business

Snippets

By / February 10, 2011 / 1 Comment

Last night our dinner table conversation was a discussion of exactly how Darth Vader eats. Howard was a proponent of the “food block inserted through chest plate” option while Gleek was a vehement supporter of the “opening face plate” party. The discussion broke down when Gleek declared that Darth Vader’s real name was bubbles and Howard said “Wait, did we just take a left turn into Gleekland?” No firm conclusions were reached except that the word “bubbles” is made out of giggles.

Kiki has been reading books about kidnapped and/or raped girls lately. She’s read Hidden in Plain Sight: The Story of Elizabeth Smart and The Lovely Bones. As I understand it, both of the books are ultimately optimistic and the really hard stuff in them is touched only very lightly. Now all she need to read is Not Without My Daughter in order to have a perfect trifecta of books that I am completely unable to read as a mother. They hit too close to my fears and would hurt too much.

Gleek has decided that combing the cat should be her daily household chore. Both the cat and I think this is a marvelous choice.

It turns out that 24 hours is a long time after the opening of the GenCon hotel block. I completely forgot to register on Tuesday at noon, and by late Wednesday Howard’s preferred hotel was full. We found another close by, but it still had me a bit panicked last night. I don’t know why GenCon is always surrounded with a cloud of terror for me, but I am perpetually afraid that I will make some mistake which irrevocably ruins the event for us.

Speaking of conventions, Howard’s April has changed from empty to full. He’ll be attending both Ad Astra in Toronto Canada and Penguicon in Michigan. Penguicon is especially notable because Howard will be there with Brandon, Dan, and Jordo of the Writing Excuses crew. They are going to have a great time.

XDM X-Treme Dungeon Mastery is now available in e-book versions via both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. That was last week’s project.

I meet with our tax accountant today. Hopefully he will not have very much homework for me.

Patch has been reading through our family photo books at bedtime because he “wants to look into his past.” Last night he reproached me for a pair of photos I took of him as a baby. In the photos he’d grabbed an open yogurt container and accidentally dumped yogurt on his feet. Instead of instantly helping him clean up, I took two pictures of yogurt covered baby. 7 year old Patch thought this was nigh villainous of me. I hugged him and assured him that I helped him clean up the moment I put down the camera.

Last night Kiki and I had a long and rambling talk about boys, relationships, life plans, and a host of other things. During the course of the conversation we determined that she is completely normal, which was something of a relief for her to learn. Apparently that “all teenagers think they are weird” thing is not a myth. Also the “teenagers never listen to their parents” thing is a myth, at least for Kiki. I hope that she and I continue to have many conversations about many things through the years.

After being sick over the weekend, Link is read to pick up his health and fitness schedule again. I’m pleased to see that the time off did not break his motivation.

LTUE begins one week from today. I need to clear away some space in my brain so that I can contemplate the topics of the four panels I will be on. Not much preparation is needed for most of them. I just need to dust off my thoughts so that they’re a ready resource. The one for which I do need to prepare is the session on financial management. I’m the moderator and I want to make that hour as packed with information as I possibly can.

I’m at about 50% on my project revision. I’d hoped to have it done by now, but since I am continuing to make progress instead of stalling completely, I plan to just keep going. Eventually I’ll work my way to the end.

And now it is time to head out on my errands for the day.

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.

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.

Pondering next year’s calendar

By / December 30, 2010

The calendar lay across half of my kitchen table. Around it were multi-colored pens, my planner, a schedule from the school, and last year’s calendar laid partially across the top. The time for my annual switching of the wall calendar had arrived. All the various notes and plans made for 2011 were dutifully recorded in the color of the family member to which they applied. I stood back and surveyed next year laid out before me. It didn’t look too bad, but there were big events not on the calendar because the dates for them are not yet fixed. Howard and I had a long conversation about this just after Christmas. We mentally juggled book production and release schedules against the fixed commitments on the calendar. Some side projects were approved while many were tossed in the “not this year” file. The resulting plan for next year is busy, but hopefully only crazy in a few spots.

My fingers traced across the calendar as I mentally marked our tentative press and shipping dates for the two books we plan to produce next year. My hand hovered over June and July which look empty on the calendar, but which I know will be full of preparations for GenCon and WorldCon as well as book production. I thought back to a piece from I book I’ve read recently. It talked of an old Jewish man who never made any kind of appointment or plan without speaking the words “God Willing.” For the man this was not a fatalistic prediction that the plan would fail, but rather an acknowledgment that no mortal being is in full control of his life. Many things may happen between now and next week to make a dinner date impossible, he speaks the words so that he will not be angry or frustrated if some other event intervenes.

