Organization

Up Keep

By / September 8, 2011 / 8 Comments

I went to the dentist today for the first time in *mumble* years. I’m not trying to be coy about how long. I honestly don’t remember. It was probably about the time that our dental insurance ceased to exist and that was at least six years ago. I am fortunate to have pretty good teeth. Howard has super teeth. Our kids haven’t complained about their teeth, so we’ve kept going without maintenance visits. The thing is, I know that skipping maintenance increases our risk of emergency. I also know that there are incentives present for dentists to recommend more work than actually needs to be done. I still believed that dental check ups have value, even though we haven’t been doing them. Howard went to the dentist right before WorldCon. His major issues were to whiten or not to whiten. I went today and I’ll get to go again in two weeks because two of my teeth have holes that need plugged. After that, I’m going to take a deep breath and take my kids one by one. Once we’ve managed those bills, the dentist tells me that attention needs to be paid to the 30 year old fillings in my mouth. It is time to pay attention to maintenance again.

Our deck and redwood play set are almost bare wood these days. All of the stain has faded, peeled away, or been scraped off by paper wasps. This is not a new problem. We’ve watched it happen slowly over the course of years. Every summer someone will say “We really need to re-stain the deck and play set.” Unfortunately our summers are notoriously busy and no one took any steps beyond saying the words. I have decided that before September is through I will rent a pressure washer and a paint sprayer. I will perform this small maintenance task which will make us feel better about our back garden and which will defend our structures from the elements.

Our roof has begun shedding. After rain storms we can find a scattering of roof gravel on our driveway. Sometimes there are also pieces of shingle. The roof has held up well since the house was constructed, but it is showing age. I need to call and get an estimate on a new roof.

Things require up keep or they will fall apart. During the Novell years we were on the dot with all sorts of up keep. It was easy because the money was available. Then money was less available and we coasted along only managing maintenance issues when they reach crisis level. I am trying to push that back so that we’re keeping things up when they’re only urgent. Perhaps after that we can venture into the realm of just keeping things up because they need done. All of this maintenance will have to be done carefully and balanced against our budget. Our money is not plentiful, but it is time for me to stop living in crisis mode. I just wish that up keep wasn’t so expensive.

Lists and Staging

By / August 9, 2011

This is the week when WorldCon preparations swamps everything else in my life. You’d think that would be next week when I am actually at WorldCon, except that I’ve arranged for everything else to be managed next week. Next week I can give WorldCon 100% attention. This week the preparations are all mixed up with feeding kids, house chores, shipping packages, customer support, and community events. At the moment it feels like I’m not doing any of these things particularly well. We’ve also reached the stage where it is too late. We wanted to create better banners as backdrops for the booth, but there isn’t time to get them made and shipped. We’re going to have to pay more for fliers and business cards because we have to print them locally instead of at the discount place online. I have half a dozen other clothing and sewing ideas, but have neither time nor clothing budget to execute on them.

My major focus for the next week is thinking ahead. I have to make sure that nothing critical is forgotten. I have to anticipate what we’ll need without ever having seen the space in which we will be setting up shop. I have a packing list for the booth, a packing list for me, a packing list for Howard, and I still need to make a packing list for the kids. I also have price lists, inventory lists, and schedules of events. It is all coming together and yet I’m fighting back a persistent feeling that it is all falling apart. To combat this feeling I’ve started piling things up in the front room.

Our front room is often used as a staging area. This time as I accumulate pieces I am stacking them where I can see them. Once I put them in the pile, I can stop trying to hold them in memory. Also I can start gauging how much stuff we have to haul and whether it will all fit into the two vehicles we’ll be driving to Reno. Our neighbors will loan us a car top carrier, which will help, but it will still be tight. My internal volume estimator says it will all fit, but actually seeing the stuff stacked up will help me know that for sure. I’m taking process shots for later blogging.

I think I am doing today what my younger two kids did last week. They each had a day where they cried about going to a new school because they didn’t know what to expect and were worried about it. The next day they were fine and have continued to be fine with only small signs that they still have increased levels of tension. Here’s hoping that tomorrow I can be back to excited anticipation instead of stressed worry.

