Organization

Scheduling March

By / March 3, 2013

I sat down and counted. During the month of February there were 20 school nights. These are nights when it is important to run life on schedule so that homework gets done and people are in bed on time so that they can get up the next day for school. Out of those 20 school nights, only 8 of them were not disrupted by a non-routine event. More than half of our school nights had something unusual going on, something that pushed dinner late, prevented homework, required adjustment, or delayed bedtimes. This makes a joke out of the concept of “routine.” I look ahead to March and know that somehow I need to keep more of the evenings free. Either that, or I need to do a better job of taking breaks earlier in the day so that I am not worn out by evening. I’m not sure how it will all work out, and I’m torn. Part of me wants to plan it all and defend my plan. Part of me thinks I should trust and follow inspiration to flow through my days. I’ll probably split the difference: Making focused lists and tossing them aside as needed.

Structuring Life to Make Room for Creativity

By / February 18, 2013 / 7 Comments

This blog post is a write-up from my presentation notes. I’ve given this presentation at LTUE. I’ll be giving it again at LDS Storymakers in May. As I wrote this from my notes, I noticed a major difference in the flow of a presentation and of a blog post. Speaking to a group is more conversational and I included anecdotes and examples that I’m leaving out of this post, because if I were to include them this post would be 15,000 words long. I’ve chosen not to break the presentation into 10 separate posts because I feel like having these abbreviated notes all in one place will be more useful than a blog series. Not included in this post is the discussion that resulted from the question and answer session at the end of the presentation. A recording was made of my LTUE presentation. I’ll link it when it is available on the internet.

I am a busy person. I have four children who attend three schools, all of which feel like they can email me. The schools have attached PTAs who want pieces of my time. I also share a business with my husband where I do the accounting, order management, shipping, customer support, layout work, art direction, and a host of smaller tasks. I have a house which gets disheveled if I don’t pay attention. I have to eat on a daily basis as do my people and the cat. I am not exaggerating when I say that I am busy. I’m busy even though I am constantly trying to be less busy. In this I’m not unique, because everyone is busy. Life fills to overflowing with things to do. Yet, last year I wrote a novel’s worth of blog entries. I wrote a picture book, Strength of Wild Horses, which I’ll be Kickstarting in a couple of months. I remodeled sections of my house, wrote letters, sewed. The remainder of this presentation gives some principles which allowed me to make space for these creative things. Not included is the advice to set aside time for creative things, which is good advice, however I feel it important to discuss how to structure life so that the time can be made available.

1. Identify Your Support Network
I could not accomplish what I do without the support of those who share my house. My husband could not accomplish what he does without my support. The first step in adjusting your life to make room for your creative pursuits is to talk to the people closest to you. You need to identify what sacrifices they may have to make and whether they are willing to make them. It has to be a conversation and the sacrificing needs to be reciprocal. Sometimes the people around you will not be allies, they will be obstacles or enemies. Then you have some hard decisions to make. You have to decide whether to value the relationships or your creative dream. The answers will be individual. Sometimes the creativity needs to be put down for a while, other times it is necessary to declare a creative space and let everyone be mad about it until they adjust. I recommend sitting down and making a list of who is affected by the creative space you need, how they are affected, what support you hope for from them, and what you might need to give in return to keep the relationship balanced. Making this list will require self awareness about your creative pursuit.

2. Arrange a Physical Space
You need to have a home for your creative pursuit, the space does not have to be large. For the longest time my space for my writing was contained inside my laptop. That worked really well for me because it was portable. I could take it anywhere, open it up and be in my writing space. Once I entered my writing space, the writing thoughts would unfold in my brain. When Howard began cartooning, we put all his cartooning things in a box on the kitchen counter. Then we shifted things around so he had a drawing table in our front room. Right now he has an office with a computer desk, a drawing table, a crafting table, and a second drawing desk at a local comics shop. Creating a physical space for your creative pursuit declares that it matters, it also provides a visual reminder that you might want to do your creative things. For more thoughts on spaces and how they affect us, I recommend reading The Not So Big House by Sarah Susanka.

