Month: January 2011

An awkward moment

By / January 18, 2011 / 2 Comments

I was having a conversation with friends, whose religious affiliation I don’t know other than “not the same as me,” about heritage and rumors of Native American heritage as long-ago family scandal. One of my young children piped up:
“We all have Native American heritage, because we all come from Adam and Eve.”
The moment following her statement was short, but I was at once aware that several people in the room were possibly wondering how I could take my child to a church which teaches Adam and Eve. At the same time I was aware of the need not to shake my child’s faith in the things she has been taught. Faith has carried me through many hard places and I believe she will need the strength it can impart. I could have quite fascinating discussions about human origins with either my daughter or my friends, but they start in such different places that I did not know what words to use which would harm no one. I needed to change the subject rapidly so that our pleasant visit would not be turned into something else entirely.
I wish I’d had the presence of mind to say “Yes honey, when we get down to it all humans are related.” I don’t really know what it was I stammered instead, but because my guests are good people the topic changed and a pleasant afternoon was had.

I don’t know that anyone else felt the awkwardness of that moment as I did. Perhaps they thought nothing of it. The event has me thinking about the difficulty of teaching matters of belief to children when others who hold different beliefs are nearby. I wonder if I need to be more courageous about this. I tend to keep discussions of belief behind closed doors. My beliefs are safe there where they won’t draw attack or ridicule. One of the most frightening realizations in my adult life was that there are people in the world with whom I will never be able to peacefully coexist because our belief systems are so far divergent. Yet it is by sharing these close-to-our-hearts beliefs that we have the best chance of understanding each other.

I have no answers, except to know that if I am ever in the position that my friends were in, I will try to do as they did. They did not let difference of belief make them think any less of me and I truly appreciate that.

Thoughts on the staying home from a seminar

By / January 15, 2011

It is 9:30 in the morning and I am still in my pajamas. I feel a little bit of guilt over this. Howard, who is every bit as tired as I was this morning, got himself dressed and out the door over two hours ago. Since he left, I’ve mostly been dozing in bed with occasional excursions to rescue the cat from Gleek’s enthusiastic loving or to dispense food. On the other hand, I also feel wistful. Howard is going to spend the day learning valuable information and talking to fascinating people. I will spend it with kids, laundry, packages, email, and (hopefully) book revision.

My attendance at the Writing Superstars Conference for the past two days was a last minute decision. We’d long planned for Howard to go, but when we were over at Brandon’s house on New Year’s day, Brandon turned to me and said “You should come too.” So I did. It was worth every bit of the schedule shuffling and favor claiming that I had to do to clear space. Each conference, convention, and workshop has a distinctive feel to it. From the name and marketing on this one, I expect a more motivational-speaker, sales-pitchy event. Instead I found it extremely warm and down-to-earth. The information density in the presentations and panels was amazing. If you want to learn the business side of writing, this is the event for you. The thing I found personally heart warming was seeing, in gestures and comments from many people, that I’ve earned a respectable little corner in the local SciFi and Fantasy community.

My one regret associated with the seminar (other than not being there today) is that I did not meet more of the attendees. That room was full of writers in various stages of their dreams. This means that the room was full of fascinating people with stories to tell. I wish I had talked to more of them. On the other hand, I’m glad for every minute that I spent reconnecting with friends. This is happens at conventions too. I am meeting fewer strangers and finding more friends. I suppose it is not a bad problem to have.

My final moments at the symposium were providing taxi service from the hotel to the banquet restaurant. Howard and I did not attend the banquet ourselves, but I had my van and thus the capability to help shuttle people. I ended up driving David Farland, Rebecca Moesta, Brandon Sanderson, Eric Flint, Moses Siregar, and a woman whose name I never did catch. It was only after I’d dropped them all off that I thought about how envy-inducing that particular car ride might be to the fans of these authors’ books. I just felt like a I was giving a ride to a group of friends. This is not because I’m important or special, it is because these people are wonderful, friendly, and welcoming. Do not be afraid to approach them at public appearances. They’ll be very happy to talk to you.