In good news, we have Schlock Mercenary water bottles to sell at WorldCon. The Writing Excuses badge ribbons also arrived. We now have all our merchandise in hand. Tomorrow I will go shopping to acquire booth supplies and dressings.

A Little Bit Exhausted

By / July 28, 2011 / 3 Comments

Being a little bit exhausted is an oxymoron really. Exhaustion is all-encompassing. It takes over the whole body and demands that it be attended to before any more effort is expended. I can feel the exhaustion there. It threatens to break through and take me over, but I’m holding it back and getting things done. This probably means I’m actually nowhere near true exhaustion. But it feels like I am. I’ve been working during most of my waking hours since Monday. My list of to do items is not getting shorter. It keeps expanding in the middle because of last minute scramble-to-get-this-done-in-time-for-GenCon things. It also expands due to not-quite-so-last-minute-but-still-urgent WorldCon things and the must-plan-ahead-for-Dragon*Con things. Then there are the neglected household things and the ramping-up-to-a-new-school-year things. I’m pretty sure that most of the urgency will shake out of the list by the time Howard leaves for GenCon on Tuesday. It’s all a little overwhelming, so I try not to think about it en masse. Instead I focus on today’s list and hope that by the end of the day I have nothing that rolls over into tomorrow.

Shipping and Convention Prep Status Report

By / July 22, 2011

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

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

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

Counting and Inventory Ordering

By / July 8, 2011

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

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

Busy has Arrived

By / June 30, 2011 / 3 Comments

Last night I was unable to sleep until 3:30 am despite going to bed around midnight. My brain was spinning with things to do and anxieties related to them. This is in sharp contrast to last week which was all drifty and lazy.
The things my brain spun in circles trying to solve:

I was notified that a space had opened up in the gifted program for which Patch was an alternate. Howard and I looked at all the factors and decided to accept the placement. This decision makes next fall a harder adjustment for Patch. As a result, both Howard and I will have to spend more energy to be available to him and to Gleek who is also entering the same gifted program. We finally made the decision to go ahead when we realized the only thing holding us back was knowing how hard it is going to be. If I spend my life trying to avoid hard things I’d never get anywhere worth being.

Books arrive in one week. By this time next week our garage will be full of books and we’ll be busy schlepping them around so that Howard can sign them and then sketch them. I’ve also got invoices to sort, shipping boxes to order, supplies to gather, volunteers to organize, and bundles to assemble. All of this is familiar work, but I need to not lose track of any of it. Our book shipping day is July 25.

GenCon is in one month. This means that the minute the new books arrive, I need to turn around and ship a bunch of them to our support crew over there. It also means we have to hammer out designs and plans for the booth space so that everything can be set up intelligently. I will not be going this year, so I have to make sure that Howard and his crew have all the pieces that they need. Also I need to buy plane tickets for Howard.

WorldCon is in six weeks. I have an outline of a plan which gets me, Howard, four kids, two booth helpers, associated luggage, and all booth supplies to where they need to be. It is time to start fleshing out the outline and pinning down details. The details will show me the faults of my outline, this has already happened. We have to be in Reno a full day earlier than I thought we did. I have to extend the hotel stay, hopefully that will work.

School starts in seven weeks. I will have to cart all my kids home and then immediately turn around to start them off in school. My brain is still going to be post-convention unsettled and I won’t have time to settle it before I have to start working with schools and teachers.

Somehow in the midst of all of the above, Howard needs to not just maintain the buffer, but get ahead on all of it. I’m supposed to be writing. The kids are supposed to be doing chores. In theory Gleek and Patch are practicing times tables and reading books. Kiki is working her way through an online course which it now looks like she won’t be able to finish before the end of the summer. Kiki is supposed to be learning how to drive, but we haven’t yet felt brave enough to take her on the freeway. Laundry and dishes are omnipresent. Things keep growing in the yard and I have to suppress the unpleasant ones so the nice ones can flourish. Howard needs to brainstorm bonus stories and outline the things he wants to write in the retreat this fall. And my house is full of people all the time.

