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As of this writing there are only three days left on the X-treme Dungeon Mastery Second Edition Kickstarter.

This final run of days on a Kickstarter is always exciting and exhausting. On Friday at 10am Mountain Time I will know exactly how much budget we have to work with and I’ll know exactly what we’ve promised to deliver. Then we can settle into working on all of that. I will be able to reassign the energy I’ve been spending on promotional work to other tasks.

But for today, I’m still in promotional mode, so I’m making sure that my blog readers know about this project in its final days. I love what we’re creating. I’m excited that we reached the stretch goal for the audiobook. I’m hopeful we’ll reach the goal where Howard livestreams the creation of the illustrations for the book. I’d also love for us to be able to add spot gloss to the cover, though that is a real stretch. $20 gets you a PDF of the book, a PDF of the Quest for the Tavern adventure module, some desktop backgrounds, the option to also buy the audiobook, and possibly the PDF for the Attack on Santa’s Workshop adventure module. Or you can get yourself a hardback book and all those other things as well.

A year ago any discussion about the future included speculation about what the “new normal” would look like. Those discussions have changed shape around the question “Is this it? Is what we’re living the new normal?” The answer to that question is yes because normal has always been a mirage, a fantasy, an illusion that life is in any way predictable. We try to make it predictable for our own comfort, because constantly paying attention to and emotionally managing a shifting world is exhausting. If we can find a routine for schooling or work or chores, then at least that small portion of our lives can just happen without us having to think to much about it. I now carry a mask with me and put in on in public places without thinking about it. I give people more distance. I spread out social contacts so that I can tell if I caught something before I have the chance to spread it unawares. I’m accustomed to random shortages, for some reason there are no pickles for three weeks, then they are back. I’m shifting my own book printing stateside so that none of my products have to traverse the snarled mess of global container shipping. All of these things do require a small modicum of attention, but I’ve become accustomed to giving that attention. It is normal for me to adapt on the fly to regular shifts in product availability, Covid numbers, and local mandates. All sorts of little things are less predictable than they used to be, but that lack of predictability has become predictable, and therefore normal.

My son was not diagnosed with autism until he was 18 years old. We went through all the emotions, regrets, relief, and fears which attend upon such a late adjustment in comprehension of what was affecting my son’s interactions with the world. I was baffled by how a kid could have full psychological/behavioral assessments seven times as he was growing up and not one of the supposed experts recognized the autism. He was screened for autism on multiple occasions and the result was “probably not.” The flaw was that those screening tests depended on me, the parent, stating the severity of behaviors and how disrupting the behaviors were to our life. The thing was, we’d already adapted to those behaviors, they were normal and manageable for us. That came across in the screening test. They were absolutely indicative of my son having autism AND they were entirely normal for us so that we thought nothing of them. Our household normal looked very different from the normal in other households. This continues to be true as my three fledgling adults are just beginning to flap their wings while depending on the security of the nest for survival.

I think about normal as learn and collect information for the accessibility appendix in XDM2e. I exchanged messages with a Game Master who has been blind since birth and was wondering how to deploy maps that they can’t see in their games to help their sighted players. In this person’s world being sighted is the oddity and blindness is completely normal. The same holds true for wheelchair users and deaf people. They know exactly how to navigate the world using their capabilities. Their normal is different from mine, but it is still normal. Just as my parenting normal has been very different from other parents I know. And my current normal is different from the normal of the pre-pandemic times. In fact the ability to create normal might be a survival trait for humans. In order to not be overwhelmed, we start classifying things as “normal” so that we can not be exhausted paying attention to them all the time.

I wish I had a grand conclusion to make of these meandering thoughts, but all I have to offer is that normality, whether new or old, is a strange and illusory thing.

The week began smoky as storm systems and air flow carried smoke from fires in California and Oregon into my valley to sit. Some days it was inadvisable to spend much time outside and the asthma sufferers in my house had to use their inhalers more often. I tried to capture a photo of the way the smoke turned the moon red. I only sort-of succeeded.

When the rains blew in, we were so glad to have relief from the smoke, and we were happy to have brief monsoon bursts where water poured down in sheets. Not typical desert weather. My pandemic patio turned into a wading pool for a couple of hours.

The rain also showed me that I need to get up on a ladder and unclog my rain gutters since they still seem to be full of water days later (and reflecting sunlight onto the side of my house) instead of funneling that water to the down spouts.

