Self

The Eve of School

By / August 20, 2012

Summer is not gone, but it is waning. I can see it in the walnut husks on the tree that are beginning to crack and blacken. Soon walnuts will litter my lawn and deck. I also see it by the grapes growing heavy on the vines. Any day now the local robins will discover they are there and begin raiding. The signs are all around me, but summer still has some scorching hot days in store. What we’ve run out of is summer vacation. That is finished, complete. Tonight will not be one of staying up late just because. I will be carefully managing bedtime because this is the first school night of the year.

I remember when the onset of summer vacation felt rife with possibility. I made long lists of things I wanted to do, places I wanted to take the kids. Summer was play time on a grand scale. Once I began working, that changed. I could no longer alter my schedule around that of the kids. I had business obligations which did not defer to vacation, in fact some of the business tasks increased because of summer. Those big summer conventions take a toll. Instead of contemplating summer as a wide open possibility, I know in late winter what things must get done during the summer months. I do lots of spontaneous day trips for the kids whenever a free day hits, but we don’t plan and promise in advance. An unexpected result of this is that here I am, at the end of the summer, without a list of things I meant to do and didn’t. I haven’t spent these last few weeks frantically trying to finish items on that list. Instead I sit here on my porch, done with things of summer, prepared for things of fall.

It is possible that my feelings of completion have more to do with resignation. Ready or not, school will begin. I did not feel ready two weeks ago when I rounded the corner into August, I did not want to think school thoughts. But then later that same day, I did. It was like I found the drawer where all the school thoughts were stored. Once found, I was able to air them out and see what needed mending. It also helps me feel complete that I’ve done so many house tasks that have been waiting. I finally took a saw to the dead tree in my front yard. It has been rendered into a log, a stump, and a pile of branches. I’ve been staring at that ugly, dying tree for years and now I don’t have to anymore. Granted, I still have to clean up the tree shrapnel, but the major work is complete. The same with the summer conventions. In the next couple of weeks I’ll finish off these odds and ends of summer and we will fully transition into a different rhythm of life.

I am done with summer. I am ready for school. But there is a large part of me that wishes for a pause. A space in which I could spend two weeks to unfurl all those summer possibilities which we were too busy to contemplate this year. A space with the difficult pieces of summer complete, but the difficult parts of school put off for a bit. I would dearly like a pause. Perhaps I’ll find some of that in the writer’s retreat at the end of September.

Being Between

By / August 17, 2012 / 2 Comments

For the first time all summer, I find myself between. There is no more work I can do for GenCon and I can’t yet begin post-GenCon accounting. I’ve mailed all the things to ChiCon, but have to wait for Howard to get home before the final preparations. I’ve finished off the house organization projects which got shuffled aside during the crush of other things, and I’ve not yet decided what house project to tackle next. I’ve let go of my summer plans, but won’t embark on school schedule until next Tuesday. I am between. In some ways it is a lovely space, but staying here too long would not be good for me. I like moving forward.

Yesterday I read a letter from a friend where she lamented that every year she intends to plan and prepare better for the beginning of school. Then every year she ends up dealing with the same frantic scramble to get everything done. I read her words and realized that one of my focuses over the past six months is that I’m trying to be less prepared. I live much of my life planning for the future. I’m paying attention to thing I need to do today in order to prepare for events a week, a month, a year in the future. I’ve slowly become aware that the world is full of people who do not do this. I regularly see something coming, stress about it, plan ahead for it, and then move onward; only to find that others hit this same emotional process weeks or months later than I do. Several times I’ve had to straighten out a financial misunderstanding because I’ve paid a bill so early that the recipient mis-filed the payment. I plan ahead. Much of this is my job. I am the one to reserve a hotel room in February so that Howard has a place to stay at GenCon in August. I make sure that merchandise arrives where it is supposed to and when it is supposed to. I create schedules out of nothingness and then remind everyone to adhere to them. I intend to keep doing my job, accomplishing concrete tasks on a think-ahead timeline, but I want to shed all the needless stewing over possibilities.