It is my intention that on July 4th I will re-capture the blissful denial of last week. On that day I will be excused from everything except hanging with my kids, having a chalk drawing festival, eating ice cream, lighting fireworks, and visiting with neighbors.

No wonder I couldn’t sleep.

New Things I am Learning

By / June 8, 2011 / 2 Comments

1. How to research and query agents. I’m starting by asking my friends about their agents, once I’ve dried up that source of information I’ll resort to the internet.

2. How to set up our online store for a pre-order. This is one of those things which I expected to learn once, but instead I have to re-learn every time I do it. The software keeps updating and changing in between pre-orders. Also our needs shift and change from book to book. On the list of things to research for the store: how to set it up to deliver electronic only files and if it can track orders based upon how a customer arrived at the site. (It would be useful to be able to figure out if a tweet or a blog post is more effective in driving sales.)

3. Graphic design. I have text books sitting on my desk and gathering dust. I fully intend to study them and get better at this job I’ve been doing for four years now. I want to know how to purposefully create rather than just muddling through.

4. How to manage four kids at home all day and still get my work done. Again, it seems I should know how to do this, but the kids change from one year to the next making hard things easy and introducing new hard things. Also the summers have different demands, different camps, different scheduled items. Last year there were swim lessons, this year I haven’t scheduled any. This year there will be a summer drama camp if I can ever get in touch with the teacher long enough to get the kids registered. Generally I get it figured out just in time for everything to shift around again.

5. Marketing. There are always marketing things to learn. If I learn and apply marketing skills then (in theory) we will have more money. More money means less immediate stress. I like being less stressed, but I still don’t like marketing.

6. Freelance non-fiction writing. I’m just on the front edge of this, beginning by emailing some people I know who do it. I have enough writing skill that I could be earning money this way. But before I can earn money I have to figure out how to find people who are willing to pay for my words. Then I have to figure out what kinds of words I am willing to sell. Ideally I’d be able to sell some of my essays with only minor revision. Getting paid is not the only aspect of this which interests me. I like being able to say things which are useful to others.

7. How to make over a dress. I already know a lot of sewing, but a make-over project is inherently dictated by what already exists. I have to figure out each step as I go. I’m also doing researches on acquiring discounted materials.

8. How to pick up and start writing a new project after completing a large project. This one is harder than I would have thought.

It would be so lovely to be able to focus on learning one new thing and be really excited by it. That is not my life. I’m not sure that luxury comes to very many people in this world. At least most of these things do not have fear attached. I like it when I can learn without being driven by terror of failure.

The Gateway to Summer

By / June 3, 2011

It is the last day of school. Two of my kids are at their elementary school for an hour and a half. My junior high and high schoolers are both at home since no one takes role on the last day and they don’t see much point in wandering around in the halls carrying yearbooks. In 30 minutes I’ll retrieve the younger pair and the school year will be officially over.

The end of a school year is usually an event of high emotion to me. I’m either eagerly ready to be done with a year that is hard, or dreading the end of a year that was good. Often I feel both ways about different children, or even the same child, if the year has been particularly… interesting. For the past few years I looked toward the onset of summer schedule with dread. I panicked about organizing 6 people in one house all day long so that work was maximized and squabbling was minimized. I also tend to dread the influx of lunches. Fixing meals is not my favorite activity and with the kids at home I have three per day instead of just two. The end of the school year also carries with it much angst about what the following year will be. No matter how hard the current year was, it was at least a known quality. The year to come could be so much worse.

If you pay attention to tenses in the previous paragraph (but not too close, my tenses probably don’t hold up to intense scrutiny) you will notice that I talked about all that high emotion in past tense. It has all been absent this year. Today is the end of school and my entire emotional reaction has been to shrug and dust off the summer chore lists from last year. It is possible that I simply used up all my end-of-year hand wringing back in April when I helped my older two register for classes and filled out paperwork for my younger two to be transferred to a different school. All the choices are made and my psyche seems inclined to let them lay until (probably) sometime in August. Also there doesn’t seem to be much point in panicking about having all the kids home while I’m trying to work. I’ve done it before and sorted it out. We’ll figure it out again.

