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.
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.
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.
I spent part of my day designing a new business card for myself. It feels good to have a tangible accomplishment for the day. Everything else is pending and my moments of focused energy have been sparse.
Last night I was unable to sleep until 3:30 am despite going to bed around midnight. My brain was spinning with things to do and anxieties related to them. This is in sharp contrast to last week which was all drifty and lazy.
The things my brain spun in circles trying to solve:
I was notified that a space had opened up in the gifted program for which Patch was an alternate. Howard and I looked at all the factors and decided to accept the placement. This decision makes next fall a harder adjustment for Patch. As a result, both Howard and I will have to spend more energy to be available to him and to Gleek who is also entering the same gifted program. We finally made the decision to go ahead when we realized the only thing holding us back was knowing how hard it is going to be. If I spend my life trying to avoid hard things I’d never get anywhere worth being.
Books arrive in one week. By this time next week our garage will be full of books and we’ll be busy schlepping them around so that Howard can sign them and then sketch them. I’ve also got invoices to sort, shipping boxes to order, supplies to gather, volunteers to organize, and bundles to assemble. All of this is familiar work, but I need to not lose track of any of it. Our book shipping day is July 25.
GenCon is in one month. This means that the minute the new books arrive, I need to turn around and ship a bunch of them to our support crew over there. It also means we have to hammer out designs and plans for the booth space so that everything can be set up intelligently. I will not be going this year, so I have to make sure that Howard and his crew have all the pieces that they need. Also I need to buy plane tickets for Howard.
WorldCon is in six weeks. I have an outline of a plan which gets me, Howard, four kids, two booth helpers, associated luggage, and all booth supplies to where they need to be. It is time to start fleshing out the outline and pinning down details. The details will show me the faults of my outline, this has already happened. We have to be in Reno a full day earlier than I thought we did. I have to extend the hotel stay, hopefully that will work.
School starts in seven weeks. I will have to cart all my kids home and then immediately turn around to start them off in school. My brain is still going to be post-convention unsettled and I won’t have time to settle it before I have to start working with schools and teachers.
Somehow in the midst of all of the above, Howard needs to not just maintain the buffer, but get ahead on all of it. I’m supposed to be writing. The kids are supposed to be doing chores. In theory Gleek and Patch are practicing times tables and reading books. Kiki is working her way through an online course which it now looks like she won’t be able to finish before the end of the summer. Kiki is supposed to be learning how to drive, but we haven’t yet felt brave enough to take her on the freeway. Laundry and dishes are omnipresent. Things keep growing in the yard and I have to suppress the unpleasant ones so the nice ones can flourish. Howard needs to brainstorm bonus stories and outline the things he wants to write in the retreat this fall. And my house is full of people all the time.
It is my intention that on July 4th I will re-capture the blissful denial of last week. On that day I will be excused from everything except hanging with my kids, having a chalk drawing festival, eating ice cream, lighting fireworks, and visiting with neighbors.
No wonder I couldn’t sleep.
The first Pre-order day is always full of free-floating stress looking for things to barnacle. All those months of preparation and planning, all the financial calculations and predictions will be resolved within the next few days. This is when the customers show up to buy, or they don’t. If they do, then we get to proceed toward shiny future A, which includes paying our bills and shipping out a thousand books in less than 30 days. If they don’t, then we have to flee toward contingency plan B. Then there is the unlikely possibility that customer turn out will exceed expectations and we’ll get to trot briskly toward some castle in the sky. (Where we’ll discover that floating castles are a lot more work and expense than one would expect.)
Orders have been open for an hour, and we don’t know yet which financial future we’ll be implementing. Howard and I end up standing in the kitchen away from obsessively checking our computers. Except that we talk, and naturally the conversation turns toward big picture plans. We talk about what to do if this pre-order causes us to sell out of The Blackness Between, forcing an immediate reprint. We think ahead to the next book release. Would it be better to work on the next book in line, which needs recoloring, or should we jump ahead to Massively Parallel which is ready to go? We can’t answer any of these questions today. The right answers depend upon the results of pre-orders and it will be Wednesday or Thursday before we have an accurate prediction on those. So we should table all the questions and wait. We try, but if we’re separate we gravitate to our computers to check on sales. If we’re together our conversations drift toward future plans. Catch 22 and we’re stuck orbiting the question of pre-orders.
In theory the best idea would be for us to get away from the house and ignore the pre-order entirely. Unfortunately I represent the entire customer support department. This requires me to be on hand to help customers who are having trouble with the system or who just need a question answered. We will send Howard away as soon as Dragon’s Keep opens. He’ll go focus on drawing comics. I’ll be here, keeping tabs on things. Theoretically I can get some other things done, small things which don’t require extended focus. In practice that hasn’t happened yet. Instead I’m hovering, watching orders trickle in, and babbling on my blog.
