Today I’m headed off to the land of Cabin Without Internet. I shall be spending my time there bonding with relatives and helping coordinate the family reunion activities. Sometimes it is good to walk away from my online life. I will chant that any time I feel withdrawal symptoms or anxiety over the quantities of mail that will be waiting for me upon my return. I have to remember that Howard will keep his eye on things. All will be well.
This year Howard and I will celebrate our 19th wedding anniversary. Of course by celebrate I mean that we’ll probably remember to tell each other that we’re glad about it, but only probably. Sometimes we forget the anniversary because we’re too busy getting on with being married. Whenever Howard and I are asked for advice on being married, we share something we learned early. Don’t keep secrets. Anything you’re afraid to tell your spouse must be discussed as soon as you can arrange a quiet and uninterrupted time. Short term surprises are fine, long term secrets will fester and poison everything else. Lately I’ve found a corollary to that advise. Don’t tell everything. This advise seems to contradict the first advice, but it doesn’t.
A few months ago we opened the pre-orders on Sharp End of the Stick. The particular blend of stresses involved in the pre-order process always trigger fun blends of anxiety in both of us. I was trying to maintain a very zen approach to the whole thing, not checking on numbers. Howard was watching numbers, doing calculations, and making contingency plans. He was really stressed, so he came to me and spilled all of his fears in detail. At bedtime. I then fretted all night. The next couple of days Howard felt much better and went about his normal things, while I checked numbers, did math, and made contingency plans based on worst case scenarios. Then I came to Howard and spilled all of my anxiety and fear in detail. At bedtime. Then Howard had a turn to fret all night. I think we repeated that cycle one more time before recognizing that we were playing a horrible game of anxiety-and-depression hot potato. Fortunately pre-orders only throw us off balance for awhile. We managed to extend the experience by throwing each other off balance, but things got better. Sometimes the telling of something does more harm than help.
Yesterday was not an emotionally good day for me. I don’t really know why, because nothing is actually wrong. In fact, I can point to a dozen things which are going really well. Yet I was feeling like it was all futile and doomed to failure. This was true no matter what you substituted for “it” in the sentence. My writing was pointless. The finances were constantly returning to ebb points. The kids needed stuff which they would just need again later. The laundry. I really wanted to corner Howard and explain all of this in detail. Surely as Husband it was his job to listen and make it all better. Except that I knew some of the things in my head would definitely punch Howard’s anxiety and/or depression buttons. A round of anxiety hot potato was guaranteed to make the entire week miserable. I needed to not tell him, yet I needed to not keep secrets.
I found Howard and gave him an extremely sketchy outline of how I was feeling. It was enough to let him know “hey, I’m struggling today and need extra hugs.” He supplied the hugs and the support, then we went our separate ways. Howard headed off to draw comics, because completed work reduces our stress levels. I watched kids, assembled bundles, and stared at the huge pile of ripe apricots that I had no desire to make into jam. More important, I assigned my oldest kids to watch their young cousins, then I got out of the house for an hour.
By evening my mood was better and Howard had not been distracted from his important creative work. The concept is applicable in other situations as well. Some things have to be talked through in completely honest detail. Other things don’t need to be said.
Niece7 and Nephew5 arrived the other evening, the influx of little voices caused our cat to bolt upstairs and ask to go out. She knows that little voices are accompanied by little hands. Fortunately for her the problem of small people interested in cats is a familiar one. Gleek is not so little, but frequently wants to love our cat more than our cat would prefer. We’ve set up designated safe zones, places where the cat is to be left alone: Howard’s office, her basket, the chair in my office. Many times I’ve seen her dash to one of these places and hunker in them very deliberately, rather like a child reaching home base in a game of hide and seek.
“See. I’m in the safe place. No touching.”
From her safe places, our cat likes people. She watches or just hangs out nearby. She particularly likes sleep next to people who are working quietly on computers. That way people are readily available for petting, should she want some, or door duty, should she desire to go out. Normally our house is the perfect haven for her. Summer is a bit harder with her increased exposure to bored children who have ideas about snuggling. This new influx of extra small people has her dismayed. last night the door to Howard’s office was closed, she batted at it with a paw until I opened it for her. She’s also identified Howard, Kiki, and I as people who will make the small ones give her space. She hovers near one of us whenever she is indoors. As a system, it works. Soon the extra small people will end their visit and our kitty will not spend so much time being dismayed. Until then, she’ll be in my office hiding on her favorite chair.