Part of me is glad to be at home today. I love attending events, but they also exhaust my mental and emotional reserves. Today I can settle back in to my regular routine and help the kids do the same. Being shuffled off to neighbors and babysat is fun for them, but they need routine as much as I do. My wistful regrets are abated somewhat by knowing that I will get to see my non-local writer friends again at WorldCon Reno in August. In the meantime I will lounge in my pajamas and ponder whether to tackle laundry or email first. Email will probably win. Thanks to the joys of laptop ownership, I don’t have to get out of bed for it.

Shadow Puppets with Mary Robinette Kowal

By / January 14, 2011 / 2 Comments

“Tra la la!” said Mary as she made the little shadow puppet move behind the back lit screen. In front of the screen my four kids sat spell bound, watching the surprisingly life-like motions of the little shadow man. A second player entered the stage and Mary gave this character a distinctly different voice. “Is this the road to London?”

As a professional puppeteer, Mary Robinette Kowal is quite accomplished at this sort of performance. She has performed all over the United States and some other countries as well. Having her perform in my kitchen to an audience comprised of just myself and my children was an opportunity not to be turned down.

I stood at the back of the room, watching not just the slapstick antics of the shadow figures, but the larger scene of Mary and the children. The same light which turned cardboard cut outs into shadow figures also illuminated Mary’s face from below. Both Mary and the children were completely focused on the shadow play as it wound to its comic ending. The Children laughed with delight as one of the figures went head first into the river.

“I want to see it again!” Patch declared
“Me too!” said Gleek.
Mary laughed and re-set the stage for an encore performance. My older two kids wandered off, but the younger set laughed again as the figures moved through the now-familiar play. Once the play wound to a close, Mary invited the kids behind her screen to see how the puppets worked.

“You hold these two little rods in one hand and roll this one between your fingers so it moves his leg.” said Mary as she demonstrated.
Gleek hardly waited for Mary to finish before she took the puppet and tried it for herself. Patch claimed the other figure, delighted that he could make the little guy pound away with his axe. Mary saw that the kids were exploring the possibilities of the puppets and stepped back to stand with me.

“Tra la la!” said Patch
“Is this the road to London?” Gleek chimed right in. As we watched the two kids do an impromptu encore performance of the play they just watched. Mary and I stood silent and smiling until the ending arrived for the third time.

“If you have cardboard and a shower curtain, you can make a stage like this.” Mary said quietly to me. “Then they could make their own puppets.”

This second prospect was so enticing that I went and fetched cardboard right away. Mary was struck with the idea of making a little puppet Schlock. She settled at the kitchen counter and began to sketch and cut. Gleek wandered over and decided to make a puppet of her own. I fetched supplies and cut coat hangers for rods. Puppets were made and tested behind Mary’s screen. All too soon it was time for Mary to leave.

“One more time!” pleaded the kids. Mary was kind enough to comply, this time there was a difference. She used the Schlock puppet in place of the second little man.

The little cardboard Schlock is still on my counter even though Mary is now gone. I keep picking him up and using the coat hanger rod to make him wave. When I do I think about the joy and magic that can be created out of a few household supplies. The little Schlock makes me happy every time I see him. We will be making our own shadow stage and puppets.

Friends and Visiting

By / January 12, 2011

I was talking with a friend today about social networks both online and off. We agreed that while online communications help people stay in touch or make connections, they are no substitute for talking face to face. As if to underscore this point, I spent most of the afternoon visiting. Then in the evening I did some more as our weekly writer’s group gathered. Today also contained some hard and annoying things, which happened outside the visiting hours. Somehow the worries and frustrations are washed away by a tide of laughter and shared experiences. I am left only with a sense that today is a good day.

I remember times in my adult life when I felt I had no one beyond my family with whom I could connect. Now I rejoice in the abundance of good people I have the opportunity to know. I should probably spend some time contemplating how the change came about, because I am certain that there are others out there who are like I was. Once I see a pattern in the memories I shall blog about it. In the meantime, I sit here happily leafing through my memories of today’s conversations. There is much to savor and contemplate.

