Month: October 2009

Roseola Infantum is an early childhood illness that most people contract and recover from before the age of three. It is characterized by several days of high fever followed by a body rash. Anyone who has ever had the disease is a carrier and so contracting it is pretty much inevitable. It is worrisome, particularly for new parents, but not ultimately dangerous. The rash doesn’t even itch.

Roseola is familiar to me. I diagnosed it several times for several of my babies. When Gleek’s two day fever broke and the rash appeared, I viewed it with familiarity. I could think what it was, but I knew I’d seen it before. I consulted the internet and dredged up my own diagnostic memories. Except for the fact that she is 8 years old, Gleek’s illness was classic for Roseola. How she managed to miss this illness before is a mystery to me, particularly considering that she attends the giant vector barn that is public school. It is not surprising that I missed the diagnosis earlier. I was watching Gleek’s fever and evaluating it against swine flu symptoms. I stopped worrying about infant illnesses about the same time I stopped changing diapers.

The good news is that no one else is likely to get sick. Everyone else in the family has been exposed previously. Gleek feels lots better and is bouncing around happily. The bad news is that the rash may linger for several days and I can’t send her back to school until it disappears. The quarantine is not due to actual contagion, but due to the fact that one look at her stomach would have the school staff sending her back home for fear of contagion. Also, Gleek would be so tempted to show the rash to her friends. So I predict boredom for tomorrow. Perhaps I’ll swing by her classroom and pick up some homework for her to do. Or maybe the rash will be gone in the morning. That would be nice.

For the last three days my brain has been running at high speed. It is like the creative fountain burst its bounds and flooded me with thoughts and ideas that I can turn into essays or blog posts. The ideas keep flying at me hard and fast. I’ve written multiple essays/blog entries per day on each of these days. I can only process so much before my brain frizzles out. So for the other ideas, I scribble notes. I’ve accumulated many pages of notes in a short span of time. This overflow has been exciting and invigorating, but also exhausting. I can’t make my brain stop. Insomnia has plagued me and I’ll find myself scribbling notes at 2 am because an idea struck me and I can’t sleep until I write it down.

I wear out during the day as well. There are times I desparately want my brain to shut up, to stop throwing ideas at me. So I turn to the computer game Plants Versus Zombies. It is a fun little game from Popcap.com where cute little zombies try to cross my lawn to invade my house. I must defend my lawn by planting a variety of defensive and offensive plants. There is quite a bit of strategy involved and it engages my whole brain. After 30 minutes or so of lawn defense I emerge feeling more relaxed and rested. Or perhaps it is just that I’ve used my brain in a different way, kind of like stretching after sitting in one position for awhile. Whichever it is, I stand up ready to tackle the non-writing tasks of the day.

This weekend has been heavy on house cleaning because we planned to host a social event on Sunday evening. The event itself got canceled due to Gleek spiking a fever, but I didn’t know that was going to happen prior to late last night. So I was cleaning vigorously to make the house fit for company. The thing about the house cleaning is that it kept my hands busy, but left my mind free. The thoughts began to flow again. Then I’d find myself with note book in hand scribbling notes again, or at the computer typing vigorously. Then my brain was frazzled again, which led me back to defending my little electronic lawn from zombies. I don’t know how often I looped that loop, but it continued for two days.

This kind of high creative energy state is familiar to me. It has happened before. It will happen again. It is not always writing focused. Sometimes I’m consumed with a sewing project, or a gardening project, or a book layout project. Other times the energy doesn’t have a specific focus and my brain begins to plan big new projects for me to take on, whether or not I have time to complete them.

I can feel the creative energy tapering off today. This is also expected. If I were to stay that creatively buzzed all the time, I would go crazy. I need my brain to be quiet and calm sometimes. And I will. I fully expect to find myself mired in some low creative energy days. It may not happen this week, but the inevitable biorythmic cost of energy expenditure is that I’ll have to lay idle and rebuild my resources.

I’m glad that I’ve been through the cycle enough times that I recognize it. I’ve learned tactics to prevent complete burnout (Hello zombie game) I’ve also learned how to replenish my resources more quickly. These days I can track the biorythmic sine wave and know that a low will follow the high. I can also find comfort in knowing that the low will end as well. This same pattern is repeated within each day. I have high creative energy times of day and low energy times.

