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Gen Con 2023

By / August 13, 2023 / 2 Comments

It is difficult to capture the complexity of my Gen Con experience in a single blog post. I wrote about some of the emotional arcs of it in my latest newsletter. I microblogged the road trip and collected that here in my prior post. Yet there is still something I’ve been trying to catch in words for weeks now. It is an amazement at how people will put so much love and stress and effort into creating an experience which requires the cooperation of others to also participate. Gen Con staff puts in so much work that would amount to nothing if the vendors did not show up to build their stores. The vendors put in so much work that would amount to nothing if the attendees didn’t show up to walk the floor and shop for wares. Each individual attendee also had their own logistics, planning, expenses, and challenges to come. And that doesn’t even begin to cover the people who run programming, the people who run games. The people who construct a giant balloon sculpture each year who must have spent months planning, calculating, purchasing, and staffing to make that happen.

This year we got a balloon version of the Apollo Lunar Lander made of 9000 balloons.

And then on Sunday afternoon they sell charity tickets to a popping party. All that effort turns into shared laughter, a pile of balloon shreds, and money for a good cause.

Gen Con is a community creation. It has to be. But then, so are our actual towns, our country, our writing groups, our families. All of these things depend on people showing up to cooperate or disagree, to negotiate over rules, to seek their own advantage, and to be stunningly altruistic in helping others. Humanity is beautiful and a Brigadoon-like event such as Gen Con helps me see that in such a joyful way.

We walk into the convention center to find an expanse of concrete.

Concrete floor with a few pipe and drape booths in the distance.

We find our individual space and then spend two days turning this:

A zoom in of our space from the prior image.

Into a miniature store that becomes our home for 4 days.

The Howard Tayler Jim Zub booth at Gen Con

That small 10×20 space contains so much laughter and exhaustion. From here we talk with attendees. We shuffle our merchandise each morning, picking a sales focus for the day. We have a runner who brings us food. We have Jim, Howard, and Stacy as “the talent” who are the people that attendees come to see. We have sales staff who run the register and keep things stocked on the shelves. Like the rest of Gen Con, the roles aren’t rigid, we all pitch in where help is needed. We shuffle around for the hour when Tracy Hickman joined us in the booth. We re-shuffle to make adjustments to Howard’s drawing chair. By the end of the show we have a long list of things that went well and things we’d like to change for next year. This year’s big winners were that spinner at the corner of the booth which let people find the Schlock books they wanted and the closet space in the back where we could put all our stuff and occasionally go hide for a few minutes of down time. The big change is that we want to figure out how to build around Howard’s drawing chair so that he and Jim can sit next to each other instead of having Howard off to the back.

But we still got to have some joyful moments where Jim and Howard riffed off each other and laughed.

Howard Tayler and Jim Zub

I particularly liked the moment where Jim pointed out that Howard’s reclined position meant he could eat food like a sea otter, with things just supported on his tummy. Howard leaned into the joke and Jim took video (which I haven’t yet gotten from Jim) But I did catch a photo of Howard pretending a pair of McDonald’s cheeseburgers were a rock and an oyster.

The chair, while at times awkward in the booth, really made a huge difference in Howard’s ability to manage the show. He would get into the chair and get energy back after the walk through the convention hall. We managed to set up a camera and monitor so that people could watch him draw. I love the moments when Howard’s drawings give people joy.

A woman delighted with the sketch in her XDM book.

I don’t have any photos of the time I spent away from the booth at the Gen Con Writer’s Symposium. So that’s a note for next year: take more selfies with my writer friends when I get to see them. I got to re-connect with people I’ve known for a long time. I got to meet some new people. As usual, it was a little difficult to be split between booth and writer’s conference. I wanted to always be at the booth to help with Howard, sales, and lift the burden there. I also wanted to always be at the symposium, having more conversations with fellow writers both in the green room and in the hallways. I feel like I really stuck the landing on my Networking Despite Social Anxiety and Building Community Around Your Work presentations. The Marketing as Storytelling presentation needs some work still. Both of my panels were full of smart people with excellent things to say.

I do have a few photos of the hotel where we stayed, because it was a transformed train station. On the second floor there were actual train cars that have been turned into hotel rooms. We were glad to have a much more spacious room on the main floor, but it was fun to walk past the trains on our way to the convention center sky bridge.

I failed to photograph the trains. Sadness. That is also I thing that always happens after conventions, getting home and realizing the portions of the event that I failed to capture. This hotel was a big win for us. It was the closest possible hotel to our booth. That was very helpful for not using up Howard’s limited energy on walking. He still arrived at the booth exhausted more often than not. But then reclining in the chair restored energy. A large portion of our stress and planning both before the show and during it, was trying to make sure that we didn’t over-tax Howard and cause him to crash. We also wanted to prevent a post-event crash that would keep him from working for weeks on end like last year. (Since I’m writing this more than a week after the show, I can tell you we succeeded! Yay!)