My kids start school on Tuesday. Beyond reminding myself what the wake-up, drop-off, and pick-up schedule needs to be, I am trying not to think about it. Entering school will expose my kids to new information and people. They will shift and grow in response. Some of that growth will be painful and difficult. Tantrums and meltdowns are coming. I know it. If I sit down to think about it, I could predict what those crises would be, but then I would begin planning how I could respond to these hypothetical crises. After that I can imagine that the child does not like my response and reacts poorly. I could stage an entire melodrama in my head with branching possibility trees, a choose-your-own-adventure of parental stress. Except when school really does start, odds are that my kids will depart from the script in the first five minutes. All my fretting, planning, preparing would then be discarded because we’re going somewhere else. Instead of trying to improve my predictive abilities so I can better plan, I’m trying to trust that I’ll be able to deal with whatever comes when it arrives. Some things are concrete and life will be better if I plan ahead for them. Other things are in flux and I need to leave them alone until they are concrete. Living in flux is where I have to exercise my faith; faith in myself, faith in God, faith in the family members around me. Faith is often hard, I want to be able to predict and plan, as if I could plan life into calmness. Controlling something that is in flux is like trying to grab a fist full of water. I need to learn how to open my fingers, let the water flow past, and wait for something solid to grab.

So I am between, and will be until Monday. I will do the few small concrete tasks which are nearby and then I will endeavor to fill the remaining space with something enjoyable. Perhaps I can make something lovely out of these last few days of summer.

Mind and Body

By / August 14, 2012 / 2 Comments

Hi! I drank caffeinated soda this morning. Can you tell I’m on caffeine, cause I can totally tell I’m on caffeine. I can tell because the clouded and lethargic thoughts of yesterday have turned into the sharp, focused, and highly distractable thoughts of today. I chose caffeine this morning because Howard leaves for GenCon in just five hours and yesterday I accomplished none of the preparatory tasks I was supposed to complete. Some of that was because of pre-convention stress and denial, but the larger part was something physiological. There is a bug which has mowed down Kiki, Link, and I. Link fell asleep while playing a video game and stayed asleep for the next sixteen hours. Kiki and I did not fall asleep, we just felt like going to sleep, or like crying about everything. We’re sick. It will pass. Unfortunately I have to fulfill my role as talent wrangler and business manager before I can collapse into sleep for sixteen hours like Link did. So I am medicating myself with caffeine in the hope that I can consolidate my limited energy for the day into a small enough time span to get the necessary work done. After that, I’ll collapse into a heap and watch movies for the next day or two. This is the theory, thus far my brain on caffeine has scampered like a squirrel across the necessary tasks, but has also darted all over the place composing parts of blog entries (such as this one), done math to figure out how old my kids will be in 2020 when WorldCon may take place in New Zealand, contemplated a major clothing sort, planned how to repaint my bedroom, and made a list of things to do today. At least I’m moving, which is an improvement over yesterday, but it does highlight the connection between mind and body wellness.

This time last year I experienced a major physiological and psychological event. I had a panic attack during the Hugo ceremony. The experience threw me out of balance, or rather, it demonstrated in a not-to-be-ignored way how out of balance I had been for a long time. I’ve spent much of the last year trying to find the hundreds of small ways that I’d pulled myself out of kilter and to set myself to rights. The process has been slow and has required me to rearrange my physical spaces in order to figure out my emotional spaces. I’ve had to isolate stresses and determine why they are stressful. I’ve deliberately shaken up my usual patterns of behavior and thought, making a River Song journal, maintaining a Pinterest board, eating new foods, going new places. Then I watch my reactions to these new stimuli to see if they will lead me to hidden pockets of grief which have been driving my behaviors. I’ve learned that my body will tell me when I am stressed even if my mind is too busy to notice. When my teeth ache, it is because I’m pressing them together subconsciously while sleeping or doing other things. I do that when I’m carrying suppressed stress. This means that aching teeth is a sign that I should stop and dig around in the back of my brain to see what else is going on. There are other physical signs, I’m actually kind of amazed how accurately various kinds of stress manifest as different aches or strains in my body. Paying attention to my body teaches me things about myself.