The week also included a trip to the vet for my old lady kitty to talk about what to feed her to keep her kidneys in good working order, followed by changing the feeding patterns for all three cats to accommodate old lady kitty’s needs. I softened the stress of feeding changes by also acquiring some interesting new toys which the younger cats both love.

My Saturday was consumed by the acquisition of a large china cabinet that is eventually destined for my front room.

It is big. Several times during the process of extricating it from my neighbor’s downstairs and trundling it down the street to my house I pondered the wisdom of my impulse acquisition. But I’ve wanted a way to display some of my grandmother’s antique glass while still protecting it from the cats and my neighbor was only asking $100, so I grabbed the opportunity. It will have to sit in the garage until after some of the work that needs to be done on the kitchen is complete. And possibly I’ll discover that this is not the right furniture for the space, in which case I’ll have acquired a task instead of a solution, but wise or not, that’s how I spent my Saturday.

It is now Sunday afternoon, which means I’m in the middle of twenty four hours when I try to step away from work to rest from my labors. I’m better at this than I used to be when so much of my work behavior was anxiety driven. My weekends are still frequently busy, but they tend to be differently busy. I switch gears into house or family instead of business and internet. Thus I am writing a post about my week instead of clicking over to XDM2e files. The files can wait until tomorrow.

I have landed on the shores of Saturday like a beached jellyfish. At least I think it is Saturday. Time has gone wobbly and slippery for me. Perhaps in a while the tide will return and I’ll be able to move again, but for this morning I’ve had little energy for anything except laying in a limp puddle.

The XDM2e Kickstarter funded. I’m so glad it funded. Next week I will be excited for and pour energy into talking to the world about the stretch goals we have planned. Extra things we get to do if the project over funds. Funding means we can afford to do the project. Over funding means we can afford to pay for the time we’ve poured into making this project happen and for bills and living expenses in the coming months. We are really well positioned to meet those stretchy goals. Four more weeks of excitement and promotional push lay ahead of me. Which is why it is so important to spend the rest of this weekend doing very little at all.

One of the joys from last week was that a friend came to stay with us for two days. We got to have a fellow writer in the house, like having our own little mini convention/retreat. We shared food and visited and then retreated to our computers where she worked on a script and I frantically drafted information to explain international shipping costs to a potential backer who was quite certain that my price point meant I was running a scam to overcharge on shipping and thus get rich on ill-gained proceeds. Or I wrote tweets to draw eyeballs to the project. Or I coordinated things behind the scenes to arrange for meetings or make decisions or give copy to copy editors.

At one point Howard sent friend and me on a scenic drive up the Alpine Loop road. I hadn’t realized how much I needed the silence of aspen forest until I was standing there in the company of trees.

And then on the return drive we had the delight of discovering that someone had deposited a recliner chair at a scenic overlook. When life presents you with a roadside recliner with a view, one simply has to take a minute to sit in the chair.

Just beyond the sagebrush was a drop into a canyon where we could look down on a campsite below. And of course we could also look out over the mountains.

Just looking at these pictures helps me feel less like a beached jellyfish and more like something that can pick myself up and move under my own power again. Perhaps I need to schedule another trip to the mountains for next week. A chance for me to see new things and remember that the world is larger than my house. Also to step away from the constant urgency of funding a Kickstarter project.

Mountain vistas are good.

Tomorrow morning we launch the Kickstarter for X-treme Dungeon Mastery Second Edition. All day I’ve been carrying a feeling about it. I really want this Kickstarter to fund well so that we can finish pouring our energy and creativity into this book. I’ve had so much fun doing the work and I want to get to finish it. I also want to be able to pay our bills. A well funded Kickstarter enables both.

We’ve prepared everything. Now we just have to wait until morning. And then I have to spend energy pushing the launch. Then I have to wait and see. Until morning, I’ll be quietly jittering over here in my chair.

After writing a lovely post about being called back to my writer self, I dove head first into X-treme Dungeon Mastery Second Edition. This is the book that completely took over my life in April/May of 2009. I remember the crazy scramble to get it all done. We are once again having a crazy scramble to get it rearranged and new sections written. I’m very excited about the project and tremendously proud of what we did the first time around and what we’re doing now. We’ve even set up the Kickstarter Prelaunch page.