What I’m feeling is not apathy. It’s not that I don’t care. It is that I don’t feel stress. The calmness is nice. I can save all my panic for the upcoming book pre-order, book shipping, and three major conventions in six weeks. Perhaps it is simply that Conservation of Anxiety means that I’ve already met my anxiety quota for the summer and I don’t have any left to spill over onto the end of school. Except that I don’t feel particularly anxious right now. I feel like we’re going to move calmly and seamlessly into a nice summer routine.

Tune in next week for : Sandra finds her stress, a blog in four parts about how bored kids can squabble over anything.

My List of Things

By / April 21, 2011

This is my list of things to do between now and Wednesday. The results of these things will generate an entirely new list of things for the second half of the week. Well, new except for those things which I did not complete before Wednesday and which did not go away on their own. In theory I will be updating as I go, in practice I’ll stop when I get distracted and forget:

Accounting I cheated and got a head start here. Finished on Saturday.
Update four websites
EPD layout -place margin art and bonus story
EPD Reprint margin art pages for Howard Done. Monday afternoon
EPD create pipe boxes for footnotes Done Mon 12:50 pm. I learned to work smart. Yay!
EPD enter copy edits Done Thurs noon
EPD cover comic and quotes Partially done Thurs
Contact Unspecified cool person about a future book intro Done Thurs morn
Contact another unspecified cool person about a different book intro. Done Thurs morn
Complete my book revision not going to happen this week. Again. Sigh.
Email triage Done Mon Morning
Visit new elementary school with kids Done Monday afternoon. They are pleased with the look of the new playground.
Go to Meeting with Gleek about gifted program Done Tues evening
Decide for certain whether to accept placement in gifted program Done Wed morning
Decide whether I’m going to also move my youngest child to the new school or if I’m going to put up with 4 kids being in 4 different schools. Done. youngest is moving too. (I hope. I’ve applied anyway.)
Preliminary layout for four more schlock books
Make dessert for an event I can’t attend because I’m double booked Oops. Skipped this one.
Do reading for Writer’s Group Done Wed morning
Attend Writer’s Group Done Wed evening
_____
Added Monday Morning:
Buy 10 ISBN Numbers I can’t believe we ran out. 10 books in print right now. On to the next 10.
_____
Tues:
Watch Dancing With The Stars. Done I feel quite guilty about accomplishing this with so many important things pending. I was hiding from all the stressful important things.
_____
Added Thursday:
Mailing Done Thurs Morning
Email triage Done
Work on book revision
EPD image edits Done Thurs afternoon

Visualizing My Schedule as it Flows

By / April 12, 2011 / 2 Comments

We are now six and a half years into our adventures in creative self-employment. The first eighteen months were all about scrambling to find ways to bring in more money and to spend less. The two years after that were all about growing the business and figuring out how things work. We succeed at business growth until we spent a year and a half so insanely busy that we had to learn how to turn down opportunities. The past 18 months have been one long effort to balance work and life in ways that allow both to prosper.

At each stage I had to re-conceptualize how I managed my life and the lives of our family. Last year I struck upon thinking of our schedule as a fluid river with a few fixed points rather than trying in December to plan the following April, May, June. Things always change in between and if I picture them already set, I have to re-set them. If they flow, then changes in the fixed points alter the flow without me having to panic. Conventions and appearances are fixed business points. Book creation and releases are fluid. Kid concerts and school schedules are fixed. Family outings and housework are fluid.

Most of the big fixed points for this year were placed on the calendar last Fall. One of the most important ones was a family vacation. I put it on Spring Break and I made reservations for a place we could go. I expected to arrive stressed and worried about work. I particularly expected it after the addition of a convention right before it and right after it. I’m not stressed. I can see how things will flow. It is all going to be fine. I’m looking forward to our departure.