3. Understand Your Biorhythms
Everyone has alert times of day and low energy points. Learning when yours are can make a huge difference in your creative output. Ideally you will put your block of creative time at your most creative time of day. This is not always possible, but knowing when you are most creative gives you something to aim for. A common pattern is to be high energy first thing in the morning with an energy lull in the afternoon and another energy burst in the evening. Some creators are at their best late at night, others before dawn. Find your pattern.

4. Use Supports for Your Schedule
In general, creative people struggle with creating structure for their lives. Howard and I depend heavily on the imposed structure from our kids’ school schedules. It gives is a required time to be up in the morning. We know that we have to do kid stuff until they are out the door. Then we switch to work tasks. Willpower is a limited resource. This is why I try to set up my creative schedule to require as little willpower as possible. I train myself that right after lunch I write for awhile. That way I don’t have to think about if I feel like it. I don’t have to muster the energy to get moving. I’m already moving for lunch, I just let that motion carry me into doing something creative.

5. Master the Small Stretch
Humans have a tendency to get excited and try to overhaul their entire life at once. They want to put writing in the schedule, and start exercising every day, and always have the dishes done. They want to Do All The Things. Then they wear out very quickly. Don’t overhaul your life, make one small change. Give that change time to settle in and become a habit. Once it does, you’ll be able to see what the next small change needs to be. The accumulation of small adjustments will change life dramatically over time. It can also help unsupportive family and friends become accustomed to creative things when they see that supporting creativity does not require a complete overhaul of life.

6. Learn to Work in Fragments
Creative people tend to want to work in big bursts, to immerse themselves for hours, or days, only to emerge when they’ve exhausted their energy. This is extremely disruptive to a busy schedule. Learning how to open up your creative thing and work on it for ten minutes or an hour is an incredibly powerful capability. This is where having a physical space for your creativity can be so very useful. You can train your brain that when you enter your creative space all the thoughts are there waiting for you. Working in fragments is particularly important if you are a parent of young children, because they cut your time into itty bitty fragments.

7. Ponder the Tortoise and the Hare
I used to hate the Aesop fable about the tortoise and the hare. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized I hated it because I was a hare, and in the story the hare loses. My natural inclination is to tackle a project and not stop until it is done. Unfortunately most creative projects are too big to be managed in a huge burst of energy. You can write a novel during NaNoWriMo, but at the end you are exhausted and the work on that book has barely begun. But if you learn to work in fragments, you can teach yourself to be like the tortoise. You can just keep stepping forward. It feels like you’re not getting anywhere. You work endlessly for what feels like no result at all, but there will come a moment when you reach the top of a hill and can see how far all those little steps have taken you. I truly admire the natural tortoises of the world. They get stuff done.

8. Health and Spoon Theory.
I began with a brief description of spoon theory, which is that we only have limited amounts of energy available in a given day. For visualization purposes that energy is represented as spoons. Those who are healthy are allotted more spoons than those who struggle with illness. Each task of daily life uses up spoons. There is inherent unfairness in energy distribution and this is hard. Sometimes energy which you wanted to go into creative pursuits will have to be spent on other things. I don’t have good answers for this, but I don’t feel like this presentation is complete without acknowledging that health can be a major difficulty. Also I want those who have good health to be aware that not everyone does, and maybe sometimes they can share some of their energy with those who have much less.

9. Get Outside Your Box
Creativity does not burst into spontaneous existence. I think of it as a deep subconscious aquifer full of all the stuff that accumulates from the places I go and people I talk to. I drill a well down into it and draw from it when I am writing. Sometimes when we are trying to organize life to maximize creative output we make the mistake of removing from the schedule all the things that fill us up. Playing video games or watching television may look like a waste of time, but for some people those things are essential to filling the creative aquifer. Each person will have different things that fill them up. I garden or visit new places. Howard paints and goes to movies. Both of us visit with friends. Find the things that fill you up and know that sometimes you’ll need to choose the filling activities instead of the creation activities.