Forty minutes after Patch’s Lego Brick Camp ended, I got a phone call from the teacher.
“So, um, are you going to come pick up your child?”
At which point I apologized profusely, promised it would never happen again, and barely took time to hang up before grabbing purse and keys to drive very fast. The place is only five minutes from my house. All the way there I berated myself, felt horrible, and worried that Patch would be distraught at being forgotten.
I arrived and Patch was happily helping clean up bricks and put away chairs.
“Some other parents were late too,” The teacher said as I apologized yet again. “Then I got talking with them until I realized you weren’t here yet, so I called. It was no trouble.”
“I told him you’re late sometimes.” Patch volunteered.
I’m late sometimes. A part of me dies inside that my son knows and believes this about me. Surely part of being a mother is being reliable. My other kids would have panicked if I’d been forty minutes late. I wasn’t late for them. Patch has a different mother than they did at his age. Patch’s mother works. He’s learned that sometimes I’m late and the world doesn’t end if that happens. which is actually a good thing in some ways. Patch is more self reliant and confident than my other kids were.
Yet I don’t have “flaky about afternoon appointments” in my self image. In my head I’m reliable. Mostly. I’ve been memorably late twice in the past year. Both times I was focused on a computer task and was too far away from my cell phone to hear the alarms I set for myself. I set those alarms on purpose…because if I don’t, I’ll forget. So, yes, I’m flaky. I’ve developed systems to handle the flakiness. Most of the time they work and no one can tell. Then I can pretend to myself that I’m completely reliable, when actually I’m human and prone to make mistakes.
Patch and I made a joke out of my lateness all the way home. We laughed together about it, which is probably a healthier way to approach things than for me to plunge into guilt-driven despair. However both Patch and Howard independently arrived at the conclusion that my contrition for being so late ought to extend far enough to spring for Wendy’s. So I did, and all was well again. I’ve also set more alarms for tomorrow and made them much louder. Once can be funny, more than once is bad.
I wrote myself a royalty check last week. It is the first time I have ever done so. With the creation of Cobble Stones, and Hold on to Your Horses finally being profitable, I realized that it is time for the publishing company I run to be paying me as a writer. So I did the spread sheet, calculated the numbers for last quarter, then wrote the check and signed it. Right afterward, I flipped it over and signed the back so I can deposit it. Before I tell you how much money, let me tell you a couple more things.
Hold on to Your Horses took me a month to write. Granted, I probably only worked for about 10 hours of that month, but during that month I wrote little else. Finding an artist to work with used up at least 30 work hours. Back and forth with the artist took 40 work hours over three months. Layout and design took at least 40 hours, this includes the hours I spent curled into a ball crying because I was sure that I’d completely ruined the project and would never be able to make it work right. I had to wait three months to get the books. Then I took the books with me to every convention I attended. I talked about them to customers over dealer’s room tables. I did that over and over again for four years. I talked about Hold Horses on the internet. I did interviews on local television, radio, podcast, and the internet. Howard blogged about the book to all his readers. The project finally broke even financially last year. It has now paid my artist a fair rate and paid for printing costs. My royalty check for this month, the first money I’ve ever made on the project, was $15.
Cobble Stones is newer. It took me 20-30 hours to edit, layout, and create. I paid someone to help me put it into kindle and ePub formats. I spent at least 30 hours making the cover through trial and lots of error. I don’t know how many hours went into the original essays. I haven’t spent much time marketing it yet. The release got swamped by the Sharp End of the Stick pre-order. It was more a kick-this-thing-out-the-door-to-fend-for-itself than a celebratory release. I find it amusing that I co-own the publishing company, but my book got sidelined by a big money maker. There is a lot more work I can do to promote this book, but the truth is that my profit margins on it are very slim because it is a Print on Demand book. It will never make very much money. My total royalty on this book is $9.
I give all these numbers because people considering self-publishing should know. It eats a lot of time and usually does not pay a lot of money. I’m not sorry I did the projects. I continue to hope that they will earn more in the future, but they have not even begun to pay me back for the financial value of my time. Emotionally both projects are paid in full and then some. Except, perhaps, in the moment when I hold a $24 check and think “that’s it?”
The Schlock books are also self-published. They support our family as well as allow us to hire a colorist and an occasional shipping assistant. Neither Howard nor I has been able to leverage the fervent Schlock audience into sales for my books. The works are too different. My writing has to find its own audience, and I’m working on that slowly. I’m treating this first $24 check as a promise to myself. It is a starting point from whence I can grow. It certainly beats the zero dollars I was getting before. Self publishing is a long game, I need to be willing to keep working at it for years to come.