I press my hand flat against the calendar. I have planned next year. It is a good plan. I have built in more flexibility in the months. I have place space for happiness to dwell in each day. I intend to hold this schedule loosely and not panic when it inevitably has to shift or change. God willing, this is how 2011 will be. If it turns out differently, and it almost certainly will, then I will try to trust that there is a bigger plan with pieces that I can not see.

The calendar now hangs on my wall. I’m ready to proceed.

Starting in the corners

By / December 15, 2010

My front room is a mess. It has been a mess since some time before Thanksgiving. I don’t like it when my living spaces are a mess, and I’ve been sorely tempted to clean it up by shoving stuff elsewhere. I don’t because that is what I’ve been doing ever since school started and at this point “elsewhere” is full. Last week I finally had space in my brain to try to figure out how to clean up the front room. In order to do it, I had to start in my office. This makes sense when you realized that “elsewhere” is usually in the middle of my office. This continues until my office is impassible. Which it was.

So I began to clean my office. Unfortunately many of the things in the middle of my office had been stuffed there because they simply did not have other places to belong. All the stowing spaces in my office and storage room are full. Half of what they are filled with is the wrong stuff. Things I use regularly reside in piles and under other things while things I no longer need sit neatly on easily accessible shelves. Reorganization is in order. So yesterday I began. I am going through my office shelf by shelf and evaluating everything. I’m putting things where they will be readily useful. This is not going to be a quick process. I expect it to take weeks.

Yesterday I finally accepted that my office needs to be an office instead of also doubling as a guest room. I set up a permanent shrink wrapping and paper cutting desk. Now there is not room for me to put an inflatable bed in here for guests. I am sad, because I like being a good hostess and giving guests their own space, but this makes much more sense on a daily basis.

Today I began going through the four drawer file cabinet. All the drawers are stuffed full and I intend to look at almost every paper in there. I already have two garbage bags full of shredded out-dated documents. The world will not suffer for me shredding old utility bills. I keep the tax related stuff back 7 years, but I’ve saved so much garbage paper. It wasn’t garbage when I stowed it carefully away, but it is now. Soon I’ll be able to re-think the organization in those cabinet drawers. I’m hoping to be able to stow writing notes in the newly created spaces.

Onward I will head to the cubby holes and shelves. Then into the storage room. I will haul garbage bags out. I will have a stack of things to give away or donate. In the end I will have space and the supplies I need ready to be used. It is going to be good to have an office that I am able to vacuum.

Hold on to Your Horses book signing

By / November 13, 2010

I’ve been asked to participate in a book signing at Dragons and Fairytales Bookstore in Eagle Mountain Utah. The store is celebrating its first anniversary by hosting signings all week long. Monday is Children’s book night from 4-6 pm. I’ll be there and so will several other children’s authors. There will be readings and fun. Saturday is the Science Fiction and Fantasy night which is when Howard will go.

Dragons and Fairy Tales
3535 E Ranches Parkway Suite A
Eagle Mountain, UT 84005

Snippets from the past few days

By / November 9, 2010 / 4 Comments

This has been a week where I danced to the tune of someone else’s piping. There were a few items that I got to schedule, but my choices were limited by the many things where I had to adhere to someone else’s schedule. On top of that were the last minute occurrences which required shifting to accommodate. All that and I’ve only reached Tuesday evening. It has been a busy two days in which I did not have time to think long and luxurious thoughts. I could only grab snippets.

***

The trees we planted 12 year ago when we moved in to this house are now mature. We finally have shady canopy over most of the yard. At this season of the year our yard is completely carpeted with fallen leaves. When we rake, we will have some truly epic leaf pile jumping. Hopefully we’ll get a couple of nice mild days to dry the leaves out and make them crackle again. Thanksgiving is a great time for raking and jumping. First I’ll need to re-locate all of the rake handles which were pressed into service as staves and walking sticks during the summer.