10. Your System Will Break
You’ve followed all the steps outlined above, you’ve crafted the perfect schedule, everything falls into places and flows, but then suddenly it all falls apart. Something changed, things always change. My kids get older, their needs shift, I shift, we enter a different part of the business cycle, school gets out for the summer, school starts for the fall. The list of ways life can change is innumerable. When your system falls apart, just grab the best pieces from it and build a new schedule. In another few months that one will fall apart too. Having your schedule fall apart can actually be a gift because sometimes it forces us to really look at all the pieces and build something that works even better. When I was a young parent it felt like each overhaul of the schedule made something completely different. Now I can see that patterns emerge. These days I don’t have to overhaul very often, I just have to tweak.

This is when we moved into the Question and Answer portion of the presentation. I remember we talked a little bit about how to handle internet distraction and I recommended taking a break to see which parts of the internet you actually missed. Other excellent questions were asked, but I’m afraid that I can’t remember any more. This presentation was followed by two full days of conversations and they all blend together. Each of the points above could be expanded into a full discussion and blog post of its own. Perhaps someday I’ll do that. For now I hope that this set of notes gives people a place to start as they’re contemplating how to fit creativity in with everything else that they are already doing.

Renewing My Spaces

By / January 13, 2013

Every so often we would look at our walls and say “We really need to repaint.” Sometimes the words were triggered by corners where the paint had completely chipped away, other times it was contemplating the way that dirt collected on the sections of walls in front of the studs, thus creating a grid pattern in dirt. The declaration of the need to paint was always a launching point for the conversation, because if we were going to improve why stop with paint. “These cupboard need to go. The drawer fronts are breaking off. While we’re at it we should move the pantry and knock out this wall to connect the kitchen and the front room. Then we can expand off the back to add a dining room.” Soon we’ve imagined spending enough money to double our mortgage and the whole project gets filed in the “when we can afford it” pile to get dusty.

The problem is that the state of the walls triggered this sort of conversation increasingly often. We began to feel like the house is falling apart and we were powerless to fix it. We weren’t. It just required me to think about it differently. I had to think of fixing the house in small pieces rather than in massive projects. I had to apply the “do a little every day” philosophy which does not come naturally to me, but which I’ve learned is amazingly effective at getting things done. I needed to see the need for paint and treat that as a project in itself rather than as a small piece of a larger project. I’ve been staring at ugly paint in the front room for the last ten years. Putting new paint on the walls took $80 and 15 hours of work. I spread out that work over a week and a half, moving furniture and washing walls, masking, and only on the final two days breaking out the drop cloths and paint. Now the walls of my front room make me feel accomplished instead of helpless. It leaves me excited to proceed with putting on baseboards and finally replacing that stupid plastic windowsill which we’ve hated since the day we moved into the house fifteen years ago. Each of these projects takes some time, but if I spread out the work it becomes and enjoyable project rather than a massive and disruptive effort.

How we arrange our physical spaces can have a major effect on our mental spaces. I noticed this when we remodeled my office last year. The moment when I realized it was possible to remove a wall and join a closet into the room let me imagine the room I wanted instead of the room I was stuck with. I don’t think it is coincidence that I’ve been finding mental energy for my writing and projects since I created a physical space for them. So now that the walls in my front room are a pleasure to look at, I’m also looking around the room and thinking “What do I need this space to be?” Our front room should be a home for our antique piano, a place where people can enter our house and sit down to visit, and a staging area for things entering and exiting the house. It’s done fairly well at two out of three, but I don’t know that it has every succeeded at being a pleasant place to sit and visit. We’re going to fix that. Fixing it will require me to once again knock down a closet wall. It’s not that I have a thing against closets. I like them a lot, but not when they’re plunked in the middle of floor space which could best be used for actual living.

Little by little this house is going to be customized for the way we live. It will be full of small thoughtful details because such things delight me, and making my home full of small happy details seems like a worthwhile pursuit. The process will be slow, because both money and time have to be carefully apportioned, but $80 and 15 hours is well worth being able to sit in my front room without hating the walls.

Painting the Front Room

By / January 11, 2013

January is a cold month with far too little daylight, so I try to fill it with fun projects. That way I blink and it is over.