Knowing that my creative energy comes in cycles gives me the ability to structure my life so that things get done. When I feel the drive, as I did this weekend, I scramble to write and take notes. When I have lower energy, I will still have those notes. They are like a breadcrumb trail I can follow. On a low creative energy day I can still get myself to follow one crumb after another so that work still gets done. Howard calls this tactic “Smart Howard and Dumb Howard.” He organizes his days and his weeks around his creative biorhythms. Scripting and penciling have to be done by Smart Howard in the morning because Smart Howard is the one with the flashes of insight about how things need to go. The inking can be done by Dumb Howard because all he has to do is follow the pencil lines. (This whole concept was told to us by our friend Chalain who understands these cycles very well.)

Hmm. Not so sure I’m on the down swing from this particular creative peak right now. Not considering how quickly this whole blog post leaped from my brain through my fingers and on to the screen. I’ve been typing furiously almost without stopping until just now when I achieved brain frazzle. Must be time to go garden the undead.

Howard and I frequently get asked questions about self-publishing and/or marketing.  This is logical since we pay our bills on the sales of books that we have self-published.  Our success draws people to us.  They ask how we did it, hoping that they can apply what we say to their own projects.  So here is what I have to say about self-publishing and marketing:

There is no easy path.  Publishing and getting your work into the hands of others is hard.   Many people look at self-publishing as a short cut, a way to skip all that difficult submission and rejection.  The truth is that you’re trading submission and rejection prior to publication for the labor of text layout, cover design, doing all your own marketing, and rejection from bookstores when they won’t stock your title.   None of our books are available in Barnes & Noble or Borders.  The only way people find us is if they come looking or are told by a friend.  We have been rejected by multiple distributors until we finally found one to carry some of our books into games/comic stores.  There are days when I think longingly of having a publisher.  Publishing is like climbing Mount Everest.  Self Publishing is like soloing up Mount Everest.  Neither one is easy, but the solo climber is much more likely to end up in the bottom of a very deep hole.

Your publication choices should reflect your goals.  If you want to be a full-time author, you should work to team up with a publisher.  If you want to create a book for your grand kids, check out Print On Demand (POD) publishers such as lulu.com.  If you want to write a book for your society of gardenia lovers and there are a thousand people out there waiting for your book, contracting the publishing yourself could be valuable.  If you wrote a novel and just really want to have it in a book for your family and friends, then you could go with a press offers paid design services.  Look around at the options and pick one that meets your goals for your writing.

Self Publishing will take over your life. We began with a single self-published book.  Since then we have created 6 more books.  The publishing has become a business which requires the full-time labor of two people.  I spend hours of time shipping books, managing store software, communicating with customers, writing marketing copy, communicating with retailers and distributors, and physically hauling books around.  1/3 of our home is occupied by publishing work spaces and storage.  We also have two large storage units which function as a warehouse.  We pay to attend conventions so that we can promote the books.  We have reached the point where we almost qualify as a small press instead of as self-publishers.  But even doing all that work does not guarantee an income.

Building an audience is harder than serving one. When we publish the Schlock books, we know that there is an audience out there anxiously waiting to buy.  We published a children’s picture book and that project is still in the hole financially.  It is a good book.  We love it.  But getting the word out about it has been an uphill struggle.  Self publishing is a great way to answer the needs of an audience that you already have.  Using self publishing to build an audience is a very different challenge, and one that we have not yet overcome.  We all want to believe that if we build something beautiful, then the audience will find it.  Unfortunately we know many amazing creators who continue to languish in obscurity.

To speak of our own experience, Howard’s creative work has succeeded brilliantly through self-publication. My work has not and for future projects I intend to pursue traditional publication.

All of that said, I do not regret the hard trek through self-publication. It has been an amazing experience. I would not change it.

I’m working on compiling a book of essays. This is not a new project. I’ve been toying with it for quite awhile. Most of the essays are pulled from blog entries, but I am revising them so that they work better in a book format. Over the past year or so, I have been looking around for books similar to what I intend to create. They exist. This means that getting the book published is a possibility, although I expect the process of acquiring a publisher to be lengthy and full of rejection. I am not looking forward to the rejection.