We also feel fairly good about our infection / safety protocols. We had several CO2 monitors and any time the numbers got over 1400ppm (Outside air is 400ppm, good indoor air ranges 400-800.) we would mask up. If numbers got over about 1800 we went elsewhere. Our booth had multiple air filters running and creating an air wall. In the dealer’s hall, even when completely packed, the numbers stayed below 1400. We masked through crowded hallways, and we came home uninfected as demonstrated by negative tests. I did hear some reports of infections, but this year I did not hear of many secondary infections. Last year the infection cloud continued to grow for more than a week post event (for all the events I tracked). This year the reports tend to be isolated to one or two people, most of whom can’t track exactly where their point of infection was. There were more masked people at Gen Con than I’ve seen anywhere else in the past year. Paying attention to all of this during the show was another layer of stress. But this is the world we live in, and Howard’s long covid has taught us caution, yet we still went to Gen Con. I should write a separate post about the safety vs. benefit math that goes into the decision to attend in person events. For our business and brains, Gen Con is a creative pillar, a huge supportive structure in the year and with the collapse of some social media, in person events gain a much larger importance. It is very much a Scylla and Charybdis situation. Pick your peril, try to navigate a safe path between.

At the end of the first day, it feels like the show will last forever. By mid-show we’re exhausted and sometimes counting the hours until it is done. Then suddenly it IS done. The lights go dim and it is time for us to take apart the store we built. The dealer hall that took two days to carefully construct is torn down and vanishes in mere hours. We’re back to bare concrete with pallets, packing cases, and the constant beep and roar of forklifts.

Sunday evening is full of farewells. We had the full crew dinner on Wednesday night with our extended Gen Con Family, current booth crew plus the people who crewed for us for ten years. I was so glad to see friends I hadn’t hugged since before the pandemic. Sunday evening was a smaller crew dinner, just the exhausted few who were staying at the hotel with us and all departing in the morning.

After the show, there were two very long days of driving. We did a lot less chattering during the drive home. And we did a lot more stopping because the four of us (Howard, me, our daughter, and son-in-law who booth crewed for us this year) all picked up Pokemon Go again. We scattered pokemon at gyms all down I-80.

After the driving there was the unpacking, and the remembering what normal life feels like, and the collapsing in a heap. Today, a full week after the final day of the show, I am beginning to feel more normal. Just in time to dive head first into launching a Kickstarter next week.

Gen Con was lovely. I’m still sorting thoughts, making notes, doing accounting, and planning ahead because we’ll do all of this again next year.

Water Lantern Festival

By / July 9, 2023

A single paper lantern is lovely with light reflected on water in the dark. But lovely turns to magic when there are hundreds of lanterns floating together on open water. It is what I hoped for when I bought two tickets to a local water lantern festival and I was not disappointed. This particular magic requires community. It requires an organizing force of people to say “come here at this time on this day, buy a ticket, we’ll supply the lanterns.” Then people have to flow into that framework willing to bring their hearts and write on their lanterns. At launch time hundreds set their small lights afloat and the water doubles the light, reflecting twice as much back to all of us on shore.

The scene is even more beautiful when you glimpse some of the lanterns. Each was specifically prepared by someone who hopes, or someone who grieves, or someone ready to let go. It is not just lights on the water, but expressions, thoughts, words, pictures, a part of the person who set it afloat. All completely unique, but glowing in common.

I spoke to no one while at the festival other than my companion that I brought with me. The organizers did try to get everyone to connect with each other. They built a framework of group activities, a “meet people” scavenger hunt, and packs of conversation cards. But I was content with my thoughts and my one person. It was a well run event, and I say that with life experience in running large events. They had clear instructions that meant nothing ever felt chaotic, not even at launch time when everyone went down to the water and people had to maneuver their way to launch around others who were busy taking their photos for social media. I too took photos, storing up the experience in pixels of light that will glow at me from screens and remind me of my experience.

The crowd was noisy and inconvenient. There was no solitude to be had. Part of me would have liked solitude. I would have liked to sit with the floating hopes and dreams without all the inconvenient humanity that set them on the water. But I can’t have one without the other. I can’t have hundreds of lanterns carrying wishes and fears unless I also have the people to launch them. People are messy, noisy, and often annoying, but there is beauty that simply can’t exist without them. Without us. Because those messy inconvenient people includes us. We create problems for others as much as they do to us. We can choose to move through the world graciously rather than demandingly, but we still get in each other’s way. There is beauty in that too.

I love that a core human impulse is to organize ourselves, to draw hundreds of people together into one spot where we can spend time drawing on paper and floating lights on water simply because it makes us happy to do so. It made me happy to be there.

The Days After the Events

By / March 28, 2023

The morning after the event that I spent six months planning, I woke up without a list. I lay awake in bed probing the lack of urgency to pull me from it. It was a stark contrast to how I’d regimented my life in tasks, alarms, and calendar reminders. I entered the day through that void and mushily thought my way through a formless mass of memory and experience that needed processing. I needed to unpack it all. And possibly also unpack my suitcase, and begin picking up the pieces of house tasks that were neglected on the run up to the events.

The second day after the event I slept late on purpose. I woke early and chose to dive back into sleep. I chose that again in the middle of the day when I took a two hour nap, my body choosing hibernation as a coping strategy for stress recovery. I did do some necessary tasks, orienting myself back into a post-event life. I began to form lists for post-event tasks. I wrote a page of highlights, fragmented sentences to catch moments, threads which I could pull on later to remind myself of the myriad of joyful stories. The events succeeded in all of the important and emotional ways. I saw my tasks through all the way to making sure that the last guest was able to board her much delayed plane on the day after the event. I also began making notes for next year, because there were gaps and moments which were managed and fine, but which next time I would like to run more smoothly.