My Grandfather’s Blessings

By / January 10, 2011

During the month of December I spent time reading My Grandfather’s Blessings by Rachel Naomi Remen. This book is not a single story. It is a hundred stories each with their own message of hope or peace. When I first borrowed this book from a friend the size of it was daunting. Each story was like a shining jewel. I felt like I had to pause and give each my full attention to comprehend it. The result was that I read about five of the stories then I put the book down and didn’t pick it up for over a year. When I picked it up again last month, I realized that it would simply not be possible for me to fully absorb everything Grandfather’s Blessings has to say. I’m not intended to. Instead I read it the way that I read scriptures. I let the stories pass through me, trusting that the things I truly need will stick. It worked.

Some of the stories from My Grandfather’s Blessings were the catalysts which allowed me to see how I needed to shift my life and my thoughts. My focus on seeking bright things instead of dark, holding my plans lightly, and five daily things are all a direct result of thoughts created by stories from this book. I can’t tell you which stories anymore. The details have all washed away, only the pieces I needed have stayed with me so that I can turn them into something new.

One other thought stuck with me after reading this book. This one was definitely attached to the book as a whole rather than any particular story. Just as this book helped me, my book can be exactly the right catalyst for someone else. My book does not have to be perfect or superlative in order to be useful. It merely needs to be the best that I can do. I find great comfort in that thought as I slog through one last necessary revision before sending it out to alpha readers.

Do I recommend My Grandfather’s Blessings? I think that I do, particularly to those who are suffering loss or who are in need of hope. It provided a useful conduit for the inspirations that I needed about my life. I can’t say that it will do the same for everyone. Perhaps it would not have done so for me a year ago when I first picked it up to read it. Perhaps that is why I put it down for so long. I’m ready to give it back. I’ve gleaned from it what I need for now.

Snowy walk to a church meeting

By / January 9, 2011

The thin layer of snow glittered in the morning light as we made our way toward church. Under the layer of snow were the lumpy sheets of ice that have been covering the ground and sidewalks since just after Christmas. I was trailing behind Howard and the four kids, all dressed in Sunday best except for footwear. Skirts may look odd with sturdy snow boots, but they look better than being covered with snow after taking a painful tumble.

Most of the time I watched my own boots and the ground right in front of them sot that I could select my path with care. At the corner I paused a moment to look toward the beloved people tramping along ahead of me. No one else was out yet, the Stake Conference church meeting did not start for half an hour. Link had declined to wear a coat despite the 22 degree temperatures. He was at the head of the pack, moving quickly to get inside the warm church. Patch carried his newly-acquired art binder. We’d re-purposed an old school binder just that morning so that he had a place to carry his blank paper and markers. Gleek also had a new binder. As soon as she spied Patch’s she needed one too. In her case the binder was shoved into her shoulder bag along with pencils, paper, notebooks, pencil sharpeners, markers, erasers, and a small ball of clay. Gleek was quite thoroughly defended against the possibility of boredom in the meeting to come. Despite her preparation, she was the one most likely to be bored. I had my own emergency boredom kit in the bag on my should.

Kiki and Howard walked along together. Kiki had a binder of her own, simply organized and arranged. Howard moved among the kids, guiding and helping them pick their way along the icy sidewalks. I could hear his voice as he gave directions. A deep breath and the chill air filled my lungs. Then I continued on. It was a beautiful walk to a good place.

Snippets from a good day

By / January 8, 2011 / 2 Comments

Today felt like I want the majority of the next few months to feel. It was not a day free from strife or conflict, but I feel good about the responses I chose for those conflicts. I spent time on a project that is just for me. I even made the house orderly so that I enjoy being here more. This last is important since we are embarking on our third week of sub-freezing temperatures which prevents the kids from playing outdoors for very long.

Snippets from the day:

Kiki has been reading Little Women for her history class and loving it. I’ve been watching with interest as Kiki reacts to all the various developments in the lives of the March family.