The life benefits of good diet and exercise are commonly known. There is, naturally, much argument about the definitions of “good diet and exercise.” This is because bodies are different and the perfect diet for one person is not ideal for another. Some of my experimentation in the past year has been figuring out what forms of nutrition to which my body best responds. I’m also observing how stress changes my food cravings, or perhaps eating poorly alters my stress levels. I’m still not certain of the causality. I just know that times of high stress correspond with high chocolate and ice cream consumption. When I am stressed my nutrition deteriorates because I’m less able to spend extra energy planning healthy food. Stress shuts down the food planning circuits in my brain. This means I need to create some optimally healthy for me default meals and turn them into brainless habits during times of lower stress. I think my ideal diet is lactose free, lower carb, and reduced sugar intake. When I’m on this diet I think more clearly. When I’m exercising regularly, this is the diet I crave. Mind and body feed back into each other so that everything either falls apart or works smoothly. I fall into bad patterns and haul myself out of them over and over again. Though, hopefully, my pattern cycles are actually a spiral where I am gradually bringing myself to a healthier place for both mind and body.

I’ve often wished I could separate body chemistry from my ability to think. I usually lament this when I’m dealing with an excess of emotion due to thyroid imbalance or hormonal fluctuations. I can’t separate them. Everything is entwined, which makes change difficult and complex. All I can do is pay attention to the things my body tells me about my mind and vice versa. I can make sure that I don’t try to use a short-term emergency fix, like caffeine, as a long-term solution. And with that thought, I need to take my distractible squirrel brain and apply it to the problem of putting the appropriate clothing and supplies into Howard’s suitcase.

Prayer, Scriptures, Church, and Parenting

By / August 5, 2012 / 4 Comments

For someone who believes in prayer, it is amazing how often I forget to use it. I believe that God listens to my prayers and answers them. I also believe that when I pray on someone else’s behalf that my prayers have an effect, even though my logic brain is stumped to explain the mechanics of exactly how it works. I know for sure that when I pray it changes me; my internal landscape alters, calms, shifts and I step away with a clearer view of what is and what needs to be next. Sometimes the changes to my internal landscape unlock floods and rivers of inspiration which wash through me. Other times I realize that God has been waiting very patiently for me to ask before helping me. I’ve seen all of this over and over in my life. Yet I’m usually fairly well established in my stress or crisis before I think to apply prayer to the problem. I need to be better about that.

There are other religious observances which I also neglect such as daily study of scriptures. Somehow it gets lost in the middle of everything else and I don’t even think to miss it until it has been absent for weeks or months. Every time I put it back, it fills my soul. I find greater reserves and strength for managing everything else in my life. It is exercise and good nutrition for my spirit, yet it fares about as well in my schedule as exercise does.

Fortunately I have weekly church attendance to nudge me and remind me of the importance of prayer and scripture study. It is like a regular appointment with my personal trainer, the day when I have to account for my choices during the prior week. Sometimes I slouch into the appointment resentfully, knowing that I’ve been lacking. Yet I’m not scolded there, just encouraged, reminded, nudged. And on days like today, when I’m feeling a bit cracked open and raw, I am healed. My spiritual practices bring me closer to my loving Father in Heaven who only wants me to grow and is sad that sometimes the growth process is painful. I can sympathize with that today as I look forward to this coming school year and know my kids have some difficult emotional terrain ahead. I keep forgetting that Howard and I do not have to do this alone. My Father in Heaven is also there for my kids and when I remember to apply prayer to our challenges, miracles happen.

Leaping

By / July 24, 2012 / 1 Comment

I was fifteen years old when I jumped off a cliff. It was a camp thing and the cliff was more of a very large boulder. I think there were about twenty feet from the top to the water below. From the beach I watched others jump and it looked fun. The view from the top was a different story. Yet I knew it was likely my last summer at this particular camp. Leaping let one enter the realm of the brave. Then I could be one of those who told others what it was like. If I did not leap, I would never know. So I walked to the edge. I contemplated. I stood back and prepared myself for the run up to jumping. One had to run so that the momentum would carry you out and into the deep water. I stood there, prepared to jump, for quite a long time. Others took turns before me and I watched them run, jump, and disappear over the edge. The splash and laughter would follow in only seconds. I took several large breaths. The muscles in my legs propelled me forward and the edge of the cliff came closer at an alarming rate. In the instant that I was to plant my foot and leap, some animal instinct in the back of my brain took control of my muscles. My legs froze. I suddenly knew that jumping off a cliff was crazy and completely at odds with physical survival. The momentum carried me over, not in a triumphant leap, but in a forward plunge. I was certain I was going to die. I was too close to the rock. The water was too far. What had ever possessed me to do such a thing? I do not remember the water striking my feet, but I do remember it closing over my head and the feel of the bubbles as they skittered over my skin toward the surface. That moment lasted a long time as I went deeper into the water. Then I began to rise, my limbs moved again, striking toward the surface. I splashed back into daylight, honestly surprised to be alive and uninjured.