The third day after the event (today) I rolled out of bed on my usual schedule and clocked in to begin answering email. My admin brain is still tired, but there are things to finish and I must start doing them. So we collect data and receipts and answer questions and begin talking about what is next. And I take time for a massage where the therapist’s experienced hands convince the muscles of my back to let go of all the emails, lists, charts, and decisions that have been stored in knotted muscles. I walk in my garden and toss clover seed onto the lawn I’m trying to replace with clover because the day is gloriously sunny and pleasantly warm for the first time in months. Then I return to my computer. I want to describe my events, share the joy of them. But apparently I must first describe and share the experience of recovery. Somehow this meandering description fits my weary brain while wrapping words around the events themselves feels harder.

Yet they sit in my brain, all those highlights glinting and tinging off each other like a crystal chandelier in sunlight, casting rainbows across my mind. I just need to find the words which allow me to display the unique beauty of each moment, because this chandelier is not made of identical crystals, more like crystal snowflakes, each one unique and worthy of admiration. Even the flawed ones.

I remember a conversation sometime during the Gala where the other person was describing a feeling of triumph, that I did not (in that moment) share. I was still making sure pieces were in place. I was doing work which was essential to the smooth function of moving large groups of people from reception to banquet tables and getting them all fed. I did the work well, and I am glad that I did it well, but I was always aware that my well-done work could have been done well by a number of other people had they been given the tasks. There was satisfaction in being part of a team that carried off the event. There was a lack of anxiety because any failure of mine was likely to be caught and compensated for by the work of others. My triumphs, my crystal moments were not in the events as a whole, they were tiny individual things enmeshed in the events.

It was seeing teenagers in their prom dresses and cosplay on the gala night being so delighted at coming to a fancy gala event that was designed to celebrate words and books, things that they love.

It was the moment when our Gala MC had the teenage poets and short story writers stand and I realized that nearly half the room was full of these fledgeling writers who are going to soar.

It was seeing the faces of guest authors on TABC morning as they saw how many writer teens we had gathered. And the joy on all the faces as we participated in a book dash to give every teenager a book to keep.

It was the opening skit of TABC which was exactly the right amount of cheesy to let the teenagers know that it is okay to be silly and joyful. And then having that mirrored in the closing skit where the audience participated in defeating the villain by shouting “My story matters!” which we all knew for silly theater, but which also has an impact and lingers in the hearts and minds of everyone who was in that room.

It was the quiet girl I watched out of the corner of my eye all through that closing ceremony because she was at a table by herself and I wondered if I needed to make sure she was okay. But the corners of her mouth tugged up at the jokes, and she drumrolled with everyone. And she shouted too. Sitting by herself because that was how she was most comfortable, but not lonely, and not alone. She had found her tribe and place of belonging even if she hadn’t talked to many people all day long. I hold that girl in my head. Her story matters and I hope that by telling it she learns to sit up straight and take space instead of trying to be as unobtrusive as possible.

These are a few of my crystals. Moments I feel honored to have witnessed, but which I do not claim as my triumphs. I can’t take credit for them, no matter how many hours of work I put it. It is a shared magic that requires the sharing to exist at all. I am not triumphant, I am honored and awed. And pleased. And tired. And aware that the ground work for next year’s round of magic begins with the emails I need to find enough brain for in the rest of this week.

Catching Some Consolation

By / February 25, 2022

Twitter is yelling today. So is the News. Everyone has opinions on how I should be spending my attention / energy / money to help with various crises. The crises are real. People are hurting and afraid, which makes them highly reactive and less able to feel empathy for approaches which are different than theirs. These crises have been brewing for years, a fact which has some yelling “I’ve been trying to warn you, why didn’t you listen?” But the past few days have had tipping points where everything went from “brewing” to “boiling over”. Now everything is hissing, smoking, making a mess, and we have literal fires to put out. And yet for someone like me who isn’t standing in the kitchen, who is out of reach to control the pot, the ways I can help are limited. My work is mostly unchanged. I still have to do laundry today even though missiles are flying over cities. I still need to write my representatives, precisely because other states have passed bad laws. I need to spend time writing, even though it feels like words are inadequate. I must tend to people near to me, because the mundane ways that we lift each other up don’t go away just because the crises boiled over. Today I’ve just added a new task called “Do not let the shouting and anxiety consume me.” When I was picking a title for this post I started with the word “comfort” but I don’t think I should be comfortable with world events today. However I do think I can be consoled. Consolation acknowledges the grief and allows it to continue to exist even while moving forward to do what is necessary.

I gathered the following two quotes from twitter. They helped me find some consolation today. Perhaps they’ll also help you.

With the world locked into a spiral of destruction, what point is there in making art? How can a song or a story or a picture make a difference? But every act of creation is also an act of defiance. And something as small as a butterfly’s wing can sometimes summon the hurricane. –Joanne Harris From @joannechocolat on Twitter.

