Book Production

Sunshine and Projects Completed.

By / March 10, 2012 / 3 Comments

Sitting on my porch with warm sunshine warming my bare toes, I begin to believe in springtime. The belief is reinforced by the smell of wet earth and the green leaves of spring flowers which poke from between the dead grasses in my flower bed. I close my eyes and tip my head so that I can feel the sun radiating through my hair. I’m on the porch because I am waiting for the last few pieces I need for SEOS layout. Four little pieces and then the whole project is ready for a test print. Test printing is the last stage, the final look for mistakes before I send it all to the printer and say “print it”. Completion feels so much better than the muddle in the middle.

I have plenty more work to do, of course. Clearing out this project merely makes way for a dozen more. Yet completing one thing helps me believe I can complete other things. It is rain after a drought during which all my projects languished in various stages of waiting and incompletion. Like the water I sprayed on my flower bed, it will help new things grow stronger and more beautiful. On Monday I will survey what comes next. For today I can let things feel completed and sunny.

After LTUE is Done

By / February 12, 2012

Today is a jellyfishing day. I drift about, occasionally dealing with a task that I bump up against, but mostly just drifting.

I came home from LTUE last night to discover that my kids were mostly in bed, the house was relatively clean, and while there were dirty dishes aplenty, they bore testimony of the fact that my kids ate food healthier than candy corn. All of that and I never got a crisis phone call. The kids took care of each other and generally managed just fine while I was gone. I am extremely grateful for this. Not only because it made coming home far less stressful, but also because it is evidence that my months and years of effort to teach them are actually bearing fruit. They are quite glad to have me back at home. Today has been huggier than usual.

This afternoon we all went to church. The moment everyone was settled on the bench, calmness settled over me like a comfortable blanket. I looked around the chapel at all my friends and neighbors. I live in a good place, surrounded by good people. All the professional should-haves and what-ifs dropped away. I love attending conferences and events. I love coming home to where I can just settle in and be inconspicuous.

I have panel notes to write up. I also came away with a list of follow-up items. The biggest thing on this list is that I really must pull together a short book of essays pulled from this blog. It doesn’t need to be cohesive or brilliant. All it needs to be is a sampler, something physical that I can point at when people ask what I write. Hopefully tomorrow I can begin focused work on all the convention follow-up items. Then of course there are the preparatory tasks for upcoming conventions. And the graphic design work for the next Schlock book.

For tonight, drifting and sleep

Updates from the Tayler House

By / February 2, 2012

Three fourths of my kids are sick today. This is going to significantly change the tenor of my day. I’ve grown accustomed to having longish stretches to focus on work. There are still random phone calls, script aprrovals, and business meetings to interrupt my focus, but on the whole I can work. I was thinking about this the other day after reading a post from my sister who is potty training a toddler and thus having to orbit said toddler pretty closely. After reading the post I swiveled in my office chair and realized that I’d been sitting in that exact chair for over two hours. Such a thing never happened when my kids were little. I was up and around, feeding kids, cleaning messes, negotiating deals. So in some ways today will be a return to that. I expect to be paged for deliveries several times per hour.

LTUE begins one week from today. If you’re local in Utah it is definitely an event to consider. I’ve already begun compiling notes and thoughts for my four panels. The nice thing about pulling together notes for a panel is that the same notes can be used to write a blog post later.

In writing news: My short story “The Road Not Taken” was selected to be featured as a finalist during the Mormon Lit Blitz over on the Mormon Artist blog. This was a cheerful addition to yesterday. Subscribing to the RSS of that blog from Feb 15-29 is probably worthwhile. They’ll be posting one finalist per day. I’m looking forward to reading them. I hope you’ll join me and perhaps cast your vote for any writing you especially like.

To balance out the happy writing news, I got another form rejection on Stepping Stones. My only reaction to this one was the thought “of course” followed by a thin thread of “this is wasted effort. No one will ever want it.” Sometime in the near future I’ll pull up my boot straps and figure out where else to submit. Right now I need to focus on the primary February goals.

Good heavens, it is February. This is the month when I need to finish layout work on Sharp End of the Stick and I need to dismantle and reassemble our shipping system. In theory I’ll get some further work done on my office remodel, but truthfully that project is paused until I can allocate the necessary funds to pay someone for framing, electrical, and drywall. I have ongoing support for kids, homework, and household maintenance. The weather remains cold, but not really wintery. LTUE is a bright spot, but only lasts three days. Hopefully my participation in Letter Month will help me find small bits of happiness in a month that is looking sloggish from this end of it.

And now it is time for me to begin the work of today.

Monday of shipping week

By / November 28, 2011 / 6 Comments

Returning to a school routine after five days of break was easier than I expected. Everyone rolled out of bed as usual and the morning proceeded as normal. My work day was far from normal. It was all focused on preparing for invoice sorting, which is hours of shuffling papers around until they are sorted by shipping method, contents, and alphabetized by last name. I’ve gotten really good at alphabetizing over the last few years. As usual, Janci and I had many moments where we pondered things like: should we sort for sketches before or after sorting for shipping method? The general shape of this process stays the same from release to release, but there are six months in between when the details fall out of our brains. There is also the fact that each release brings some new and interesting challenge for which we must adjust. This time there were four different categories of sketched options: sketched calendars, sketched TBB reprints, sketched reprint bundles, and sketched emperor bundles. Mostly the various merchandise did not add too much complexity, the only thing which kept throwing me off was mugs. I had to add in a sort where I went through the flat rate box invoices to make sure that the ordered items would indeed fit into a flat rate box.