This is our front room. It hasn’t been painted since before we moved into the house. We’ve found it fascinating that the dirt accumulates differently depending upon whether there is a stud behind the sheetrock or just an insulation filled space. At this point you can clearly see a complete grid of where all the studs are in the wall. It feels rather like a jail.

So I bought paint. It is called Castle Stone, but the castle in question must be a sand castle because I would call the color Sand. Over the past week I’ve been shoving things around and prepping for paint. Today I painted the first section.

It still needs a second coat and the rest of the room needs to match. We’ve also discovered another hazard of making home improvements. Now the kitchen looks even worse than it did before. I don’t think I can stop painting when the front room is done. But for today I can feel accomplished while the paint dries.

Adventures in Social Media

By / January 22, 2013 / 6 Comments

I want to fund a picture book, The Strength of Wild Horses, and the obvious choice for that is to run a Kickstarter drive. However those who are wise in the ways of Kickstarter have advised me that the project has a better chance to fund if I do some community building first. This makes sense to me.

Completely separate from my Kickstarter project I have been thinking about ways to build community and about some ways I’d like to do that which are difficult to do from this blog. Or rather, I could do them from the blog, but I am interested in seeing how it would feel to run a different sort of place on the internet. I want to run a series of posts talking about different picture books, how they show character traits which are common in high energy ADHD or Autistic kids, and how parents can use those books to help kids and their siblings to come to terms with these traits. It was to accomplish exactly this that I wrote Hold on to Your Horses in the first place. I’ve had a growing list of books for years and would love to find a useful way to share that list.

I’ve also been thinking about stages of parenting. I’m in the middle of parenting headed for the endgame. Several times I’ve had parents who are just starting out come to my blog hoping to find posts about the early years of parenting. There are some. Patch was only a year old when I began blogging, but I’ve grown as writer since then. I’ve grown as a parent since then. My perspectives have changed and I have new thoughts about old topics. I thought it would be interesting to run a series where I link to an old post and then provide commentary from my current perspective. It isn’t the same as me going through being a young parent myself, but it would help me delve into those topics. It is certainly a worthy experiment.

I’ve also been thinking about cross promotion. Many times people find Howard because of Writing Excuses (or some other project) then they find me because of Howard. Having multiple creative pursuits reaches into different groups of people. For a long time I’ve been dependent on Howard’s internet stature as the primary promotional tool for my creative work. Except we have different audiences and I’ve been feeling like it is time for me to strike out on my own to build my own community which is not annexed to his. In the long run I must do this if I want to be able to afford to create the things I want to create. I need to believe that Hold Horses and One Cobble are works strong enough to be the foundation of a community.

All of these thoughts connected with the advice to build community in advance of running a Kickstarter and the result is an experiment that I intend to run for the next several months. I’m going to extend myself a little bit further online to see what I can accomplish. I’ve picked venues where I’m already comfortable and have been for awhile: Facebook, G+, and Twitter. These are places I like to play already and so I’m just introducing a new game into those spaces.

On Twitter I’ve just set up an account @OneCobble. It will be a simple feed of links back to this blog. This provides a simple way for those on Twitter to follow the blog without me feeling like I’m spamming everyone with links to blog entries. People who want to see every single blog entry will follow @OneCobble. Others will be able to blissfully ignore it.

On G+ I’ve used the new communities feature to set up a One Cobble at a Time community. This is where I’ll post those blog links with commentary. I’ll also post links to articles of interest. I’m sure I’ll come up with other things as well. I’ll be deliberately trying to encourage conversation about these topics.

I’ve also set up a One Cobble community on Facebook. At first I expect it to be nearly identical to the posts on G+, but I’m quite curious to see how the two communities develop differently. If they don’t become different, it will be because I’m talking to myself and I’m pretty sure I’ll get tired of that in a hurry.

Facebook also has a Hold on to Your Horses page. This is where I’ll post about those picture books. It is also the measure I’ll use to figure out when I have enough community support for a Kickstarter to be successful.

A month from now I’ll evaluate to figure out which of these ventures is adding happiness to my life and which is adding only stress. I’ll see whether I can feel an increase of interest in the things I write and do. Perhaps at the end of that month I’ll pull back inward. I don’t know for sure. I just know that this feels like the right experiment.