The plan was to be getting everyone out of bed by 8 am because sleeping late in the summer causes us all to sleep through some of the best work hours of the day. Except the best outdoor hours of the day are 8-10 pm. Those are the cut-the-lawn, work-in-the-garden, go-ride-bikes hours. If we’re outside until 10 pm, then the younger kids don’t go to bed until 11 and the older kids until midnight. Seventeen years of mommy radar training makes it very difficult for me to fall asleep while kids are still rattling around the house, even when those kids are teenagers. I get to bed around 1 am. This makes getting up at 8 am…unlikely. We can do it. I make efforts, but when I do get up early, the house is so lovely and quiet. “I can get work done in peace!” I think to myself. So I do. Then I hear kids rummaging in the kitchen for breakfast and realize that once again it is 10:30 am. The pattern is more or less working, but all my roles run into each other. Also, I’m not getting enough sleep, not even on the days when I catch an afternoon nap. The lack of sleep further erodes my ability to compartmentalize my roles. My life feels much nicer when each day clearly divided in to mom focused time, work focused time, house focused time, and relaxation time. In summer those things all dissolve into each other so that I always feel like something is getting neglected. The best I can do is declare “house stuff comes first today” and then plan for a more work focused day later. The good news is that all of the critical tasks are being accomplished even though everything feels like a big muddle.
Things will change (again) tomorrow evening when Niece7 and Nephew5 come to stay with me for five days. Those number designators are ages, and no their parents aren’t going to be here. I’m re-entering the world of 24 hour preschool child care. Yes I expect it to make just about everything harder. I’ve planned for that, but my sister is moving so I’m watching her kids. Then there is a family reunion, and then a different sister is coming to stay with her kids. The family part of my brain is very happy and excited. The business side of my brain worries a bit, particularly about the next week, because I’ve got to get books shipped off to GenCon soon.
I write all this out, and it feels like I’m repeating myself. Which I am. Because I face similar challenges every summer. Part of my brain feels like I should have figured this out by now. Surely it is a solvable problem. Yet the best I can manage is a solution that feels like muddling through.
We left the water park when I realized that the best time to leave was an hour ago, before the crowds got so bad and the kids were cranky. I suspect this is a typical departure time. This was my first venture into a water park in ten years or more. I gave them up when I realized that taking young children into such places was signing up for five hours of Where’s Waldo when Waldo might drown if you can’t spot him quickly enough. Today was nothing like that. My children have reached the age where I can say “We need to stay together” and they do. I say “sure, swim ahead of me in the lazy river, but wait for me at the exit” and they will. Or even “I’ll wait here, once the waves in the pool stop, come back” and they arrive right on schedule. It was lovely all morning. By afternoon everyone was a bit tired, but not admitting it, and the crowds had increased to the point that they interfered with everything. So the negotiations for One More Thing were a bit heated, but compromise was found. The kids are full of plans for how things should go next time. Since we have summer passes, having a next time is probable. More importantly, I can picture a trip to the water park as something fun instead of hours of exhaustion, frustration, and tantrums. I like parenting for older kids.
For now I will pay attention to the parts of my skin that are screaming at me. 5 hours of direct sun does a really good job of showing me my sun screen blind spots.
The process for deciding how much inventory to ship to a convention is very involved and always stressful.
Step 1: Look at numbers from last year
We’ve been in this business long enough that we have several years of prior numbers to consult. This is particularly true in the case of GenCon where I can look up how much we sold last year and the year before. Our GenCon team is amazing and keeps wonderful track for us. Yet looking at those inventory numbers shows me all the flaws in my convention inventory management systems. Without fail there is some number I want which is missing. This time it was magnet sales not being itemized out from other things. I know I had them itemized at some point, but I must have made a data entry error in my accounting software. Either that or I was tired and instead of looking up the specific number, rolled it into an additional book sale. This means that last year’s numbers over count on a book or two to account for the magnet money. Little bits of fudging on small ticket categories happens every time. Usually it reveals a flaw in my system rather than any fault of those who are on the ground running the booth. More often all the numbers line up perfectly the week after the convention, but then I fail to record them because I am tired and distracted. Or sometimes I record them and then file the record in an odd place. So the seemingly simple task of looking at numbers from last year gets time consuming.