If most of the above paragraph read like gibberish to you, then you have a good feel for the state of my brain when the invoice sorting was done. I was exhausted by all the thinking. Then I had to go back through all the piles and guesstimate the numbers of boxes we’ll need in all the various types. We’ve got 770 packages which will go into 5 types of mailing boxes and envelopes. In the end I made an educated guess on the high side. We’ll use the boxes eventually, I’m sure.

It is a good thing I had Howard pick up frozen pizza from the grocery store this morning. That was dinner. Now I need to muster the energy to make the kids turn off Phineas and Ferb to do homework. They are not going to be pleased with the switch.

Warehouse Day

By / July 27, 2011

My teenage boy and two boys borrowed from a neighbor were my minions this morning. The four of us moved three and a half pallets of books from my garage to our storage unit. Each pallet held 56 boxes of books. Each box held 22 books. Each book weighed one pound. Doing the math, we come up with approximately 3800 pounds of books moved this morning. I rejoice that my van survived hauling all of that in only four loads. I drove slowly, particularly down the hill. All that mass made it hard to stop quickly. This is one of the final steps to finishing off a Schlock shipping.

This year I decided to take the warehousing even further. We hauled all the empty pallets and pallet tops back from the storage unit where they’ve been taking up space. We also hauled out several large bags of paper and plastic garbage. At the moment we have 6 spare pallets and 24 pallet tops. Hopefully some kind soul from the Provo freecycle community will be delighted to have them and will haul them away for me. Right now they’re “decorating” a corner of our driveway and adding an air of class to the house.

The other warehousing I have to do in the wake of a shipping day is to find places for all the extra shipping supplies to belong. I also have to rearrange my storage room to make space for another book. Then there are the last few orders which required extra help to get out the door. Those are all done now. The storage room is mostly rearranged. I just have to find the energy to carry stacks of boxes and rolls of packing paper down the stairs. I’m hoping for a burst of energy later this evening. At the moment I just want to sit for awhile.

Shipping and Convention Prep Status Report

By / July 22, 2011

We are in the last run up to Emperor Pius Dei shipping. This is the season of our lives when the kids tend to themselves because I am busy. Fortunately for me, they are old enough to do so. Balancing the shipping work with family care used to be a lot harder. Shipping season has also been made tremendously easier by hiring a shipping assistant. She’s been helping me for four shipping events now.

Today will be bundle assembly. We’ll be putting together Emperor Bundles and shrink wrapping them. This will make our lives worlds easier on the shipping day because the volunteers will be able to grab a single wrapped bundle rather than 7 individual books. Bundle assembly involves hefting around boxes of books, rearranging the contents, and then hefting the boxes again. Next week I need to round up some strapping young men, hopefully with a truck, to help me shift three pallets of books from our garage over to the storage unit. Then Howard will be able to park in the garage again.

After all that is done, and the odds-and-ends of shipping is cleared away, I’ll ship Howard off to GenCon and dig in to the serious preparations for WorldCon. We’re going to be playing tetris with two vehicles, 8 passengers, luggage, and booth supplies. Fun.

Books Arrived, Work Begins

By / July 12, 2011

Books arrived. We shifted 1500 lbs of them into the house. Howard and Travis signed them. Kiki and I stamped them. Then we recruited some teenage boys to shift them all back out and down to Dragon’s Keep. Howard can commence with sketching tomorrow.

Lots of lovely people emailed me to volunteer for the book shipping day. I have the volunteers I need. I am too tired to make more words right now, so I give you some pictures of today’s work.

Scattered Thoughts on the day Preceeding Book Arrival

By / July 11, 2011

I got to 3:30 pm and realized that I had not yet accomplished a single thing on the list of tasks I assigned to myself today. I got stuff done, but it was all little jobs which didn’t get written down on my task list. Thus I was completely deprived of being able to click the little check box.

I pondered my unfocused morning and remembered that I didn’t get to bed until 1:30 am. Partly this was the fault of a good book, the other part a child who didn’t cooperate with bedtime. I did not compensate for the late bedtime by sleeping later because I’m trying to maintain a good schedule. Sometimes when I’m over tired the whole day feels like a slog. Other times I snap into a high-energy, high-efficiency state and get a million things done. Today felt like the second, but my efforts were scattered instead of focused.

At least I got the library books returned. And I bought a fresh basil plant at the grocery store. It is silly how happy that little green plant makes me. I snipped some leaves off and put them into a sandwich. Yum. Howard will probably not like the smell of it, he often doesn’t like having plant smells in the kitchen, but perhaps since this one is a food plant instead of a floral plant, he won’t mind. For now it is all bright and green on the window sill.