Today I finally recognized why I am afraid when I contemplate going on a writer’s retreat. It is that moment with one foot planted on the edge of the cliff, water below me, but knowing that all my forward momentum is going to carry me over. It is that split second in which I think “Wait. I’m not ready for this” only it is already too late for me to stop. I recognize it because I’ve experienced it many times between now and when I was fifteen. The most memorable being the moment I realized that I was pregnant with my first child. I should take comfort, I suppose, in the fact that I did survive the leap off the cliff. It was even good for me. I have a story to tell based on extremely vivid memory. The parenting thing has turned out extremely well thus far. I like my kids. This bodes well for the writing retreat. Now that I’ve identified the fear, it does seem less. But fear is not logical and instinct tells me that the action I am taking could cause me harm. That is scary, but it will not stop me from leaping. Only time will tell if this is like cliff jumping, which I’ve never done again, or like parenting, which continues to be a daily part of my life.

Pretty things at a Family Reunion

By / July 17, 2012

This post was originally written on Saturday July 14, but internet at the cabin was too sporadic and slow to support uploading pictures. I am now home and can post the entry.

For me the biggest advantage of this family reunion location is that the cabin is surrounded by trees and the trees are home to wildlife. When the cabin is too packed with voices, I can step outside. The trees are a huge reservoir of peace. I am refreshed and then ready for people again. Sometimes I take my camera with me when I go walking.

This is an extremely settled forest. Every place I walk has signs of human habitation, usually a cabin and associated landscaping, but if I face just right I can pretend I am far away from all people.

The animals have adapted to all the cabins and humans. This marmot makes his home under a shed.

The wildlife are encouraged. Here is the squirrel who politely posed for my photography efforts.

The squirrel also held still for child photographers.

On the third day of reunion my introvert kids are beginning to exhibit strain from all the togetherness. I’m spending more time helping make sure that they find quiet spaces. I try to get them outdoors too. Sometimes we find truly lovely places, like Duck Creek Pond. We brought bread to feed the ducks, but these are not city ducks and did not come flocking at the sight of thrown bread. Gleek was patient and managed to convince a duck to eat some.

This trip showed to me once again that the natural world is a huge stress sink for me in much the same way that some machinery has a heat sink. In the forest there is so much space that my stress can not stretch far enough to cover it. It thins out and I am restored. I don’t have a forest back home, but I do have a garden. I should remember to spend more time in it.

Night at the Cabin

By / July 13, 2012 / 1 Comment

The land of Cabin Without Internet has been invaded by a wifi hotspot provided by my father. For which I am quite grateful at 4 am when sleep eludes me. The room around me is dark and all the beds are filled with sleeping people. The only company I have is a ticking clock and a lonesome moth who thinks to be friends with my glowing screen.

Insomnia is a newer plague in my life. It travels with anxiety, and the past few weeks have been filled with needless anxiety. I have all this worry floating free in my head, just waiting for thoughts to which it can attach. This is one of the reasons that I organize, plan, and am so very good at my job. Knowing I’ve done all that I can do makes the ambient anxiety subside a little. On nights when I lay awake for hours–fretting over things that I know don’t need the attention–I ponder lifestyle and medication. Because one solution would be to restructure my life to eliminate anxiety triggers. The other would be to decide that for whatever reason my biology has deviated far enough from the norm that medication is required for me to be able to support a normal life. Then of course I can spend a long time pondering normal.