It can be overwhelming to witness/experience/take in all the injustices of the moment; the good news is that *they’re all connected.* So if your little corner of work involves pulling at one of the threads, you’re helping to unravel the whole damn cloth. Let’s keep working our corners. Solidarity. –Ursula Wolfe-Rocca From @LadyOfSardines on Twitter

Butterfly Wings in Interesting Times

By / February 24, 2022 / 2 Comments

Does every generation feel what I feel when watching history unfold all around them? Lately I feel caught up in an unstoppable flood of events, like videos I’ve seen of mudslides which scrape entire houses into the sea. The word “unprecedented” has been tossed around frequently in the past two years since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic to the point where I think longingly of the boredom of predictability. Through the pandemic and the global climate shift and unresolved economic shifts I’ve gained a sense of the vastness of historical events. Events are so big and I have so little control over them that it is tempting to just try to hunker down and survive.

Yet one thing I learned in the wake of the Black Lives Matter / George Floyd protests of 2020 is that I am responsible for the power and privilege that I have. My lever to change the world may be tiny, but I am accountable for my use or non-use of that lever.

I can’t make it so that the Russian invasion of Ukraine didn’t launch yesterday. I can’t repeal the order from Governor Abbott of Texas where he classified transgender healthcare for minors as illegal abuse and commanded Child Protective Services to prosecute parents for it. I can’t change the big climate-change-driven storms across my entire country. But there are things I can be doing. The effect of them is small in the immediate realm, but I take courage from the idea that the flap of a butterfly’s wing in one place can affect the weather six months later on the opposite side of the planet.

So I’m flapping my wings today. I’m posting information and action items about anti-transgender legislation in my state. I’m monitoring those posts to make sure that whatever conversations spring up around them are managed and shepherded by me instead of left to become toxic. The existence of these posts volunteers me for emotional labor to educate people who may have not thought much about these issues before. I’ve allocated mental resources to manage this for the next few days. Other things in my life may take a small hit.

Other tiny wing flaps that are in progress: Ongoing attention to anti-racist efforts. Today I’m focusing on anti-trans legislation, but I also have my eye on local book-banning and government over reach into teacher’s jobs. I’m thinking about installing a Little Free Library in my front yard that I would stock with diverse literature for both kids and adults. I’m also occasionally nudging city politics because we need more middle and low income housing. Currently every city in my county believes that the apartment complexes should go into neighboring cities instead of their city. And I’m slowly changing the landscaping around my house toward being desert friendly instead of water hungry because water is going to be increasingly scarce in the next decade. Then there is all the community building work to help shape my church communities, and to help the individuals in my writer communities thrive.

None of my actions can move the needle in the short term, but I’ve come to be a firm believer in the slow and steady turtle who eventually wins the race. I can’t focus on all of these things every day, but I can cycle through them as I have time or attention to spare. Small actions accumulate. And with every small action to exercise the power I have, I do a tiny bit to make the world better.

World events are giant, but I can do better than “nothing” in response.

Complicated Kindnesses

By / November 29, 2021

The first kindness arrives on my doorstep wearing a Christmas hat and smiling, standing a pandemically-correct six feet away from the door. She was my child’s primary teacher fifteen years ago and wants to reconnect with us now that she has moved back into the neighborhood. The person she remembers no longer exists. My child has changed their name to Lad and embraced a nonbinary gender identity, including the use of they/them pronouns. I want to give her the connection she needs, but I have to decide whether to disrupt her memory of my child, and possibly her binary worldview. The words “they go by Lad now” are easy to say, but saying the words opens a conversation far larger than a porch treat exchange.

I stand in the doorway between her and the inhabitants of my house, including Lad, now adult, but still living at home. I’ve held space for Lad before. Teenagers seek identity, to discover who they are. This important developmental task becomes exponentially harder when your body does not match your internal experience of yourself. It was years before any of us, including Lad, understood how gender dysphoria was complicating Lad’s ability to live, miring them in suicidal thoughts and depression. When Lad opted out of church, it was almost a relief that none of the youth leaders came to ask why. At the time I didn’t even know what the explanation was, just that my child needed space. So I defended their space. I sorted the people in Lad’s life into allies or obstacles; people who understood and adjusted to needs we couldn’t always define, or people incapable of comprehending gender or mental health issues no matter how much explanation I poured into their ears. Not knowing which the woman on my doorstep would be, I decide I am too tired to be an educator today. I thank her for the treat and remembrance. She waves a cheerful goodbye and leaves.

The next kindness comes in small packages left on our doorstep, holiday gifts from church leadership. I stand there looking at a card with the wrong name on it, printed from a database by a person who does not know our story. This gift is meant to make us feel part of the community. For me, that community is a refuge. For Lad… it is an alienation rather than a connection. Alienation was not always Lad’s experience with church. There were loving adults and friends, moments of joy. But once a person turns twelve, church participation becomes binary gendered. Lad traveled the expected track with an increasing sense that this was not their place, that the binary did not fit. Their choice was to press themselves into a false shape in order to stay, or to leave.  Even after leaving, it took Lad years to find their name, their voice, themself and to be ready for that name to be known. When they finally were ready to tell people, we were in the middle of the first year of pandemic. Opportunities for sharing the name change were few. It is not the fault of church leaders that they do not know about Lad’s name switch. I quietly re-gift the offering, waiting for a less mass-produced opportunity to let people know Lad as they are.