***

Dear Doctor,
You are a responsible medical professional and I don’t think you meant the words the way that I heard them, but no I do not want to pick a medication for my daughter based on what will “calm her down.” I like her energetic. I love the way that her brain fizzles with ideas and she learns a mile a minute. What I want is a medicine which will give her the ability to steer so that she can direct her life toward whichever bright future she chooses. It is possible that none of the medicines will provide that, in which case we will do without. The point is to help her grow strong and healthy in mind and body, not to make my life easier.

***

Had my first church Activities Committee meeting tonight. Came away from it with a new list of things to do and a list of things that I don’t have to worry about anymore because other people are going to do them. I also realized that one of the primary purposes of a church party is not the party itself, but the group effort and cooperation required to make the party work. Working together builds connections and friendships. This is what I failed to do with the Halloween party. The Christmas party is on the right track.

***

During the committee meeting, Gleek and Patch were sent upstairs with instructions to “find something quiet to do.” Before the meeting was over they came sneaking back downstairs to show me how they had made their very own worry dolls using bits of wood, feathers, string, and tissue that they rummaged from odd corners of the house. I’m not sure what prompted this action since it has been years since we lost the little bag of worry dolls given to us by their Grandma. Now Gleek has a worry doll tucked into her backpack, specifically for school. Another is tucked under her pillow. The rest are in a little pouch on her neck that she made from a scrap of fabric. Patch only made one doll, but it has its own pouch too. Gleek gave one to me. I shall have to find a special place for it to live and carry my worries away. I could use more of that.

***

Even before the gifted worry doll, I don’t have as many worries this week as I did last week. People have been buying boxed sets of Schlock Mercenary. This is wonderful because now I have the financial resources I need to manage upcoming expenses. It is one of the miracles I needed which has arrived.

***

Link had some friends over the other day. They were using a camera to make silly movies. I listened to the rowdiness and realized that my son was the instigator. He had the plan. He called his friends and made it happen. Somehow in the social lives of these boys (there are about five of them) Link is the one who organizes and calls everyone together. This is not the person I expected when I worried about my non-verbal, socially-awkward son 6 years ago. I’m happy to see how far he has come.

***

Kiki, Howard, and Gleek all make time in their day to sit in the garage and pet the cat. Then they come into the house and lint roll thoroughly to remove allergens. I love that the cat came to us. I love that we get to keep her. I love that allergic reactions have not prevented this.

***

This week the live action version of Inspector Gadget is Link’s very favorite movie. Showings have been almost daily. It may be a while before Netflix gets it back. Link deserves to have a fun movie this week. He has been working really hard on multiple scouting merit badges which have been full of character building experiences. He is feeding his brain and learning a lot, but not always in the ways that he would prefer.

***

Howard is home. He was gone for five days, but he is home now. This makes me happy. His luggage is not home yet. It decided to take a trip to New York without him and stay over for an extra day. Perhaps it took in a show or two. In theory it will arrive in Salt Lake tonight and be delivered to us. The adventures of Howard’s luggage have had no impact on our well being or happiness. He has plenty of clothes here. It’ll show up eventually. I’m too busy being happy that Howard is home to spare any of my brain for worrying about luggage.

One reason e-books cost more than you think they should

By / November 7, 2010 / 1 Comment

Books are electronic files before they are ever printed on paper. Publishers can just reformat the files and voila, e-book. It seems so simple, but unfortunately it is not. Each type of e-reader has a different proprietary format to which files are required to conform. It is as if each bookstore chain had different requirements before they would put the books on their shelves.

Say for example that Barnes & Noble required that all books be printed on 10 lb paper, but that the book be no more than an inch thick so that they fit on the shelves. So the layout designer drops the font size and makes the book paperback in order to meet requirements. Amazon says that books can be as thick as you want, but they must be less than 9 inches tall and the font can be no smaller than 12 points. This requires layout re-adjustment although it is theoretically possible that one layout would match both. Then the independent sellers declare that they will only carry hardback books printed on high quality paper with blue ink. The layout designers work must be done again.

Each of the e-book formats must be learned and adjusted for. In theory you could pay to have an automated system to take a file and transform it into all of the formats. Automated systems save piles of time and effort, except when they do the opposite. The simple find-and-replace feature in a word processing program can easily change the name Ben to the name Lyle throughout a document. It will also change the word benefit into lylefit. A human has to scan through for errors and fix them by hand. Add in time and effort spent on the times when automated programs fail to work catastrophically for reasons unknown. If the book in question has any graphic elements, increase by 10x the level of difficulty in getting a readable result.