Step 1b: Look up numbers from comparable conventions
WorldCon changes locations every year. The inventory sold numbers from the previous year are kind of useful, but only as a rough guideline because attendance varies. Also our sales vary depending upon whether the location of WorldCon is in a place with a strong Schlock Mercenary fan base. Reno was nearly home turf, Australia was largely new territory and in a foreign country. How much do I use those numbers as guidelines? Or would I do better to use numbers from another convention and multiply by number of attendees? I rarely know the answers, so I usually look up several sets of numbers to have them on hand.
Step 2: Adjust for new releases, cross promotion, and other factors
GenCon has a host of new factors this year. Our booth mates both have big new releases this year. We have our shiny new board game. Also Brandon and Mary will both be at GenCon doing Writing Excuses things with Howard. All of these factors will, in theory, drive additional traffic to the booth and thus lead to more sales. This leads me to round up on the inventory numbers. Also we have an established team and a place to store excess inventory, both very good things. But perhaps there is some other extremely shiny thing that will drive traffic and dollars in a different direction. It seems like WorldCon Chicago is completely made of factors for which I should adjust the numbers. Mary will be there and the convention is writer heavy, so more WE stuff should go. Except Brandon will be at Dragon Con and Dan will be in Germany. Usually we have them sign at our booth, thus luring in new people. We have a fantastic team, but perhaps most of the WorldCon regulars have already bought their Schlock books. I turn all of these things over (and over and over) in my head before moving on to step 3.
Step 3: Make a guess
This is when I write down how much stuff I need to send. It really feels like stabbing in the dark, though I can be reasonably sure I’m in the right vicinity. If I send too much, I’ll have to pay for shipping both ways. If we run out of something, we’ll disappoint someone who wanted to buy.
Step 4: Ship the stuff and fret
All the time I’m packaging and shipping I will worry that I’m sending too much. I particularly worry this when I look at the shipping bill. Once I’ve sent it, and during the booth set up process, I am always convinced that I didn’t send enough. Sometimes I will oscillate between too much and not enough at a rate of 10 minutes per oscillation.
Step 5: The convention
Things sell. We pay the bills for the show. Usually we end up in the black. We make a huge mental list of what we should do differently next time. Sometimes I remember to write down the list or parts of it. Sometimes I even keep track of the notes and file them where I can find them next year.
Step 6: Post Convention accounting
This is when all of the stuff comes back home to me. In theory I conscientiously count everything and make copious notes. I’m also supposed to write up a post convention report which includes all those mental notes. The notes and reports go into a file neatly labelled for next year. All the convention gear should be neatly put away in places where I can find it again. Perhaps this year most of those things will happen because I’ll be staying home and thus not convention exhausted during this phase. In past years the boxes, reports, and gear get shoved out of the way as I scramble to recover and handle other things. Then a month or so later I finally get around to cleaning it all up, by which time some of the thoughts and pieces have been moved or lost. I do muddle through, I do at least shove the relevant information into file folders so I can find it the next year. I have folders full of GenCon papers for the past four years. I have WorldCon papers for a similar length of time. If I at least shove all the papers into a single location, I have a hope of making sense out of it later when I need to.
It always feels messy. I always feel like I’m doing it wrong. Yet I don’t think I am. I think the guessing and mess are part of the nature of the work. Which is why I write this blog post to let everyone know when I make jokes about casting the bones to guess how much to send to summer conventions, I’m only partially joking. Its how it feels.
This past weekend was the five day weekend of Writing Excuses podcast recording. Howard, Mary, Brandon, and Dan all shut themselves in Brandon’s basement for four days (with a one-day break in the middle) to attempt to record and entire year’s worth of episodes before Dan leaves to go live in Germany. I was not part of the recording. My efforts involved making sure that Howard had quiet spaces to depart from and return to when he was exhausted. And then there was the emotional support. This was hard on all of them, and therefore hard on their support systems. But the result is 44 episodes ready to go. They won’t record again for a year, which at the moment is relieving as they’re worn out, but later it will be a bit sad for me personally because Mary will not have a business-driven reason to come to town and Dan will be far away. These are people I like being around, hence sadness. At least the League of Utah Writers Round Up in September will give Brandon, Emily, Howard, and I a solid day to hang out and talk.