I had a conversation with a friend several weeks ago in which we discussed the necessity of cutting back on social interactions to avoid over load. This is particularly true in venues where one needs to appear professional and competent rather than being able to relax. The conversation made me look around at the places where I spend time both in person and online. I realized that while I don’t need to eliminate any, I definitely needed to re-frame how I was thinking about them. The result is more enjoyment and less pressure.

The cold temperatures have driven our outdoor cat almost entirely indoors. I am not dying of allergies which is completely astonishing to me. I believed that the choice to own a cat was to choose being permanently ill. At least in this case, for this cat, I was wrong. I still feel cautious about the whole thing, but also glad.

As of yesterday morning, my shipping process is back into working shape. Stamps.com took all the information I provided them in the 75 minute service call and within 24 hours they’d released a patch that fixed the problem. This is all in place just in time for the January shipping lull.

The project I worked on today is my annual print version of my blog. This year I decided not to simply use LJbook.com to pull the entries for me. That works, but because it is automated it creates odd formatting around photographs and the dates take some deciphering. This year I decided to use my layout tools and make the pages of my book pretty. Then I’ll do something for the cover as well. This process is definitely taking longer, but I’m enjoying it.

And now it is time for me to make bedtime happen.

Witnessing Kiki’s Homework Struggle

By / January 6, 2011

I watched Kiki working on a jigsaw puzzle. She’d been working on it for an hour and bedtime was near. I knew she had homework. I knew it was not done. It was only a couple of days ago that I made an agreement with her that I would not be pushing her on her homework or preventing her from failing. The puzzle was avoidance. She was headed for failure, not by choice but by default. I thought very carefully before I said a word. I really do need her to be taking responsibility for her own homework. I need that for my own sanity, but also because she needs to learn how to be responsible. She needs to know how to track time and make plans without me standing at her elbow reminding her that she should. I chose to make a general reminder to all the kids in the room that they should do their homework if they had any. Link piped up that he didn’t. Kiki crumpled and the tears began.

Our conversation lasted over an hour. It was very hard for me to not jump in and offer solutions. It was even harder for me to not try to guide her toward what I could see as clearly the right decision. My purpose in the conversation was merely to act as a foil. Occasionally I commented on which lines of thought were adult and which were like a child. This adult/child comparison is part of a larger conversation that she and I have had over the course of several days. It was actually a helpful and informative part of the conversation rather than me applying labels. I watched and listened as Kiki worked her way through a forest of emotions. I watched her wend her way through anger and denial. She paused briefly at the desire for someone else to make her do her homework so that the homework would be done and she would have someone to be mad at. Then she recognized this as childish and moved onward. Eventually she cleared away her anger enough to see that she really is at fault that this assignment is late. She accepted that responsibility. This led to the further knowledge that she really does want to go to college and that this assignment will make or break her grade in that class. More immediately, there is a class she wants to take for which this class is a pre-requisite. Finally she sat down and did the assignment.

Watching the process was like watching someone do long division when I am possessed of a calculator. It took Kiki a highly emotional hour to arrive at the same conclusion I reached in less than a minute. But because the process was hers, she learned from it. All that sorting and digging through her own emotions taught her things about herself. It showed her how costly procrastination can be. She is a stronger, more mature person than she was while doing the puzzle. In the middle of it, when I was not sure to what end her path would lead, I worried. Now I see that my worry was needless. Kiki is amazing, smart, and able to discern what she needs to do even when she doesn’t like it.

A task oriented day

By / January 5, 2011

I did not deal with shipping issues today. Instead I tackled financial reports. I had monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports to file with two federal departments and two state departments. There were also royalty reports to authors and artists. I was pleasantly surprised when these tasks were all accomplished within the space of a single work day without me once having a desire to smack something. Two days and much smacking is what I consider normal for this process, so I was glad.

Less pleasantly, Gleek has been running a bit wild at home. She is pushing limits hard, and definitely punching some of my buttons. My preferred parenting methods involve empathy and reason, unfortunately she just uses those as a springboard. Instead I have to get strict. I don’t like it, but it seems to reassure Gleek. At least once she stops being furiously mad (usually within an hour) she is calmer, happier, and ready to behave better. She’s like the cow who has to push against the electric fence four or five times to make sure that it really will zap her every time. If it does, then she stays clear of the fence, content with the space provided. I don’t like being strict or using my mean voice. It feels very contrary to the spirit of calmness and happiness that I’m attempting to cultivate in my life.