Before I can begin sending out queries, I need to have something to send. With this in mind, I’ve been gathering essays and organizing them into categories. In the process I’ve discovered a few interesting statistics. My essays average 1000 words long. If I have five categories for my book, then 10 essays per category is 50,000 words. If I want 100,000 words, then I need to plan for 20 essays per category. Either way, it is a daunting number of essays. I was inclined to feel discouraged about it until I remembered that I’ve been writing this blog for five years now. During those five years I wrote at least 100 essay-type entries per year. (The remaining blog entries are valuable in context, but aren’t right for putting into a book.) This means that I should have 500 essays to select from. It isn’t quite as simple as just picking the blog entries to duplicate. There is revision and re-writing to be done, but the result is a daunting task instead of an impossible one.

The creation of this book feels important. It is the right thing for me to be doing with my spare hours. (I actually have spare hours these days. It’s amazing.) I’m not sure why the book is important. It may be that the organization of my thoughts into a book will be of value to me personally and that the book will never see print. It may be that the book will see print and will be helpful to others as well as to me. Obviously I want the second to be true, but I can not control the future. I can not control whether a publisher sees value in my words. I must shape my goals around what I do control. And so I will write, and revise, and organize. Then I will query.

The other day I mentioned how my head is frequently full of business thoughts that I can’t yet share. This is big news that I now can tell everyone. We’ve got a distribution deal.

Now people can walk into a gaming store anywhere in the world and place an order for our books. Not only that, but this potentially puts the books on shelves where they can catch new eyes and gain new fans. We’ll still be selling direct and doing sketch editions, but this opens up another avenue of sales, which is a good thing.

At the moment only XDM: X-Treme Dungeon Mastery and Schlock Mercenary The Tub of Happiness are available in stores, but the other Schlock books will be coming out one per month until they’re all out there.

This is a very happy thing indeed.

Today’s conflict was larger than usual, primarily because it took place in public. However the fact of conflict with children is common, particularly this Fall while three of them are pushing forward on developmental curves. I thought it would be useful to examine the conflict, a post-mortem if you will. If I understand this one, then I am better prepared for the next one. Or at least that is the theory.

The conflict began when I noticed that red liquid was leaking from Gleek’s backpack. We discovered that the liquid was from a bottle of Gatorade that she was given for participating in an activity. This is when the screaming began. Gleek began shrieking at the world and refusing to go home. The situation was worsened by the discovery that the bottom of the backpack had a pool of liquid and other items had been soaked as well.

Conflicts are often the result of needs crashing into each other.

My needs:
to get back home because I’d paused my process of bottling pears to pick kids up.
Gleek to stop shrieking and kicking up a fuss in public.
to get kids home so that we could problem solve. I was pretty sure that I could replace or wash the affected items.

Patch and Link needed:
To be away from the unpleasant conflict and to be home instead of sitting around waiting.

Gleek needed:
Her gatorade back unspilled. (She’d earned it yesterday, but they had run out, so she waited a whole day to receive it.)
Her emotions vented.
Her notebook to not be soaked with pink liquid.

Looking back, I wonder if I had responded differently in the first moment of discovery, would that have made a difference? If I had said something sympathetic instead of “let’s go home” would Gleek have moved into a problem solving mindset instead of a tantrum? I’m not sure that would have been the case. She was so focused on being mad at the world and shouting because she wanted it to not have happened. Unfortunately her response changed my options.

I could have hauled her kicking-screaming person into the car and driven away despite her protests. I could have shouted her into the car. I could have threatened grounding or brandished some other punishment to force compliance. These tactics can be used to good effect in a crisis, but if they don’t instantly bring compliance, they escalate the conflict. They also change the conflict so that it is Mother vs child and the issue is obedience, rather than Mother and child with the issue being the sad thing that occurred.

Forcing her to go home required me to change the conflict in unpleasant ways, so I had to find some other tactic. Link and Patch volunteered to walk home, which removed them from the scene and gave me a little more leeway. I sorted through the damaged items to salvage what I could. I also hoped that the sorting would help Gleek shift into a “where do we go from here” mindset, but she remained stuck in the “I want this to not have happened” frame of mind. I needed to get her to shift. Our best chance of finding solutions was at home. Sorting through the salvage had not worked, so I was left with words.