Mostly what I truly need is to get out of the dark hours of the night and into the next day when things are invariably better. For tonight this means emptying my brain of a few things by writing them down.

***
I looked at the map of where I was to go. It was a wiggly line right through a green patch of national forest. The much straighter road was closed due to fire and landslide. Google maps gave me two different sets of instructions neither of which matched the verbal instructions offered by my aunt. But we drove anyway, trusting that where there were roads we could at least find our way back. Driving an unfamiliar route makes me a little nervous. Canyon roads with steep drop offs require focused attention, not only to keep the car on the road, but also to keep my imagination from supplying imagery of what would happen if I drove carelessly just there. Throw in an intermittent torrential rain, and the last hour of my drive was quite interesting. But we found the cabin and all is well.

***
“You have to come see this Aunt Sandra!” Three sets of eyes were focused on me. Gleek, Niece7, and Niece7A all were quite intent upon showing me their fairy circle. I was given a tour through the enchanted grove, the fairy circle, the boundary, and led to the place where a deer died some years ago leaving only bones behind. The girls were solemn as they showed me the bones. They informed me that the rain was because the sky was crying over the deer. Then they dashed back through the trees to their fairy circle. For them the trees around the cabin are a magical realm. They become fae, fairies, and mermaids. I shall be quite interested to see the game involve to include additional cousins as they arrive. Gleek shapes the game, names the places, makes declarations. The younger girls are quite happy to be led and add their own embellishments. They are going to have a magical weekend. I watch the three of them together. Gleek is a head taller than the other two. She is eleven and it is quite possible that this summer is her last one as a child. Some girls still play pretend at twelve, but for this summer I am glad to see that Gleek can still imagine a whole realm into existence. I wish I could photograph the woods as she imagines them to be.

***

I rather like the quiet and the dark now that I am being awake in it instead of fruitlessly attempting to sleep. It is almost like I can absorb the solitude into my skin like a balm. I feel it soak in, and something coiled tight begins to unwind. For this hour I am free of expectation. I do not disappoint anyone, not even myself. It is strange that this freedom is so tangible even when I know that most of the weight I feel from expectation is things I put on myself. I am the only one who expects me to get everything right all the time. Perhaps the insomnia is my inner self rebelling against all the things I assign myself. It seeks the quiet dark which is timeless and alone. Dark is not required. I find some of the same feeling when I sit on my front porch in the evening or my hammock swings at any time of day. It is probable that a good portion of my summer stress is merely introvert starved of solitude.

***

My thoughts unwind and slow. Perhaps sleep will come to me now that I’ve slowed down enough for it to catch up.

Two Careers, One Marriage, and Self Doubt

By / July 6, 2012 / 4 Comments

This past weekend was the five day weekend of Writing Excuses podcast recording. Howard, Mary, Brandon, and Dan all shut themselves in Brandon’s basement for four days (with a one-day break in the middle) to attempt to record and entire year’s worth of episodes before Dan leaves to go live in Germany. I was not part of the recording. My efforts involved making sure that Howard had quiet spaces to depart from and return to when he was exhausted. And then there was the emotional support. This was hard on all of them, and therefore hard on their support systems. But the result is 44 episodes ready to go. They won’t record again for a year, which at the moment is relieving as they’re worn out, but later it will be a bit sad for me personally because Mary will not have a business-driven reason to come to town and Dan will be far away. These are people I like being around, hence sadness. At least the League of Utah Writers Round Up in September will give Brandon, Emily, Howard, and I a solid day to hang out and talk.

Writing Excuses is the one business thing where Howard is thoroughly involved and I am not. For most of our business ventures I’m in charge of operations, tracking schedules, sending inventory, accounting for both money and time. With Writing Excuses, I arrange nothing, plan nothing, am not involved. It is kind of nice, because I’ve got lots of things to track and don’t really need any more. However it is also a bit sad because the podcast is a truly worthwhile endeavor and I’d love to be part of that energy. I’m not though. I’m vitally important to Howard and a good friend to everyone else, but Writing Excuses exists entirely without my supportive efforts. I have no claims on it. On the days I feel a little sad, I have to remember that it is good for Howard to have professional spaces which do not include me. It is good for me to have professional spaces that do not include him. Our careers flourish best when they are unshackled from each other because we have very different professional focuses. The tricky bit is balancing those against our marriage in which we share all things. The other tricky bit is that whenever Howard and I are together the room is crowded with Husband, Wife, marketing directer, accountant, merchandiser, artist, art director, graphic designer, warehouse manager, customer support rep, and best friends. All these various roles have different relationships to each other, different authority structures. It gets quite complicated, particularly when we trade roles based on context. On the other hand, if all of those roles where filled by different people getting them all into a conference room and making them to agree with each other about priorities would be a monumental endeavor. There are also, of course, the times when Howard just hangs out with Sandra and all those other people are nowhere to be seen.