The third kindness is my friend who texts me a passage in the updated handbook saying transgender members can update their membership record to their preferred name. This friend knows about Lad’s name switch and since her husband is ward clerk, he can update the record. In moments Lad’s name is in LDS Tools. The gender options are still binary, and we have to squeeze “they them pronouns” into a suffix field, but it is a start. With this small change my ward and neighborhood can begin to engage with the person Lad is now. The old name served well, but it is done. Becoming who we’re meant to be by acquiring a new name should be understandable for church members, a pathway to comprehension. Most of my neighbors only need an instructive map for how to welcome people who don’t fit their expectations. The updated handbook begins to teach how to be more welcoming, how to change expectations to have room for more people. Listing Lad’s name lets people come to me and ask for information when they are ready to know. At the very least it means the next automatically generated label for a gift will have the right name on it.

Lad is not likely to come back to church. Not unless church culture and doctrine changes more dramatically than is usual for a single person’s lifetime. I sometimes grieve that my cultural home was not a place my child could stay, but I must find peace with things as they are rather than holding happiness in wait for changes that may never come. God has told me that He loves Lad exactly as they are, because of who they are, and they will be welcomed in eternity. I don’t try to match the edges of this knowledge to doctrinal structures, instead I exercise faith in the goodness and fairness of God. Lad has other paths to connect with the divine and I am to stay with my people and my church. This is where I serve. This space in between. Sometimes that service is standing in the doorway to protect Lad from people who will judge and not understand. Other times I am a bridge, extending love and explanation to beloved community members who want to connect but don’t have the information to do so.

 Kindness is sometimes packaged clumsily, but the intent is love, and love is the construction material of connection. With that love I work teach my people how to make room, so that some future child has a space where they can both be themselves and stay.  This is the kindness I can offer in return for all the kindnesses that have been extended to me.

Note: The first reader for this essay was Lad, they gave edit notes and had veto power over the entire essay.

In the Wake of SIWC

By / October 25, 2021 / 2 Comments

I remember water skiing and how much attention I paid to the wake of the boat that was pulling me along. That churned up portion of water that was so full of energy and potential for me to lose my balance. I felt so brave the first time I dared to cross the wake, riding the waves instead of fearing them. I spent all last week giving every spare ounce of energy to the Surrey International Writer’s Conference. I taught three presentations and was a panelist. I reconnected with friends and met new people. I spent so much time on Zoom that my back and shoulders ache with exciting new tension knots. But just like those long ago skiing days, I’m discovering that while being in the wake requires every ounce of my attention, as I exit the wake, I get a boost of momentum imparted by the water-carried energy of the boat. I want to make good use of this energy, my first use of it is writing this retrospective post.

Of my three presentations I had timing issues with two of them. I’d like to think I’m a more practiced presenter than that, but my presentation on Worldbuilding Communities was entirely new and the time slot was three hours which is a less familiar length for me. I had to rush the end of the presentation. I planned to be better for my Networking and Social Anxiety class, but the timer I set was on my phone. When I rejected a phone call mid presentation it stopped my timer and I didn’t realize the timer had stopped until suddenly I had two pages of material left, 7 questions in the queue, and only 20 minutes to get through it all. I had to skip an entire section and promise to put it up in written format for people to download from the SIWC website. I still feel like I delivered good content in both cases. I made myself available in during the social spaces for people to ask questions. I have some solid ideas for improving the flow of information in both of these presentations to help them better fit their time slots. I’m exceedingly pleased with the work I did to punch up the beginnings and endings of all my presentations. One bit of momentum I’m carrying away from the conference is a renewed excitement for teaching. I’ll fix up these presentations and run them as classes in Jan, Feb, March of next year.

In two of my presentations I reference Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I couldn’t help but notice the esteem level of the pyramid and recognize how very filling teaching at SIWC is for me. I was gifted a presenter role, which meant people showed up to listen to me and treat me like an expert. That happened in social spaces as well as the class times. That level of visibility is very validating, but over time it can also become exhausting. Higher profile increases my ability to accidentally do harm and I was very conscious of that as I moved through the conference. I loved the gatherings where I got to talk a lot and be an expert. Then I loved the gatherings where I got to step down a level on that pyramid and just belong to the group, a writer among other writers. It was a delight to be part of silly conversations about the poetic qualities of refrigerator contents, two sentence spooky stories, and the way that humans pack bond with inanimate objects. It was an honor to be in conversations where people spoke about their challenges and heartaches. All of it combines to impart some momentum to me as I exit the wake of the conference.

My anxiety would like to rob me of that momentum if it could. I’m hopeful that my success at anxiety management over the past week is indicative of personal growth and the stability of the coping strategies I’ve put into place. So that when anxiety reminds me that I taught an entire class on networking, but then failed to invite anyone to join my Patreon or my monthly Creative Check-In events, I can answer it with the fact (from my presentation) that networking is about personal connections rather than marketing opportunities. I made correct decisions to prioritize paying forward instead of paying bills. When my anxiety throws a social moment into the front of my attention along with a jolt of adrenaline to tell me that I was foolish/overbearing/hurtful/an embarrassment, I answer with “maybe I was, but that moment is over and not worth spending energy on.” It is, in a strange way, very cathartic to teach a presentation on social anxiety because it allows me to be very open about the ways anxiety has sabotaged my life in the past and the things I do on a daily basis to stop it from continuing to sabotage my future.