I sat in the car and began to talk. I probably talk too much during conflicts. I suspect I hound my kids with words and they hate it. I think they hate it most if they can see I am right. Each linguistic foray was an attempt to get her to shift from denial into something else.
I mentioned how her behavior was over-the-top and unacceptable. (This earned more screaming.)
I told how I was frustrated because I wanted to be sympathetic about what had happened to her. She quieted down to listen to this, so I detailed exactly what I knew about why she was frustrated, that she’d looked forward to the gatorade, that the ruined notebook was a special one, and how it was awful that both were gone.
The silence was an improvement, but it still wasn’t getting us home. And she still yelled when I suggested leaving.
I expressed my frustration at managing her behavior and my embarrassment at having to do this in public with teachers and students who could over hear. To this she answered “Now you know how I feel. People are staring at me all the time.”
I replied that it wasn’t the same because she got stared at for things she did while I was being stared at for something someone else did.
We exchanged a couple more heated sentences until she was mad enough at me that she flounced into the car and said “Fine! We’ll just go home!”

I’d won the point about going home. Once at home, I left Gleek to fume by herself while I settled things and started washing out the soaked backpack. When I returned to Gleek I was all sympathy and she was ready to receive it. She’d really needed time alone to cool off, which I’d been completely unable to supply without getting home first. At home she quickly made peace with the loss of the notebook, threw out the remaining gatorade, and happily accepted replacement notebooks from me.

Getting home was the solution, but I don’t like that I had to provoke her to get her there. I worry that she will take to heart some of the things I said and use them as evidence that she is not a good person. I wish the conflict could have been resolved without resorting to adversarial maneuvering. I suppose I could have immediately offered to drive to a store and buy new gatorade and notebook, but would have set a precedent that I don’t want to maintain. Also I don’t think that answer would have ended the conflict any sooner. She didn’t want it fixed. She wanted it to not have happened.

The truth is that I can not avoid conflict with my children. Even if I turned myself into a doormat of a mother, they could still create a conflict by sheer irrational demands. All I can do is try to weather the conflicts with as little damage as possible and to talk them through afterward to make sure the right lessons are learned.

How do I describe a day that has been filled with strife, and prayer, and answers to prayer, and being an answer to the prayer of someone else? It was a day that began badly, but was redeemed by everything that came after.

Link needs more positive attention to balance out all the negative he has been getting lately. I began the morning determined to provide it. I’m still not sure how that determination devolved into a stand-off over kids eating breakfast complete with ultimatums and crying. I dropped off three unhappy children at school and came home to sort through where things had gone wrong. Howard and I had a good discussion about it. We identified where we’d been working at cross purposes. I felt better, but still wrung out.

Our church has a program called Visiting Teaching where two women are assigned to visit a third. Everyone gets a turn to teach and be taught. It builds relationships and a strong community. I had an appointment to go and I was in charge of the lesson. I flipped open the church magazine and saw that the lesson was on nurturing children. How ironic after the morning I’d just had. Instead of teaching the lesson, I fessed up to those other women (who are both grandmothers) about how my morning had gone and how burdened I felt with the responsibility of raising four children. I opened my heart to them and they poured in comfort. Then the woman I was visiting opened her heart. She shared some of what she has been suffering lately. Her story is not mine to tell, but she is amazing. The best part was being able to draw upon some of my own experiences and say things that were helpful to her. These visits are supposed to be around 30 minutes. Ours lasted an hour and a half because none of us wanted it to be over. Visiting Teaching is always a good thing, but every so often it is an amazing thing.

That was a sufficient emotional roller coaster for one day, but the ride was not yet over. Next Howard and I had a business meeting. It was a good meeting. But all business meetings require focus and thought. I am always tired afterward.

The afternoon brought the kids home from school and the necessary aftermath of the morning’s upset. All the kids needed additional reassurance and kindness. They also were required to sit in front of bowls of bland oatmeal and eat some. This allowed them to appreciate by comparison the other foods we have been supplying. They sampled and the light dawned. I don’t think tomorrow will feature breakfast complaints. I played some games with the kids to provide positive attention. I repaired a beloved object that has been waiting. I fixed a dinner that they all like. I generally did my best to be a stable, happy presence despite the fact that I’d been wrung empty.

My friend Janci came over to lend me company and morale support. She’d had her own events for the day and we both felt better for commiserating and rejoicing together.

Now it is all done. The kids are in bed. Howard is home and he brought a fun video for us to watch. I am tired. I am beyond tired. My eyes still feel raw and inclined to leak. But it has been an undeniably good day. I did things today that really matter. I did things that made my small corner of the world a better place. I wouldn’t trade that for anything. I wouldn’t even try to skip the bad beginning. It is all of a piece. This day was good. I shall treasure it.

…but I shall also hope for a less eventful day tomorrow.