I’ve spent too much time checking social media today. Howard and I have been exploring the usefulness of Google+ and I’m liking it a lot so far. The only part I don’t like is being scattered across so many places. Three short-form social media sites are too many. I’ll probably drop even further out of facebook as time progresses. Twitter is nice and immediate. I’ll keep it. My long-form internet forums are my blog site and the mirror of my blog on Livejournal. Unfortunately I’ve seen a huge increase of spam commentary on Livejournal. I find it annoying to have to go swat these down manually.

Books arrive tomorrow. I’ve reached the state where part of my brain is disbelieving of this. As if I can kill the stress by denying the trucking-company-stated deliver schedule. When I open the boxes tomorrow and can hold a book in my hands the tension in my shoulders will unwind. I will have maybe five minutes of relaxed accomplishment and then all the stress will ratchet back up again as my brain switches gears to the final run up to book shipping. We sent out the call for volunteers today. At the moment I’ve had 4 people respond. I will beat back the lack-of-volunteers stress by pointing out to my brain that at least all the boxes arrived on schedule. A Fed Ex truck delivered them this morning. The driver helped me stack everything in the garage and even let my kids climb into his truck for a minute.

Later tonight we have family activities and I need to get to bed on schedule. For now I need to focus my eyes on that task list and see if I can get some of it done.

Counting and Inventory Ordering

By / July 8, 2011

A few years ago I wrote up a series of posts which walked through my process for preparing the mass mailing of new Schlock books. You can find the posts by clicking my “shipping” category or just clicking this text. I still run the shipping preparations in essentially the same manner, except that I now have an assistant who comes in and helps me with most of the steps. In fact I often refer to those posts to help me keep track of how everything is supposed to proceed. I’m currently inhabiting both the sorting and inventory preparation stages. This means that most of the sketched editions are sorted, but the orders without sketches are not. The books have not yet arrived, so we can not dive into doing the actual sketching. But there is inventory preparation which does not involve books.

In my years-ago post I didn’t mention this other inventory preparation, probably because books were the only merchandise we had at the time. Since then we’ve added magnets, stickers, prints, miniatures, and Writing Excuses CDs. We don’t have t-shirts this time, but other times we have. This means I have to comb through the ordering data and make sure that we have adequate quantities of all of these items for shipping day. This year we’re good on magnets, but the painted miniatures and stickers will need to be ordered. I have to do that asap so that we can get them back in less than two weeks. Merchandise is not the only inventory we need. Shipping supplies are required. This morning I calculated exactly how many of each type of box we will need to fill all the orders. The shipping day fails if we run out of boxes. Several times we’ve had to make an emergency run for additional strapping tape. Keeping track of all of it should feel overwhelming I suppose. It used to, but this is my 8th book shipping event. I’m no longer completely terrified that I’ll get everything wrong. Instead I’m just a little stressed that I might forget something which will be annoying to fix.

Assembling Schlock boxed sets

By / July 8, 2011

Today was our day to finish assembling boxed sets in preparation for Monday’s shipping. It was also the day that the contractor arrived to deconstruct Howard’s office, but that is a tale for a different post. It did make for a chaotic day with boxes of books being shuffled around at the same time that large rolls of carpet and broken sheet rock were being hauled out. As with last time, the book assembly line began with Howard signing books.


This time all of the kids were home and they all wanted to help. They were particularly excited about helping once they realized that mom was willing to pay by the hour. I carried boxes in from the garage. Kiki helped un-box books and shuffle piles around. Gleek helped Janci slide books into boxes. Patch and Link pulled slipcases out of boxes and gathered up the garbage that Kiki and I were throwing around.


The quantity of garbage was pretty impressive before we were done.

Then Gleek, Patch, Link and I had to head out for swimming lessons. We left Howard, Kiki, and Janci working. They finished off all the book signing. We returned with lunch and the work shifted over into shrink wrapping. Both the shrink wrapping and set assembly were complicated by the fact that we were working on the sketched box sets. This means that each boxed set included a sketched Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance. We had to make sure that the outside of the box sets indicated which sketch was included inside. Post-it notes were very useful in helping us keep track. We used a wrapper to surround the boxes with plastic an seal the plastic. Then a heat gun is used to shrink the plastic to fit.


The heat gun was unquestionably the coolest part of the process. The kids all wanted a turn, except Link who was more interested in the game he was creating on the floor of his bedroom. Kiki and Gleek traded off for awhile. Then Patch took a turn. We supervised pretty carefully, but Patch still burned his finger. Kiki took over the wrapping while Howard and I helped Patch. Gleek was then queen of the heat gun and got really good and making the plastic beautiful and smooth.


Howard took a turn with the heat gun too. Here he takes aim at Schlock, who is taking aim at something else.

It was 4 pm before the work was done, a solid 7 hour day. At one point Kiki looked around and said “This really puts meaning into the term Family Business.” And it does. Having the kids working was sometimes helpful and often chaotic. I spent as much time hovering as I did working, but I think it was really good for the kids to be a part of this process. Now they can look at box sets and know that they had a part in making that shiny shrink wrapped package.