Keeping going

In our church the kids sing a song about pioneers which has a chorus about “we are marching, ever marching, marching onward, ever onward.” My life feels like that chorus right now.

Last October through December I was living a high energy, high stress lifestyle. I’ve deliberately stepped away from that. I’ve pared back my away-from-home commitments. However the at-home commitments have doubled or tripled. I’m giving the kids far more time and attention. I’m giving the house more attention. But the largest part is the increase in workload for the Schlock business. With the new merchandise I’ve been spending several hours per day preparing packages for shipping. Since we intend to continue adding merchandise at the rate of at least one new thing per month through July, I expect the shipping chores to increase rather than decrease. It isn’t high energy stress, but it is one thing after another stress. I don’t have to go fast constantly, but I do have to keep on track and keep going.

An additional time consumer is the book layouts that I’m supposed to be working on. I’d planned on getting them done early in the month. Instead I did seemingly endless piles of Tax Preparatory accounting. But the tax accounting is all done now. So today I opened up the layouts for Hold on to Your Horses and really dug into the changes I want to make. None of the individual changes is large, but I discovered that I wanted to make a lot of tweaks. I spent several hours on it this afternoon. It was supposed to be morning hours so that the afternoon could belong to the kids, but shipping and customer support slurped up the whole morning. I have another hour or so of work on it, then I can shoot a pdf off to the artist for approval.

I think I’m actually going to meet my goal of getting Hold on to Your Horses sent off for print by the end of this month. This is both exciting and terrifying. What if I make some horrible mistake in formatting the book, but no one sees it until we’ve shelled out the money and got the books in hand? What if no one buys the book? I ran the numbers and for me to break even, we need to sell 700 books. (It would be 400, but I feel strongly that the artist deserves to get paid for every copy that sells whether or not the project breaks even.) One part of my brain says that of course we’ll be able to sell 700 books. Howard sells that many of his books in the first 24 hours. But another part of me remembers all too clearly that 700 is an astronomically high number of sales for a self-published book. So I’m scared that this project of mine will cost our family money just when we’re trying to create a more stable financial situation.

As soon as I get the files sent off for print, I need to start putting together a website for the book. I need a place to point people when they ask about it. I’ll also need promotional materials like bookmarks. Oh, and of course there is the layout for the next Schlock book that needs to be done as well. So much to do. One thing after another.

Mostly I just move from task to task getting things done. But sometimes I pause and just feel tired. In that moment it all seems impossible. But then I pick up and start moving again. At the end of each day I’ve done a lot, but it is but a sliver compared to what I have yet to do. I would be discouraging except that I have this strong feeling that this burdensome schedule is only going to last for about 6-9 months. I can keep going that long.