I haven’t yet sent out invitations to these new feeds and communities. I’m still debating whether I should or if that feels spammy to me. (It is pretty important to me that I not annoy people by misusing social media tools.) If I do, it won’t be for at least a week. I want to make sure that I’ve already got interesting things in the spaces before inviting everyone. However if any of you blog readers want front row seats while I figure this stuff out, I’d love for you to join me. You’ll be like the guest who arrives early and helps set out the snacks for everyone who will come later. If none of those things sounds interesting, feel free to hang out here. I’ll be keeping this place the same.

Let the social media experiments begin.

The Things on our Walls and What they Tell

By / December 27, 2012

Our decorating scheme for this house has been pretty haphazard in the fifteen years since we moved in. The walls are white because we’ve never spent the time or money to change them. We hung up some portraits and a picture of the temple because that is what one does with the walls of a house, also because I believe that sometimes we need visual reminders of the important things in our lives. There is a large picture in the kitchen of a gargoyle leaping to catch bubbles. I still love that picture. Howard and I bought it together one day after we received an unexpectedly large tax return. However the wall hanging we picked up in Africa thirteen years ago was a purchase made because we were in Africa and felt the need to bring something home with us. Then once it was here we needed to display it. Many of the other ornaments in our home have lingered for similar reasons. Our whole decorating scheme centered around things we acquired or inherited randomly that were sort of cool. Yet this past year I’ve placed more focus on noticing how small shifts in our surroundings can add to the general happiness in our lives. The African wall hanging long ago stopped causing us to feel happy. It was time for something new.

Our walls don’t just speak to us about places we’ve been and what matters, they also speak to those who visit. Mostly what our walls have been saying lately is that we are busy people who don’t take time to clean or to create a cohesive feel to our spaces. Howard had an idea to fix that, at least for the family room. He used some reward points to get Nintendo game posters. They showed large images of games that we’ve loved. Looking at the posters made us happy. We talked of having them framed to hang on the walls. Yet we didn’t. Mostly the delay was due to concerns about the cost of framing, but I confess I also worried a bit about what our walls would say to others.

Our family room is set up for video games and movies. The big TV is mounted on the wall and the cabinet below it is stacked with multiple game systems and shelves of the games that we have accumulated. Sometimes I feel very aware of all of these things when a visitor walks into the room, particularly if that visitor is one who has expressed the opinion that video games are a waste of time. That room makes it very obvious where much of our discretionary money is spent. Do we sometimes spend too much time and money on video games? Yes. But I know that the games bring happiness to our lives. We have as many happy memories and shared experiences over video games as other families do over soccer matches or trips to theme parks.

I have been trying lately to add small happiness to life, to recognize which things add to that happiness and which subtract. For Christmas this year I measured the posters and bought frames at Target. They were relatively cheap, simple to assemble, and did a good job of displaying the posters. This afternoon I took down the other displays and hung the posters. The room no declares clearly that the games do not just belong to the kids, but also to the adults. Not only that, but that we consider the games to be art worthy of display. With this one simple act we truly own the room, the games, and ourselves. Even more important, I when I watch Howard or the kids enter the room, their eyes flicker to the pictures of Zelda or a Skyrim map and their mouths quirk in a smile. A tiny piece of happiness has been added to our lives. We are glad to walk in that room now. It is good.

We’re not done. I expect that we’ll trade out the posters periodically as these ones begin to feel stale and new ones arrive. I also know that a particular pairing is not quite working right. It would also add to the room if we were to put a fresh coat of paint on the walls. These things will come, and they will add to our happiness.

The State of My House

By / December 8, 2012 / 5 Comments

I have eight boxes of calendars in my front room waiting for Howard to draw and me to ship. Next to those boxes is a stack of packages that I assembled this morning and are waiting for me to put on clothes so I can take them out to the mailbox. There is also a bag of garbage waiting to go out to the can. The area in front of the coat closet is in its usual jumble of discarded coats, shoes, papers, and toys. The cubbies next to it–which exist to hold all this stuff–are empty. Obviously there needs to either be a system overhaul or extensive re-training. The Christmas tree stands in the corner, lights off during the day, but still a lovely promise of holiday to come. There are no gifts under the tree and likely won’t be for weeks, though Howard and I have begun discussing what we want to do.

