to work smoothly on collaboration. I never would have believed it in high school, but group work is fun when I have the right team. It is all coming together and so are three or for other behind the scenes business things.

For all the good work I got done this morning, I still have hundreds of things left to do. Unfortunately I can’t run hot like that indefinitely. Around 2:30 PM I fizzled out. The rest of the day has been spent drifting with the exception of some critical mommying tasks. Fortunately my parents provided Chinese food for dinner. Yummy food that I did not have to cook first is always a good thing.

Small good things

By / February 9, 2009

January was devoid of happy news. There wasn’t any bad news either, but with it being mid-winter I really felt the lack of good news. Apparently all the good news was lurking and waiting for January to be over. Paperwork that I’ve been waiting for since last September finally arrived. Scrapyard is nearing completion. Howard had an interview with a newspaper reporter for an article which should appear in a local paper in the next couple of weeks. Sales in the store are back up. So I’m feeling pretty good about business stuff.

Add to that the fact that my parents are staying with us. This makes the kids very happy. As far as they are concerned, having grandma here is like having a live-in Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. What child wouldn’t love an adult who gets down onto the floor with them, plays whatever they wish, and has an endless supply of stories for their entertainment. Grandpa is a dispenser of electronic delights. He has cool gadgets in his pockets and he will sit and read the word bubbles in Animal Crossing for Patch who can’t read them himself. The kids are going to miss Grandma and Grandpa when they have to leave on Wednesday.

Sometime in the past two days Howard and I bowed to the inevitable and we gave a name to the cat I rescued from under our deck. She has taken up residence in a nook out in back of our house where we provide her with food, a cozy box for sleeping, and Gleek and Kiki both spend extended periods of time out there supplying her with the attention she craves. The girls are delighted to have a lap kitty. The cat is delighted to have warm laps with petting. It works out really well. So far the kids have all been very good about washing their hands as soon as they come in and changing their clothes if necessary. I’ve only had minimal reactions. This makes me glad. I’ve felt for a long time that Gleek and Kiki would really benefit from having a pet. The boys think the cat is nice, but they don’t spend much time with her. Buying cat food felt odd though. That is not something I ever expected to do.

Here comes book week

By / February 8, 2009

This next week is book crunch week. Howard and I have decided that what we’d like to give each other for Valentines Day is a completed book. This means Howard needs to color the bonus story, finish the cover elements, approve the layout, write some extra notes, write acknowledgments, and perhaps draw a couple of margin art pictures. I need to double check the layout to make sure everything is working, shift around the sections which are not working, find margin art for all the remaining white spaces, assemble all those fiddly footnote boxes, make all the recommended copy edit changes, send a down payment to the printer, create a color print out of the final version, then ship it all off. Oh, and then there are the tasks to finish up the slipcase layouts for the boxed sets. We’re going to be busy this week, but it is the happy busy of “almost done.” By March 1st we should be ready to dive into working on book 6.