I think about all of this as I look at the list of things I need to do to prepare Howard for both GenCon and WorldCon. He will be running a booth at both conventions. I will be staying home, quite glad to shed the roles of booth manager, shop clerk, and talent handler. That particular trio of roles, when combined with parenting guilt for leaving the kids, has proven bad for me emotionally. I can do it. I will do it again as necessary, but this year we’ve lined up two different dream teams for the two events. Howard could not be in better hands. Now all I have to do is scramble hard to make sure that necessary preparation gets done in advance. Now if only I can find the appropriate business focus despite the heat and long summer days which play havoc with family schedule.

Come August Howard will go and I will stay. It would be nice to be able to say that I’ll stay behind and get writing done, that at least some of my summer will be spent working on things to build my career in my own space. Thus far that has not been true. My summer fishtails between family concerns and business tasks, skidding along, never quite out of control, but never feeling straight or steady. I have spaces, quiet times, but they’re used for things not-writing. Other than the League of Utah Writers event in September, I have no professional events currently scheduled. I hope to be involved with both LTUE and the Storymakers conference, but official invitations to present have not yet come and won’t until sometime in the fall. Right now my career is idling and part of me feels a bit pretentious for calling it a career at all. In theory careers pay money, which my writing only has in small sporadic amounts.

This points up another challenge, Howard’s career is a behemoth around which our family must constantly adjust. My career squeezes in around the edges. Howard and I talk about this sometimes. In our heads both careers have equal value. In the bank, his pays the bills. Granted, he would not have his career without all the work I do. That bill payment money is as much mine as his, but it is hard on the days when I realize that my real career, the one that makes money, is “business manager” while “writer” is actually a hobby. Then I have a whole argument with myself that the value of an effort should not be measured in dollars, which I feel strongly to be true. Yet bills don’t pay themselves and so work that pays bills is important and valued. Other work comes afterward. All of which explains why my writing continues to linger in the spaces and around the edges of everything else. I just have to confront this more when Howard disappears to record with three really cool people and I’m on the other side of the closed door.

We’ve taken steps to address the career imbalances. I’ve started giving myself royalty checks and statements for both Hold on to Your Horses and Cobble Stones. We try to send me on a career-related solo trip at least once per year. This year it was to the Nebula weekend. The thing is, I think that all relationships have similar imbalances, or could if the relationship is not carefully managed. It is easy to accidentally make one person seem more valued or important than the other. In our case, I’m guilty of doing it to myself. I give myself away without even noticing I’m doing it. Then every time I mark out territory for myself, a host of voices in my head tell me how that space could be better used. All I can do is keep plugging away, keep treating my writing like it is a career, and hope that some day I’ll have financial statements I can use to pummel the voices of self-doubt into submission.

I Have a Library

By / July 2, 2012 / 4 Comments

Some dreams shine brightly right in front of our eyes. They are the big shiny possibilities which pull us forward and cause us to despair because they are so far beyond our reach. Other dreams are quiet. They exist in the backs of our brains and we pay them no attention until that moment when they either come true and bring us unexpected joy or become forever unavailable and bring us unforeseen grief. Quiet dreams matter. They are the difference between a joyful life and one spent in hollow pursuit of the shiny, unreachable dreams. This past year I’ve been working to identify and fulfill some of my quiet dreams. I started by giving myself permission to want things, even things I knew I’d never have. Then to my surprise, I found that many of the wants which emerged were very easy to fill, and once they were, they significantly added to my daily happiness. One of the quiet dreams that emerged was a desire for a library.