In preparing for my presentations I did piles of research, reading, watching videos, collecting resources for the people who want to learn more about my chosen topic. Right now I am looking at a row of tabs in my browser which are articles, videos, threads, and posts that people suggested to me during the conference. I’m excited by those tabs. I love learning new things. Yet they are homework. Each one will require mental and emotional processing. Since I’m mentally and emotionally spent from the past week, I’m not certain I should use today’s little push of momentum on them. I might be better served by turning the momentum toward creation rather than more information processing. On the other hand, information processing is where the ideas for creation come from. I have a similar problem in that I have thirty days to watch recordings of presentations from the conference. There are so many good ones, but I have to balance learning new things and taking time to do the creative work that I’m newly excited about. I’ll need to space out the tabs and the videos from conference. If I’m careful perhaps I can extend the wake, the momentum push from the conference, all the way through the end of the year. I would like that. Borrowed momentum is a huge gift.

This was the second year of SIWC being online only. The pandemic which drove us all into Zoom connections was a frequent topic of discussion. It was also a frequent topic to speculate what will happen next year. Not even the conference organizers can answer that question yet. Not fully. The world is still in flux and the pandemic continues to impact all the decisions. I know I want to see online conferences continue because I see huge benefits in accessibility and connection. I also really want to attend some in person writer events because some things are lost when the conference is online only. I’m starting to look forward to 2022 and think about how I will venture forth, what I will participate in, what I might like to host, and how to make sure that the people who were suddenly included with the move online don’t get excluded again as we move forward.

I have further thoughts about the conferences and my experiences inside it, but I’ve been sitting here looking at the blinking cursor for several minutes without being able to catch any of them. That means it is time to hit post on this set of thoughts and pay attention to non-conference things. I have a business and a house that have been neglected for the past week. As much as I’d like to just pay attention to post-conference writer momentum, my life will fall apart if I don’t tend to the other portions of my world.

Being Called Back to My Writer Self

By / July 3, 2021

I keep a notebook where I write down my tasks sorted by days. I don’t write down every single thing. For house tasks like laundry or dishes, I rely on physical reminders to prompt me to do the thing (laundry basket is full, sink is full) so I don’t write those down. But appointments, phone calls I need to make, emails I need to send; these all end up on my lists. Life has been feeling a lot busier since about mid-May. I wondered if that was actually true, or if all the thinking involved with shipping just made my brain tireder. I pulled out a notebook from six months ago, back then my lists were 3-5 tasks per day. Now I’m averaging 8-10. Demands on my time and attention have definitely increased, and the increase seems unlikely to subside on its own. The pandemic gifted me with uninterrupted hours and very few expectations. Now I’ve returned to a world where I must defend the space in my schedule.

This week I was visiting with a writer friend during a weekly Zoom date to get writing done. She asked after my creative projects. All the things I’d been working on were business or shipping related. She nodded and understood the urgency of my tasks, understood that over the next six months tasks directly linked to earning money were going to absorb much of my time and attention because my family needs income. She was kind and accepting, but the mere asking of the question was a tether which tugged me into remembering that, for my own long term emotional health, I can’t always prioritize the endless list of tasks. Sometimes I need to stake out a space for the work which will help me grow, or which will make the world better, or which just brings me joy. I have to defend that space from all the excuses I have to use that time for something “more productive.” I have to defend it from the impulse to just knock a few more tasks off the list. On Wednesday mornings, for two hours, I need to be a writer first.

Also this week I hosted one of my monthly online Creative Check-Ins with a small group of fellow creative people where we talk about our projects, how they progressed in the past month (or didn’t.) It is really helpful for each of us to talk about how our projects interact with our lives. Life affecting projects, projects affecting life. We’d almost reached the end of our time when one of my friends reminded me that in all the discussion, I hadn’t talked about my projects. Again I talked about shipping, and tasks, and business. I talked about why I allow these things to overrun my creative spaces, shoving to the edges anything that doesn’t bring income. Again I received nods and acceptance. Again, saying the things out loud prompted me to reach behind all the logic of how I arrange my days. To reach past the ways that the endless tide of tasks is important to support my long term life goals. I was surprised to find myself talking about a minor creative rejection which had a larger emotional footprint in my creative life than I’d realized. Because my friends were there, I was able to process that emotion in ways that help me clear the way for me to create again. Once per month for two hours I have a window of time to commiserate and rejoice with others about the creative projects in our lives.

A third thing which happened this week was an email from a writer friend with whom I’ve begun swapping critiques. She had a new manuscript for me to look at and re-iterated that she’d love to look at something I have ready. I have nothing ready. I meant to, but I got swept up in the tide of shipping, barely able to keep my head above water. That tide has ebbed, but it is so easy for me to dive into more tasks. To become accustomed to living by lists. In many ways lists are easier. They are far less emotionally risky that putting my heart into a creative work which might be rejected or ignored. Tasks are also satisfying. I check them off and they’re done. Each tiny completion has endorphins, which means that even while I complain about feeling busy, there is an attraction to accomplishing things and being productive. There is also the illusion that if I can complete this weeks set of lists, that will somehow reduce the number of tasks for next week. As if most of my life tasks weren’t repetitive and cyclical. Yet now there is this email, like a thin line cutting through the water, tugging me back to a place where I can get my feet under me and remember the writing work I want to be doing. For this critique I will read a book, and engage my writer brain. Periodically an email will nudge me toward the projects I want to send to my friend because I am reminded how much I want to hear what she has to say about the stories I’ve written.