The kitchen table is littered with books, papers, and dirty dishes. All of these are freshly accumulated from last night’s homework time and this morning’s breakfast. The table can go from pristine to cluttered in less than five minutes–and it does on a daily basis. Kitchen counters, ditto, with the addition of crumbs, cutting boards, and other food preparation supplies and spills. The walls are dirty because some of them are fourteen feet up and we’ve never climbed up there to wash them. I shall not speak of the floor.

The family room is currently clean, but there is an unassuming file box sitting on the game table which heralds an imminent take over. Soon the couches will be shoved out of the way and shipping tables will be set up. The fireplace is covered in games and toys which don’t currently fit into the cabinets because the cabinets are jumbled rather than organized. The upstairs hallway needs to be vacuumed, but someone needs to put all the books back onto the shelf first. Picture books are prone to leaping off of the shelf and piling themselves onto the floor. The kids have once again taken to storing things on the floors of their bedrooms. They leave walking paths at least. I shall not speak of the bathrooms.

My office is fairly clear because it was used to house guests last week and will be put to similar use this weekend. I do need to do some careful putting away since this batch of guests includes one toddler, one preschooler, and two grade school children. Things will get touched. The laundry is actually contained in baskets rather than spilling forth to fill the entire laundry closet. That is likely to change in the next few days because I’m not going to spend much energy on laundry other than to make sure we don’t run out of clean underwear.

This is my house. It is in a constant state of flux. Sometimes I look around and think I’m doing okay. Other times I’m appalled at my housekeeping. Mostly though I call it good if the fluctuations pass through cleanliness often enough for us all to know what it looks like. I have a definite correlation between clean house and being less stressed, but the causality there can flow both directions. Sometimes I clean to become less stressed. Other times I’m less stressed therefore I have time to clean. It is the cluttery times which show me where to focus my attention when I have organizational energy. Like that front coat closet. I’m seriously considering tearing the front wall off of it and turning it into a nook instead of a closet with a door. In theory this would encourage people to hang their coats, but the reality might be mess visible all the time instead of some of the time. I’m still pondering ways to set it up so that the system still works when we’re not focused on it.

One of the most important organizational lessons I’ve learned is to think of my house as spaces instead of as rooms. The rooms have names, but each room has multiple purposes. The family room has a video game area, a computer area, storage cupboards, and an open space which sometimes is full of the game table. When we want to host a large gathering the game table gets stowed in the corner and the furniture slides around to create an open space in the middle of the room. Or if the event focuses around gaming, then the big table becomes the center of the room. My office serves as a storage space, library, craft space, guest room, work space, and quiet retreat. Things get pulled out and put away as they serve the purpose at hand. By thinking in spaces, I’m able to make the same desk serve three purposes depending upon how I set it up.

We are always tinkering with the way our household is arranged. I don’t know any other way to manage a house that contains six people who are always growing, taking up new hobbies, abandoning old interests, and pressing forward.

And now I should probably go get dressed to take out the garbage and those packages.

Stories of Today

By / October 31, 2012 / 1 Comment

There have been many impressive photographs today, scenes from Manhattan, Brooklyn, New Jersey. I’ve never been to any of these places, so I view the photos abstractly, without any personal grief attached. Before the storm I never walked that crumpled boardwalk, I never shopped in the below ground shops that now resemble a salty swimming pool. I see the subway and can ponder the feat of engineering it will take to pump that much water back into the ocean, without also having to wonder how I will manage to get to work sans functioning mass transit. Yet I look at the pictures and my brain tells me those stories. Part of me wants to capture in a story, not a description of the storm surge, but the emotion of one. This huge force beyond human control sweeps in and rearranges the lives of millions. I, three quarters of a continent away, can ponder these things because I have light, heat, health, a place to sleep, and normal work in the morning. As do many of the east coast residents, even in Manhattan. That last is a miracle of modern meteorology. We knew the storm was coming and so the people prepared.