I’m still reviewing my five things. They still help me feel calm and centered. Removing the fear and emotional imbalance has allowed me to see that one source of frustration is that I have more important tasks than I have hours to do them. As soon as we’re sure we can afford it I want to hire an assistant to help me manage the daily shipping and administrative tasks for our business. It would be nice if that occurred this year. Right now the back of my brain is full of small details and tasks I need to not forget. I want that space so it can be simmering words and plots.

My black binder full of my book is sitting and waiting to be edited. It has been waiting for more than a month. I feel it is important. Howard feels like it is important. But urgent things keep jumping in and taking up my time. Tomorrow I’ve put an appointment on the calendar. My binder and I are going to the library where we will spend two hours away from every distraction. Hopefully that will work.

How Postal Services Ate My Day

By / January 4, 2011

My plan for today was to tackle the first of the year accounting. Then late last night I got an email from a customer who pointed out that some shipping options had vanished from our store. All that remained were the very most expensive choices. I’m already indebted to our customers for supporting us, it is not okay with me that postal services eat up their money for no good reason. This discovery was made at 10:30 pm. I made a couple of stabs at solving it, but I was too tired to find my problem solving brain. It became the first thing to tackle in the morning.

Except the first thing every morning is to get kids off to school. I can’t do any business tasks until they are out of the house or they wouldn’t get off to school at all. Half the time this is accomplished by 8 am, which still qualifies as “first thing”. This morning was one of the other half, the mornings where Kiki starts an hour later than the other kids. I frequently have time to get started on business tasks in between the two drop-offs because Kiki is self sufficient. She wasn’t this morning. And Howard needed some things done urgently. And I ran to staples because it made sense, since I was out anyway, to pick up the tax forms that I would need for my accounting. What with one thing and another I arrived at 10 am, which no longer counts as “first thing.”

The problem with the store started because the US Postal Service raised their rates. This is fine. They have every right to increase the price of their services, particularly when I know that they are not very profitable. I like USPS. I want them to stick around. Unfortunately somehow the rate change broke their automated system which is queried by our store. The store software responded by making all the shipping methods for which it could not find data, vanish. The nice folks at Volusion (our store software provider) already had a fix for the issue and I had it in place within minutes of calling customer service. So Yay! Everything works again.

Only there is a third provider in our shipping process. I use Stamps.com to print out our labels and postage from data that I export from Volusion. Stamps.com was also affected by the postal rate increase. I had to download an update before that program would run. I did and then it crashed. I could print international postage just fine, but domestic postage crashed the program every time. I fired off an email to customer support and then took all the logical steps: restart computer. Re-install program. Restart computer again. None of it worked.

I resorted to printing labels on the USPS website, which works great if you have a single label, but is tedious when I need to import addresses and print many labels. At this point I had successfully turned all of the orders into packages, which solved the immediate trouble. However I still had a long-term issue to solve. I ship things every day. I did not want to use the clunky USPS form every day. And it was time to go fetch the children. Which completely fractured my ability to concentrate and problem solve.

During the next 3 hours I looked into Endicia, which is a competitor of Stamps.com. Endicia would introduce some features I like, but also would create some new hurdles. I pondered whether the problem was an inherent instability in my old computer system. There are some errors which chirp at me occasionally and photoshop crashes with frustrating regularity. I thought longingly of just buying a new computer, expensive though that solution would be. In the end I just walked away from the whole problem in a grump.

Thirty minutes ago I got an email from Stamps.com customer support. My problem is a known issue and they’ll happily talk me through a fix over the phone. During regular business hours. Tomorrow. On one hand, I’m relieved because my shipping system is still viable. On the other hand I’m frustrated because this problem is going to spill over into tomorrow. The gripping hand is that I lost a whole day because other people made mistakes and broke my system.

I want my day back.