Late last night Howard and I found ourselves tangled in a conversation which lasted almost an hour. We were both tired, emotions were a bit raw. He was frustrated that I had been drifting. I was sad that my calm happiness had resulted in stress for others. Howard was actively worried about the upcoming pre-order. My brain kept circling in sadness and mucking around in emotions.
Then in the space of three sentences, I found myself shifting from analyzing emotional motivations to listing off merchandise things and why I thought that we would be fine despite the specific sources of Howard’s concerns. The business manager in my brain came out of whatever dark closet in which she’s been buried and she took control of the conversation. Within five minutes Howard was feeling calmer, I had a list of things to do today, and the world seemed upside right again.
I have to remember that while it is important for me to acknowledge and experience the touchy-feely parts of my psyche, there is something to be said for that strong part of me who just gets stuff done. I’m going to have a busy few days and I need my business brain to handle them. However in the quiet moments when the work is all done, I also need to figure out what impelled me to bury that part of myself for two weeks. Vacations are allowed and important, but this wasn’t a declared vacation, it was more an unannounced abdication.
My brain gets weirder the more I pay attention to the stuff it does.
The text on my phone said UTAH DEPT WORK, so I answered it. That was how I discovered that our business had been randomly selected to be audited by the Utah Department of Workforce Services. They wanted to check our finances to ensure that we were paying necessary unemployment insurance on all our employees. The woman on the other end of the line was very pleasant. She introduced herself as Jan and explained the process we’d go through. She even cracked a conversationally-appropriate joke. We set up an appointment for the following week.
I used to live in terror of audits. I feared that the IRS would swoop down on us, tell me that I was doing all of the accounting wrong, and then demand lots of money which we couldn’t afford to pay. My fears were born of my inexperience at accounting. I’d learned it all on-the-job. I’d made huge organizational tangles and then had to untangle them. Those fears only faded after years of annual tax visits with a certified accountant who assured me that my bookkeeping was just fine. It was a measure of my acquired confidence that the word “audit” did not send me into a panic attack.
Jan sent an email with a full list of the things she needed to see for the year 2010: payroll records, w-2s, w-3s, 940 & 941 forms, 1099 forms, income tax returns, a check register, and a general ledger. I scanned the list and knew exactly what each item was, where it was filed, or how I could make my accounting software spit it out for me. Collecting everything would have taken less than an hour, except that the general ledger was 378 pages long and took a while to print.
On the appointed day, Jan arrived at my house. She entered with a pleasant air of competence. I had no doubt that she was fully capable of getting hard-nosed if she needed to be, but she was starting at friendly and hoping to stay there. We sat at my kitchen table. Jan pulled out her computer and began setting up. She apologized because she was wearing a bracelet with a bell on it.
“It looked so cute and pretty when I bought it. I had no idea that the sound was going to drive me crazy.” Jan held up the tiny bell so I could see it. “I’m going to have to get wire cutters and clip it off.”
“We have wire cutters!” announced Gleek, who’d been attracted by the jingling noise. Gleek darted to the garage and fetched the clippers. So I clipped the bell off the bracelet, and Jan gave the bell to Gleek who ran off happily. Jan and I smiled at each other and the real work began.
There was a little awkwardness at first. I knew I needed to be available to answer questions for Jan, but mostly she just needed to look at the papers I provided. I didn’t want to hover, but I couldn’t leave the room. After about 10 minutes I found a good solution and used the time to hand sew some of Link’s scout badges onto his bandoleer. Jan and I chatted a little as she worked. She was interested in Howard’s job as a cartoonist.
“I admire creative people.” Jan said. “I can’t draw a straight line with a ruler.”
Some of our discussions were more to the point. I explained why we pay Travis Walton, that he is a professional artist with his own business and he contracts work from lots of different people. This satisfied her that he was in fact a contractor rather than someone who should be treated as an employee. Several other names came up and I explained who they were and what we had paid them to do. I was honest in my replies. Not only is honesty the best policy, but this was a chance for me to make sure that my definition of “employee” matched the state definition. Jan was never accusatory in her questions, she just needed to sort information appropriately.
“That’s it.” Jan said as she closed her computer. “I’ll write up your report and send you a copy via email. It’ll all be zeros, because you’re good.”
Howard happened to be in the room to hear this announcement. He asked, “Out of curiosity, on a scale of one to ten, how did we do on providing the information you needed?”
“With one being the hardest and ten being the easiest, I’d say you guys were an eleven.” Jan answered with a smile. Then with a little prodding from us she told a couple of stories about difficult cases. She told outlines only, without names or identifying details. She left us with a card and encouraged us to call her if we have any questions about state tax laws. Then she walked out the door less than 45 minutes after she walked in.