At the end of the day I relish the silence. I have to relish it fast because I know it will not last. The kids are quiet because they are reading. In a moment I will have to make them turn the lights out, a process that is anything but silent. In theory there is more silence after lights out, but in practice it takes awhile to get there and by the time I do, my own bedtime is nigh.

But for the moment I have quiet. In this quiet space there are no children mulishly attempting to avoid homework. No one is deliberately attempting to annoy anyone else. No one is unintentionally annoying anyone else. No one is thumping up and down stairs at a dead run while giggling with a sibling following and emitting that half giggle, half cry of dismay that means the formerly-fun game is close to dissolving into a fight. No one needs me to pour milk, or invent snacks, or spell a word, or answer a question. These are not random examples. All have been part of the last two hours.

In the quiet space I am able to view these sorts of events with something akin to affection. I know that this period of my life is one to treasure. I know that I will sometimes miss the chaos and quarrels. Just yesterday at church I watched a mother with her crying baby and felt a pang remembering what it was like to be the primary comforter for an infant, to be the person who could make the world better just by jouncing exactly right. For a moment I missed it, but then the mother had to go change a stinky diaper and I didn’t. I’ll miss my kids as they are right now, but I am so glad that my life now does have moments of silence after the chaos. I revel in the quiet spaces because they give me strength to be calm in the face of chaos.

Time is up. Got to go make the lights be out.

One of the things that has been absorbing my time this Fall is reconnecting with various communities. I’d fallen out of touch with many of them for lack of time. Now I am back in touch and realizing that I am blessed with the problem of community over load. I have a church community, an extended family community, a neighborhood community, two school communities, a local writer’s community, a local artist/cartoonist community, a gaming/role playing community, an online writer’s community, as well as the communities inherent in participating in social media such as Facebook and Livejournal. Fortunately most of these communities have a lot of over lap, so it is actually possible for me to manage it all.

It has been wonderful re-connecting. I had not realized how disconnected my insanely busy schedule had made me. I’d lost touch without even realizing that I’d done it. Slowly I’m starting to catch up. I’m starting to know what is going on in people’s lives. I’m starting to see and care about the issues that each community deals with. It feels good.

Of course there are days where I want to flee into my room and hide because there are so many people. I like all the people, but I can get overwhelmed just by my four kids on a bad day. Of course hiding all the time is not good either. So I get out. I socialize. Then I go back home to assimilate and re-energize. The good news is that being a connected member of a community requires less effort than re-connecting with a community. I think I’m getting to the less effortful part of being a community member. That will be nice.

There have been times when I’ve truly enjoyed the process of storing food through canning. Today was not one of those times. But the pears were there, waiting, threatening to turn rotten and fill the house with fruit flies. I had the jars, lids, and rings. I even had the time. What I lacked was the desire. No part of me wanted to peel or can pears and no amount of logic could change the way I felt about it. Part of being grown up is doing things that are the right thing even if I don’t particularly feel like it. So I canned pears. The three quarts now sit on my kitchen counter and I am trying to feel accomplished instead of resentful. Also, I’m trying to ignore the box of still-not-quite-ripe pears waiting for me. Hopefully I’ll find my canning mojo next week when they’ll be ready.

It is interesting to me that I can spend an hour weeding a grassy flower bed, knowing that the grass will return from the roots I didn’t get pulled, but I’ll feel happy and satisfied with the job I’ve done. But I can look at those three quarts of pears which I will never have to can again and just feel tired. Emotions and logic don’t even have a nodding relationship sometimes.

Sometimes how I feel surprises me. This evening Howard and Kiki headed out for a social event. We’d all planned for me to stay home with the younger kids. It wasn’t until I learned that this was a whole family event that I realized exactly how much I wanted to go, not for the movie that they would be watching, but just to get out of my house and away from my routines. (Or maybe just away from the pears.) I loaded the kids and went, and had a good time.

Emotions ambush me. They lay in wait or sometimes linger far longer than I would like. This does not mean I am powerless against them. I choose my actions. I can choose to seek happiness no matter what my circumstances. I can’t make the happiness show up, but if I continually make a happiness shaped space in my life, somehow I always find happiness there. I feel fine about the pears now. This is because I spent some time choosing things which enriched my day. I sat in the sunshine, I went out with friends. Enough applications of these kinds of things and even the canning of pears fails to provide sufficient negative stimulus to prevent me from being happy.