Writing Excuses is the one business thing where Howard is thoroughly involved and I am not. For most of our business ventures I’m in charge of operations, tracking schedules, sending inventory, accounting for both money and time. With Writing Excuses, I arrange nothing, plan nothing, am not involved. It is kind of nice, because I’ve got lots of things to track and don’t really need any more. However it is also a bit sad because the podcast is a truly worthwhile endeavor and I’d love to be part of that energy. I’m not though. I’m vitally important to Howard and a good friend to everyone else, but Writing Excuses exists entirely without my supportive efforts. I have no claims on it. On the days I feel a little sad, I have to remember that it is good for Howard to have professional spaces which do not include me. It is good for me to have professional spaces that do not include him. Our careers flourish best when they are unshackled from each other because we have very different professional focuses. The tricky bit is balancing those against our marriage in which we share all things. The other tricky bit is that whenever Howard and I are together the room is crowded with Husband, Wife, marketing directer, accountant, merchandiser, artist, art director, graphic designer, warehouse manager, customer support rep, and best friends. All these various roles have different relationships to each other, different authority structures. It gets quite complicated, particularly when we trade roles based on context. On the other hand, if all of those roles where filled by different people getting them all into a conference room and making them to agree with each other about priorities would be a monumental endeavor. There are also, of course, the times when Howard just hangs out with Sandra and all those other people are nowhere to be seen.
I think about all of this as I look at the list of things I need to do to prepare Howard for both GenCon and WorldCon. He will be running a booth at both conventions. I will be staying home, quite glad to shed the roles of booth manager, shop clerk, and talent handler. That particular trio of roles, when combined with parenting guilt for leaving the kids, has proven bad for me emotionally. I can do it. I will do it again as necessary, but this year we’ve lined up two different dream teams for the two events. Howard could not be in better hands. Now all I have to do is scramble hard to make sure that necessary preparation gets done in advance. Now if only I can find the appropriate business focus despite the heat and long summer days which play havoc with family schedule.
Come August Howard will go and I will stay. It would be nice to be able to say that I’ll stay behind and get writing done, that at least some of my summer will be spent working on things to build my career in my own space. Thus far that has not been true. My summer fishtails between family concerns and business tasks, skidding along, never quite out of control, but never feeling straight or steady. I have spaces, quiet times, but they’re used for things not-writing. Other than the League of Utah Writers event in September, I have no professional events currently scheduled. I hope to be involved with both LTUE and the Storymakers conference, but official invitations to present have not yet come and won’t until sometime in the fall. Right now my career is idling and part of me feels a bit pretentious for calling it a career at all. In theory careers pay money, which my writing only has in small sporadic amounts.
This points up another challenge, Howard’s career is a behemoth around which our family must constantly adjust. My career squeezes in around the edges. Howard and I talk about this sometimes. In our heads both careers have equal value. In the bank, his pays the bills. Granted, he would not have his career without all the work I do. That bill payment money is as much mine as his, but it is hard on the days when I realize that my real career, the one that makes money, is “business manager” while “writer” is actually a hobby. Then I have a whole argument with myself that the value of an effort should not be measured in dollars, which I feel strongly to be true. Yet bills don’t pay themselves and so work that pays bills is important and valued. Other work comes afterward. All of which explains why my writing continues to linger in the spaces and around the edges of everything else. I just have to confront this more when Howard disappears to record with three really cool people and I’m on the other side of the closed door.
We’ve taken steps to address the career imbalances. I’ve started giving myself royalty checks and statements for both Hold on to Your Horses and Cobble Stones. We try to send me on a career-related solo trip at least once per year. This year it was to the Nebula weekend. The thing is, I think that all relationships have similar imbalances, or could if the relationship is not carefully managed. It is easy to accidentally make one person seem more valued or important than the other. In our case, I’m guilty of doing it to myself. I give myself away without even noticing I’m doing it. Then every time I mark out territory for myself, a host of voices in my head tell me how that space could be better used. All I can do is keep plugging away, keep treating my writing like it is a career, and hope that some day I’ll have financial statements I can use to pummel the voices of self-doubt into submission.
We took lots of shots of glow sticks swirled around in the dark. They were pretty easy to take. All I had to do was turn off the flash on my camera and hold it really still while Gleek swung the glow sticks around in various patterns. This was an over head under arm pattern she learned for swinging poi balls.
This one was two chains in a figure 8.
I grabbed this shot while she was paused to readjust something.
Again with two chains swung as eights.
Two chains in a tight circle.
It was a fun little art photography project that we really enjoyed.