I’ve always had books in my life, lots of books. They lived more-or-less on shelves, though most of them spent significant amounts of time in stacks or piles. Some of the piles became semi-permanent installations in various corners of the house. They were like flotsam in the eddy of a flowing stream, places where books gathered because people set them down there. I made periodic attempts to clear out the piles as they became messy. I’d stack books on shelves two deep, because there weren’t enough shelves. Occasionally I would sigh to myself and wish for more shelves. Sometimes I would get desperate enough to buy an additional small book case and find a corner where I could shove it. Then it too would become home to stacks of books. Thus books accumulated in all the corners of our house and our lives.

When I stood in my office and pictured knocking out a wall, the world opened up with new possibilities. I could have guest space, a craft desk, and finally enough shelves to house all the books. It was the fulfillment of half a dozen quiet dreams, things I’d been doing with out for a very long time. The office was completed last May. I finally installed the shelves this week. I pulled the books from their boxes and placed them on the shelves. The shelves began to fill and something magic happened. I didn’t just have shelves of books, they transformed into a library. There was space to sort by size and type. I could put all the kid friendly books in easy child reach, while placing other books up high. All the anthologies could go together. This type of sorting was not possible with books stacked and piled all over the house. Then I remembered, I used to do this. As a child, I sorted my books. I’d learned about the dewey decimal system in school and tried to create a numbering system of my own. Some of my childhood favorites still have giant numbers scrawled inside the front covers or taped to the spines. For a while I used unicorn book plates.

The numbers were for the checkout system I had devised to track who had borrowed my books. I revised my system multiple times over the years as various systems fell apart. I’m not sure that anyone ever checked out a book from me, but the organizing and planning made me happy. Much of my discretionary money went into book purchases. I wanted to own every Black Stallion book. Even as a teenager I made list of books I wanted to own someday. I’ve been an amateur librarian all my life without realizing it. And now I have a library.

This makes me incredibly happy. Our book purchasing habits have changed. More of our books will be electronic than mass market paperback, but the hardbacks are going to continue to accumulate. My kids are acquiring manga at a frightening rate. Some of these books will be passed along to make space for new ones. But even though the contents of the library will evolve, I find it wonderful that we are able to set aside this small corner of my house and put books there first. The existence of this space declares that stories matter, that they deserve a space of their own. And there is a comfy couch right there so that people can sit down to read. It is a beautiful thing.

Anthropomorphizing my laptop may have been a good business decision

By / June 21, 2012

I’ve always liked the idea of personifying places and things. I think it is cool when people have names for their cars and their houses. For the most part my things acquire fairly dull names like “the van” because I don’t take time to make a cool name stick first. But this time I had it in my head that I’d like to have a Calcifer in my life. Calcifer is the flame creature which powers and runs Howl’s Moving Castle. I wanted something like that in my life, a source of magic and energy, a familiar. So the name Calcifer was already in my head when I realized that the need for a new laptop was dire. My old laptop computer (called “my laptop” even thought I’d attempted to label it Scribit at one point) had reached unusable levels of battery life and memory. Calcifer seemed a perfect name for a portable computer, so I wandered the store looking for which of the computers met my needs and seemed the most like a Calcifer. I settled on a Toshiba brand with a pleasant wood grain look to the casing.

Calcifer came home, and here is where giving him a name makes a difference. If I left him sitting untouched for too long, I started to feel guilty. It was not the guilt of “I spent money I should use this thing” it was the niggling feeling that my friend Calcifer was lonely, that he was waiting for me to use him to write stories, or blog entries, or something. In the month that I’ve had Calcifer I’ve spent a lot more time dwelling in a writer mind space. Today I drafted fiction for the first time in I don’t know how long. It is a weird little psychological feedback loop. The existence of Calcifer in my life encourages me to write. Then I like Calcifer better because he nudges me to do writing. The more I like Calcifer the more motivated I am to make sure he isn’t lonely. I’m quite aware that this laptop I’ve named Calcifer is in fact inanimate. It doesn’t think or care, but names have power over me. I like the results of bestowing this one. Now I just need to get Calcifer a pretty sticker to cover up the Toshiba.