Along with the disaster stories, today has other ones. The guy on twitter who deliberately spread misinformation during a natural disaster and then discovered that the internet had the power to unmask him. Criminal charges are likely to follow. Nerds and Geeks everywhere reacted to the news that Disney bought Lucasfilm and there will be another Star Wars movie. Thus Princess Leia becomes the newest Disney princess. The publishing houses of Random House and Penguin are merging, causing yet another round of laments (or rejoicing) that this is sign that publishing as we know it is changing forever. Some news cycles are busier than others. Stories that would normally dominate all the conversational space for days or weeks are only getting a passing glance. Ordinary stories pass untold because people were too busy focusing on the extraordinary.

My story of today had a bright blue sky and sunshine. I followed my task list, accomplished goals, and was able to appreciate how my kids are continually growing into amazing and responsible people. Today contained pieces of larger stories, some of which don’t get told on the internet because my children do not deserve the experience of having their friends read all the embarrassing things their mother wrote about them. I’m just grateful that there were no storms for me or the kids today. Instead we talked costumes and Halloween. I baked cookies.

I have cookies and three quarters of a continent away there are people who had houses yesterday but don’t anymore. Life is not fair. But I hold the memory of other stories. This is not the first hurricane, nor the first storm surged city. Years from now this will be another survival story in a city which has weathered much deadlier disasters. During next few days smaller stories will emerge from the massive damage. We will get to hear of heroes and courage. We will see people work hard overtime hours trying to put everything back together. Some small scale tragedies will emerge and somehow because the size of them is comprehensible, these small tragedies will drive home how big this storm was. There will be laughter, ride sharing, and people gathering in the street next to electrical outlets so that they can charge their cell phones. These things have already begun. This storm is done. It has left behind story fodder, whether we assemble stories of hope or despair is up to us.

Catch Up Day

By / October 15, 2012

I was staring down the barrel of Monday after taking three days off of work to venture into the realm of visiting relatives and college campuses. The four days prior to that I was functioning at minimal levels due to a head cold. Stuff had piled up and Monday was the day to get it all done. The only way I could possibly do it all was to deploy lists and minions–five lists, four minions. I wrote a list for each child and left the lists on the counter. My list resided in my google tasks window. At 7 am the work began.

I wish I could take credit for training my kids right, but I can’t. The truth of the matter is that each of them made choices this morning. I made the lists, but they could easily have chosen to rebel or get distracted. Instead my kids decided to own those lists, to claim them and dispatch them as quickly as possible. By noon the house was cleaner and all the critical kid tasks were complete. (Except for Patch’s science fair project which required my participation and thus was the one item on his list which remains incomplete here at bedtime.) I grant you that we have carefully practiced doing chores. We’ve created system after system for tracking chores, assigning chores, rewarding work done, and applying consequences for incomplete work. Each system was built out of the functioning bits of prior systems that had fallen apart. There is definitely a refining process as we figure out what works and what doesn’t for each child at each stage of life. Mostly though, the kids have realized that they have power to make our lives better, that when they do work life is happier, that if they don’t things feel chaotic. Some of this learning is the result of me being too tired and stressed to save them from from the consequences. My kids are good workers because I built a structure and then got out of the way. This let their innate awesomeness have room to grow.

My list of things also shrank by leaps and bounds through the morning. The largest of these things was that I needed to be online to help answer questions and troubleshoot during the opening of registration for the Writing Excuses Workshop and Retreat which will take place next summer. It is an event I’m really excited to be part of, but which I’ve not been mentioning online because there was only so much space and it seemed important to let those who follow the Writing Excuses blog have the first chance to register. They wasted no time at all. The event was sold out within ten minutes. Mary and I were online for an hour more just to double check everything and iron out a couple of minor behind-the-scenes organizational issues. So next June I’ll be headed back to Chattanooga for another writing retreat. Only this time I’ll have Howard with me and I’ll probably get to do some teaching. I’m looking forward to it.