Three times this week I’ve been gently tugged back to my writer self. Each time I was pulled by a connection I have to a writer community. Those connections are ones I have carefully acquired and maintained in during the past several years. For me the key has been finding people who ask how I’m doing and give me the space to ramble past the surface response into the deeper concerns. It was also in learning to trust that people actually wanted to hear my answer rather than them just being nice to me because they are nice people. I have a tendency to hide in plain sight, to turn conversations away from myself. I am far more comfortable talking about the concerns of others rather than my own. So this week is evidence of personal growth. At this point in my life, I’ve managed to build community connections that truly support me and call me back to myself when I get a little lost. This is a joy to discover in my life. It is a joy I want to share with others so they can have it too. Fortunately, that is exactly how mutually-supportive community connections work.

Now I need to heed the calls and get back to the writing I’m meant to be doing. Conveniently, this blog post is part of that work. 🙂

Use of Privilege

By / January 13, 2021 / 2 Comments

With my prior post being about personal accountability, I’ve been thinking about a couple of specific accountability things I can be putting into place in my life. I want to call them out and name them because I think the more people who decide to hold themselves accountable in these (or similar) ways the better our world will be.

I need to be paying attention to who is missing in my social circles.

I participate in many communities both online and off. I have church, neighborhood, writer, and friend communities to name a few off of the top of my head. I’m glad to see people and connect. However I need to take responsibility not just to connect with the people who show up for a community event, but also to notice who does NOT show up. If my neighborhood is 5% Latino, but the neighborhood potluck is all white, that is an indicator of something amiss. Did my Latino neighbors not get invited? Did they decide not to come because they’ve felt awkward and out of place at prior events?  I’ve used a neighborhood potluck example, but the principle applies to the demographics of all communities. If no black people are in your online knitters forum, it isn’t because black people don’t like knitting. Something is keeping them out or pushing them out.

 In order to help my communities be more inclusive I need to first notice who is missing, try to identify why they are missing, then address the problems that the answers to those “why” questions reveal. More attention might need to be paid to barriers to entry: extending invitations, giving people rides, offering to cover expenses, changing entry requirements that accidentally (or intentionally) filter for race/disability/poverty. The other thing answers to “why” reveal is the ways that people decide to opt out of a community rather than participate. My responsibility is to help people feel welcome when they do show up. This requires education of existing community in how not to make people feel “othered”  I have a responsibility to correct my friends when they commit microaggressions against marginalized people. (Like asking “where are you REALLY from?” to a non-white person who was born an American citizen. The intention is to engage with the other person’s heritage and have a conversation, but the person ends up feeling like their right to be present was questioned and invalidated.) The work is on me to figure out how to open my communities to include more people.

A step I’ve taken to address the “who is missing” problem in my life is via social media. I realized that my friend and follow lists had a demographic skew that matched me. I decided to expand my lists. I followed/friended some new people. My goal wasn’t to get them to notice me or give me approval. Instead my job was to observe their lived reality. See how their life differs from mine. I found it  particularly helpful when I found someone who is willing to speak out loud the ways that being disabled/lgbtq/autistic/white/female/trans/black/single/childless affects their life. It was uncomfortable at times. Sometimes they say things that make me feel defensive. I’ve practiced sitting with that discomfort for a bit to figure out why I feel defensive. Often I discover that ingrained prejudice is the reason I’m uncomfortable, which means I have learning and adjusting to do. Other times I decide that my discomfort is based in cultural differences. Sometimes the person is wrong and I’m responding to that. In all cases I’m learning to understand modes of being that are different than mine.

Being mindful of my use of privilege

Privilege and disadvantage are not mutually exclusive. Lives are complex. People are complex. Most of us are simultaneously privileged along one axis of our lives and disadvantaged along another axis. This is often why people get upset when you try to explain privilege to them, because the things which have made their lives difficult are very obvious to them, but the things which made their lives easier are invisible.

Knowing that I have both privilege and disadvantage, I am responsible for my use of privilege in overcoming my disadvantages. I had multiple kids with special needs and I had to advocate for them in the school to get them resources and additional help. Every time I did so, I was leveraging my privileges of being a white, college-educated, articulate, middle class, blonde woman. I was listened to, and my kids usually got either the help I requested or some other equivalent help. With every interaction I met administrators who listened to me and actively engaged with finding solutions for my kids. I know from talking with other parents of kids at the same schools, not everyone got that same treatment.

There is no fault in my use of privilege to help my kids. The fault comes if I use my privilege to claim a scarce resource that my kid only sort-of needs but that would be vital to someone else. That is opportunity hoarding. The best use of privilege is when I use mine to make something easier to access for everyone who follows, not just for my kids. If I apply “my kid needs this, lets make sure everyone can have it.” Unfortunately, the school system is often set up in ways that encourage competition thinking rather than cooperative community. Parents hoard resources and bend rules to help their kids get ahead. This same behavior is observable other communities, workplaces, areas of our lives that are not school based. We can use our privilege in ways that advantage “our” people without self-examining that “our.”