The whole experience was interesting and pleasant. It was nice to be reassured that we are, in fact, running our business correctly. However even if we’d been making mistakes, Jan would have been happy to help us sort them out. This is the auditors job: to make sure things are being done properly and, if they aren’t, assist in getting things corrected. An individual auditor may be grouchy, cross, or on a power trip; but their intended purpose is to help, not to punish. I don’t want to be audited, but I’m not afraid anymore. This audit did cost me a few hours of time, but on the whole the process was interesting and pleasant rather than otherwise.
I woke this morning to a head full of stress. We’d been told that the advance copies of Emperor Pius Dei would ship out yesterday, but I’d gotten no shipment notifications. Even if the package shipped out today, I did not think it could arrive before we were due to open pre-orders on Monday morning. While we can open pre-orders before the advance copies arrive, we really don’t like to. I like being able to hold the book in my hands and know that we have something which is of salable quality. Holding the book in my hands quiets all those voices in my head which gleefully list all the ways It Could All Go Wrong. Howard and I discussed the situation and decided that we would open pre-orders anyway, particularly since we’d already announced that we would.
Then the doorbell rang and a lovely Fed Ex lady handed me a box. It was full of these:
We have our advance copies and my panic can now subside.
The arrival of advance copies and impending opening of pre-orders shifts my life into a different gear. I’m pulling out rusty skills and putting them to use creating product pages and stress testing the system. I’ve done this 10 times. I know how it goes, so the jitters I feel are not a surprise. I’d gladly skip them if I could, but the opening of pre-orders is when all my zen about our finances vanishes. Either we’ll sell enough books to continue paying our bills through the end of the year, or we’ll be scrambling to restructure our lives around a massive financial hole. Book printing and mortgage bills need to be paid whether or not the Schlock fans decide to spend money. They have never failed us yet. I know I should trust in them because they are awesome people. And yet I can’t help feeling that each book purchase is a gift to us and I can’t make myself expect gifts.
I did have a nice moment when I lined up all the books to take product photos. We’re offering an “Emperor’s Bundle” which includes all seven Schlock books at a discounted price. I looked at all the books arrayed on the table and knew that those books would not exist without me. I have worked and sacrificed to make them exist. Howard has worked and sacrificed. For a minute as I looked at them on the table, they were their own reward. Then I photographed them so that they could go out into the wilds of the internet and hopefully return with friends bearing gifts of money.
1. How to research and query agents. I’m starting by asking my friends about their agents, once I’ve dried up that source of information I’ll resort to the internet.
2. How to set up our online store for a pre-order. This is one of those things which I expected to learn once, but instead I have to re-learn every time I do it. The software keeps updating and changing in between pre-orders. Also our needs shift and change from book to book. On the list of things to research for the store: how to set it up to deliver electronic only files and if it can track orders based upon how a customer arrived at the site. (It would be useful to be able to figure out if a tweet or a blog post is more effective in driving sales.)
3. Graphic design. I have text books sitting on my desk and gathering dust. I fully intend to study them and get better at this job I’ve been doing for four years now. I want to know how to purposefully create rather than just muddling through.
4. How to manage four kids at home all day and still get my work done. Again, it seems I should know how to do this, but the kids change from one year to the next making hard things easy and introducing new hard things. Also the summers have different demands, different camps, different scheduled items. Last year there were swim lessons, this year I haven’t scheduled any. This year there will be a summer drama camp if I can ever get in touch with the teacher long enough to get the kids registered. Generally I get it figured out just in time for everything to shift around again.
5. Marketing. There are always marketing things to learn. If I learn and apply marketing skills then (in theory) we will have more money. More money means less immediate stress. I like being less stressed, but I still don’t like marketing.
6. Freelance non-fiction writing. I’m just on the front edge of this, beginning by emailing some people I know who do it. I have enough writing skill that I could be earning money this way. But before I can earn money I have to figure out how to find people who are willing to pay for my words. Then I have to figure out what kinds of words I am willing to sell. Ideally I’d be able to sell some of my essays with only minor revision. Getting paid is not the only aspect of this which interests me. I like being able to say things which are useful to others.
7. How to make over a dress. I already know a lot of sewing, but a make-over project is inherently dictated by what already exists. I have to figure out each step as I go. I’m also doing researches on acquiring discounted materials.
8. How to pick up and start writing a new project after completing a large project. This one is harder than I would have thought.
It would be so lovely to be able to focus on learning one new thing and be really excited by it. That is not my life. I’m not sure that luxury comes to very many people in this world. At least most of these things do not have fear attached. I like it when I can learn without being driven by terror of failure.