By the time my kids were finishing up their lists I was barely half way through mine, and I was losing steam. I always assign myself more things to do than can be reasonably done in the allotted time. This is because some days I really can get it all done. Most days I just can’t. Also I have to put every random task I think of on the list or I will lose track of them. I often put things on lists for next week or even next month so that I can forget about them today. Somehow the afternoon turned into a slog for just about everyone. Then we all had to wade through patches of cranky in the evening. Yet here we are at bedtime with most of the things done. I do feel caught up, like tomorrow can be a normal day instead of a sprint. That will be nice. We need a steady pace for a while.

The Steps to Deciding on Merchandise and then Managing It

By / October 4, 2012

My inventory day yesterday required me to stare at all of the various merchandise that we’ve made over the last few years. Then I started thinking about the decision making process behind creating that merchandise and I thought it might be useful to outline how that works.

1. Cool idea! This is the fun part of creating merchandise, before any work is invested. We’re able to say wouldn’t it be cool if… we had miniatures, there were a t-shirt with a maxim on it, we had schlock patches. Howard and I come up with fun ideas all the time. Fans come up with them too and tell us about them. They have to pass the rest of the steps before they can exist.

2. Broad appeal? For every cool idea, Howard and I have a discussion of whether it will appeal to most Schlock fans or if it will only interest a few. No merchandise will interest everyone, but the more people we can interest the better. Other wise we have a basement full of stuff that no one is buying. Books and calendars interest many fans, water bottles and miniatures only interest a few. We can still make the lower interest items, but it affects pricing and quantities.

3. Costs. There are different kinds of costs involved in merchandise. Production costs are the most obvious. We have to find a supplier who manufactures the merchandise we want. We would dearly love a bowl-sized yellow mug printed with Tub of Happiness, but we’ve never found a supplier who can do it the way we imagine. Space is another cost. Bowl size mugs are physically large and I only have so much room to store things. Every inch of space I give to mug storage can not be used for book storage–and books sell better. There are costs in effort as well. T-shirts take lots of effort because I have to track sizes as well as styles. Merchandise also gets rejected because of shipping concerns. We tend to avoid things that break easily in transit. We also avoid things which require new packing methods. I’m already stocking eight different types of shipping containers. Storing those shipping supplies also takes up space.

4. Price point. We have to evaluate all the various costs of the item against the price we think people are willing to pay. Some really cool ideas are simply not profitable because they cost too much for the amount of money they can earn.

5. Budget evaluation. We only have so much money available to fund new merchandise. If we have to choose between printing a book and making goopy Schlock in a cup, the books are going to win every time. Every item of merchandise we choose means there are at least three others which we can’t fund.

6. Design. All of the above steps are discussion and research. We can do those in the space of an hour if things line up right. This one is when Howard commits art. We have to find space in Howard’s schedule to create whatever thing we’ve pictured. Many cool merchandise items stall in this stage for a very long time. Sometimes we even lose track of them because we’re too busy.

7. Production. This stage begins with sending files to a supplier. Usually there are a couple of rounds of merchandise approval, but mostly this stage is made of waiting.

8. Marketing. With merchandise in hand we have to sell it. Sometimes the marketing begins before the design and production phases. When we run a pre-order it is often to answer the questions of appeal and quantity. It also helps to build interest in the merchandise. Older merchandise still benefits from marketing attention. Most of our marketing plans are “Howard will announce it from the Schlock blog and tweet it.” This works great for Schlock merch. It did not work well when we put out Hold on to Your Horses and realized that Howard’s audience is not mine. For non-established businesses the marketing discussion needs to be up there around step 3, before any money is spent.

9. Inventory management. And now we’ve come full circle back to my inventory day. I have to keep track of all the merchandise so that I do not sell more than we have in stock. It is also critical that I be able to find merchandise and ship it within a day or so of when it is ordered. I have to manage both the physical inventory in my house and the inventory listed in the online store to make sure that they match each other.

Merchandise is a lot of work, but there are rewards that aren’t measured in money. We love the moment when someone walks up to our booth at a convention and lights up “Oh I have to have that t-shirt! It is perfect!” We agree. It’s why we made the shirt. I just wish that more of the cool ideas passed the rest of the steps into reality.