So I’m going to pay attention to any time I ask for individualized attention or for a guideline to be bent in my favor. Does my action simply advantage me in a way that is harmless to others? Does it give me an advantage which is then not available for someone else? Does it make life more difficult for someone who comes after me? Or does my action make the path easier for those who follow?

In my small actions I can make the world a little bit better. I have to try.

Gratitude and Grieving

By / November 24, 2020 / 1 Comment

Tis the season for gratitude, or so I am informed by over forty years of personal tradition, a bazillion internet memes, and the leaders of my church. In many ways, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because it sidesteps so much commercialism and focuses our attention on being thankful for what we have and on connecting with those we love. And food, lots of delicious food. Yes, sometimes the food part gets complicated and can feel like a burden. Traditions do that because they are constructs. Someone has to put in the work to make the holiday happen. In a good year that person is working from a place of abundance, glad to share it. Other years, not so much. This year…. This year is weird. It has been weird since March. Pandemic required a seismic shift in the way my life is lived. Like an earthquake it changed everything and nothing at all. My house, people, and things are all here, but now I know that the ground under my feet, which always felt completely solid, can move and knock me down. If the ground can move, what else that feels certain isn’t as certain as I thought? So here I am in November after months of shifted life patterns, after canceled events, after unexpected gifts, after things I gave up and things I gained. I’m in the middle of the season for gratitude and I don’t know how to feel about Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is supposed to be joy and gathering, instead it may cause sorrow and permanent parting because people gathered when they shouldn’t have.  I both desperately want it and wish it would go away.

Not knowing how to feel about a thing is a familiar state for me. Though it is less about not knowing my feelings and more about having so many tangled up and contradictory feelings that I can’t see all of them at once or even tell what they all are. I have untangled one. It is the memory of me huddled in a church bathroom sobbing because they were handing out graduation certificates to teenagers and my teenager’s mental health issues had prevented them from getting one. Crying for my own pain, hiding because I did not want my pain to subtract from someone else’s moment of celebration. I see people posting about gratitude on social media and I am so happy for my friends and the thing they are grateful for, but sometimes the thing they are grateful for is something I will never get to have. That is hard. On a year when I’m operating from abundance, being happy for others is easy. This year I have both abundance and depletion depending on which angle I’m sitting.

Gratitude is not a single action, it is a practice. All those parental admonitions to “say Thank You” weren’t just about teaching social politeness. They were intended to teach us a way of being, to recognize and acknowledge the good in our lives out loud. It is the simplest beginner-level of leading a grateful life. Naming the things we are grateful for is a valuable and important personal practice. We can note it for ourselves in short-hand because we know when we say “I’m grateful for sunshine” we are encompassing the feeling of radiant warmth of a patch of sunlight through a window despite the winter cold outside, or the way that the sunlight catches a loved one’s hair making them seem to glow. The poetry and emotional depth of the feeling is often missing in simply phrased gratitude posts because the post is a reminder, not the gratitude itself.

I think about this when I see posts that on their surface seem like humble-brags. There is depth beneath that surface which I’m not always privy to. Which is why I am glad when a post gives me a story. With a story I get a glimpse into the inner world of my friend. I get to learn about a piece of their life and how the thing they are grateful for shaped that life. The posts I treasure are the ones which show me how grief can be transformed into gratitude. The story shows the darkness and how they found their way out. That is the road map we all need. We all need to see how a pain, like the ones we carry, can be a force for good in our lives and how we can become glad to have experienced the pain. Pain and grief redeemed. I have so many odd-angled sadnesses sticking out of me this month, I’m collecting posts that help me see how to craft those sadnesses into something beautiful. Upcycling grief via online DIY instructions.

My social media feeds are filled with gratitude posts because my entire church community has been challenged to speak their gratitude via social media for the week leading to Thanksgiving. Hundreds of posts, and I have to approach them with caution. Because some will be a delightful window into the life & heart of a person I know, but others will remind me of a personal pain. Some will help me think of the joyous things I have in my life. Others will remind me of the ongoing slow-motion train wreck that is the increasing case rate and death toll of the pandemic. I’m raw and sensitive in ways that ambush me. A funny video of cosplayers in Halo costumes doing a dance at a convention leaves me sobbing because I don’t know when that form of spontaneous joy will get to exist again. This year gratitude and grief are inextricably entwined. I’m grateful for the things that have caused me grief and I’m grieving things for which I am grateful.

I am engaging in my own deliberate gratitude practice this year. I’m staying tightly focused on what is possible withing the confines of pandemic restrictions, finding joy where I am at, with what I can have right now. I’m focusing intently on small joyful actions and service. I am sieving gently through the social media posts to find those which add to my joy without disturbing my griefs. I am constantly aware that I’m like a scooter bug on water that has dark depths. I skate over the surface, held up by surface tension, creating resting places for myself as I go. This is not the year for me to search my soul. Instead I will try to breathe and live gratitude. I will make ridiculously decorative food for the Thanksgiving dinner I’m not sure how to feel about. I will put stickers on my journal entries where I write the shorthand notes about what I’m grateful for. I will keep myself moving forward on creative projects. I hope that will be enough to get me through the dark cold months. Somewhere beyond the cold and dark, things will come alive again. Perhaps then I’ll be able to figure out all the things I am feeling during this holiday season.