In order to put out a book into 5 different e-readable formats, a human must be employed to check the e-book five different times across five platforms. That human then has to tweak and correct introduced errors before the book is sold. An employed human must be paid. Until an e-book is sold in sufficient quantities to spread out the preparation cost across millions of copies, that e-book will have a price point similar to the cost of a paper book.

The printing, binding, shipping, and warehousing of paper are really the smallest part of the cost of a book.

Edited to add: I’ve had enough reasoned counter arguments posted to convince me that I am not an expert in the field of e-books. I’m going to let this post stand because it was what I thought when I wrote it.

New website and the frog of doom

By / October 16, 2010

Some part of my brain appears to believe that the success of Schlock Mercenary is somehow a fluke which is constantly teetering on the edge of disaster. When I poke this part of my brain and say “Really? After supporting us for four years?” It mutters at me and continues to sit there sullenly like a lumpish frog, ready to flood my mind with fearful thoughts whenever we come across a shift or a glitch. It is an odd quirk of belief that I am completely convinced that what Howard does is brilliant and amazing, but this frog piece of my brain continues to be fearful about money. I think the frog part of my brain must be best buds with the financial squirrel in my brain because the frog shuts up when the squirrel is fat and happy.

We swapped over to the new Schlock Mercenary site architecture today. The switch was long overdue. It was overdue last Fall when we decided to make it a priority. The old architecture had gotten to the point where our server guys had to wallop it with a virtual wrench on a regular basis. Unfortunately building the right architecture was a long learning process for both us and the fantastic development team we elected to work with. It took far longer than any of us wanted. A year later, today, we finally launched. The launch made today scattered. Howard and I monitored twitter, email, facebook, and blog comments for bug reports. There were bugs reported and bugs fixed. In the space between the reports and the fixes, the frog in my brain was quite loud. He has this neat trick of twisting the bottom out of my stomach so it feels as if I’m plummeting. I hate that part. We expected the bugs. We knew there would be things to fix. There always are with new systems. Yet my stomach kept reacting as if we were doomed. (Or rather DOOOMED, spoken with a deep resonant croak.)

The frog doesn’t always have his say. My life is filled with troubles and reverses that don’t trigger the croak of doom. The key difference is whether I know how to fix the problem. If I do, the the problem is merely a task. If I don’t, then “doom” croaks the frog. The frog was on a hair trigger all day because website coding is deep in the territory of things that I don’t know how to fix. Fortunately none of today’s problems were mine to solve. All I had to do was muffle the frog and wait for Howard and the development team to do their jobs. There are still things to fix, but they are mostly minor and cosmetic. The comic is there, the blog is there, the archive is there, and they are all updating. This is good. Even better is having this big shift behind us instead of ahead. Now in need to find that virtual wrench and go wallop an imaginary frog.

Time to get to work

By / October 15, 2010

Sometimes people approach Howard and I to ask our advice on starting up and running a small business. Our responses vary depending upon the particulars of the person asking, but we always caution them to pick a failure point. This is a defined set of circumstances under which it is time to give up and do something else. No one wants to contemplate failure when they are the shiny, exciting end of a new business venture, but without a defined failure point a failing business can sink the person or family as well. We know too many small business owners who completely bankrupted themselves and their friends trying to keep a business alive through force of will. A thriving business is always work, but it should not be a constant scramble.

That last point had me worried earlier this week. Very often lately it feels like our business has been full of scrambling. So Howard and I sat down and had an overdue conversation about the current state of the business with a specific emphasis on what we will do if sales decline from where we are. Obviously we hope for the reverse, but the conversation was very important to have. It also gave us a chance to throw all our business fears into a communal pile rather than each of us keeping a separate stash. That too was distinctly unpleasant and it took us a couple of days to shake it off. The thing is, all evidence suggests that our business is thriving despite currently being in something of an ebb. This is happy, but we are aware of the fragility of what we have built. Right now we have a little organism. We’d like to have an ecosystem with multiple organisms. We want there to be the comic, but also Howard wants to write prose novels. I want to write books. We want to spread out our sources of income so that we do not have to panic at the thought of losing one.

What this means on a day to day basis is a careful rescheduling of our time. We need to retain the hobbies and leisure which bring us joy, but trade in all the mindless time-killing activities. We’ll trade the latter for work which will hopefully bring new organisms into our financial ecosystem. This means it is time for writing and revision to fit back into my days. Now I just need to figure out how.