However the long hours and fatigue have also woken sleeping demons of self doubt. They’ve been loud the past couple of days to the point where it is sometimes hard to focus on the project at hand. It is also hard to find spare brain space for blogging. I’m either actively working on XDM2e, or I’m actively trying to make my brain rest from working/fretting, or I’m trying to catch up on family administration tasks which aren’t politely waiting for me to be done with my project. Laundry is so rude that way. (Also I can’t make my son wait to get his first job just because I don’t want to drive him to the interview. He aced it and starts next week. It’s nice that his forward momentum is happening despite me instead of because of me.)

I’m loving the work on XDM2e and I’m terrified that I’m doing it wrong. I’m thrilled with what we have planned and I’m afraid we’re ruining the book. So that is my current status. Hopefully I’ll emerge a bit when we launch the Kickstarter in August. Though blogging might remain slow until September when the Kickstarter is currently scheduled to close.

Yesterday I was standing in the kitchen while he talked through the things he plans to do this week. He was talking fast and the list was long, but he was energetic and optimistic about the work ahead. This is a version of Howard I haven’t seen for more than two years, one I wasn’t certain we would ever get back. I spent twenty-five years running to keep up with Howard, then the last two waiting while he moved much more slowly. During those two years I had to face the possibility that this was our new normal. That we simply had to adapt to a different set of capabilities than what we had before. Two years ago Howard switched his mental health meds, then we had a house disaster that disrupted our work spaces for six months, then our daughter got married, then Howard got sick for eight months, and while he was being sick the world threw a pandemic. Then we ended the daily comic around which our lives had been structured for twenty years and we had to figure out what comes next. All of that lingered physically, financially, and emotionally until about two months ago.

Two months ago we got vaccinated, and we finally got the last pieces to deliver packages to our Kickstarter backers. Then Howard streamed all his sketches and life schedule clicked into place. Somewhere in the last month, Howard started popping awake before I do. He started being excited to get up and face the challenges of the day.

On Monday I shipped out the last of the packages for Big Dumb Objects. It feels like closing the book on the past two years. Time to launch ourselves into what comes next. I’m glad we get to launch with Howard back up to speed. I’m glad we had some time where we were forced to live slower. The enforced slowness taught us different ways to be. It gave us space to build a different structure around ourselves, one that values process equally with product. We have many projects we plan to work on in the next six months, but for today I want to pause and be glad for the past two years, and to be grateful that we now get to shift into something new.

A challenge I sometimes face is answering the question “What are you working on?” asked in a writing context. Many of my writer friends have a single book they are focused on, sometimes for years. My focus is always rolling and shifting, responsive to dozens of things that are not easily visible to people who are not privy to our behind-the-scenes business choices nor our private family needs. At the beginning of this year I had three months in a row where most of the other things had quieted and I was able to focus on professional expansion for myself on both teaching and writing fronts. During the second three months writing and teaching went dormant while I managed Kickstarter fulfillment. The third three months look to also have heavy Kickstarter commitments in them. I’m going to try to do a better job balancing and giving space to Sandra Tayler: Teacher and Sandra Tayler: Writer, but we need the income running a Kickstarter will bring to us. This means that Kickstarter administration gets to take over my brain for a while.

What am I working on? Well, that depends on how you define “working on.” Do you mean which things am I going to spend time and creative energy on today? This week? Or do you mean what projects do I have pending that I plan to return to? How do I describe projects which are paused for months or years, not because they’re not important, but because in the ever-jostling evaluation of how I should spend my time today keeps pushing them off the schedule? What about the dream projects which I don’t even have the chance to pick up because of all the other things? And how do I explain that no, really, my life has calmed down quite a lot since before the pandemic?

Explaining my job becomes even more complex when I’m talking to a person who doesn’t even have the framework to understand a variable income creative career. I end up having to pare things down, tell only a piece of what is going on. Whichever piece will fit neatly inside the conversation I’m having without having to expand the conversation. It really isn’t polite to hold up a grocery line to explain to the clerk that my plans for the afternoon involve printing postage and shipping out 100 packages that I need to send to Kickstarter backers. The clerk is making small talk, I give small answers in response.

My life feels so normal to me with all of its shifting schedules and moving furniture around to create space for projects. It is only when I try to explain a piece of it to someone else that I remember most people have a predictable paycheck and a daily schedule that is set by other people. I sometimes envy that regularity and other times I am very glad to have my flexibility.

I’m still mid shipping. I have hopes that by the end of next week I will have all of the packages in the mail. At that point I can take a deep breath and decide what is next. I’ve also decided that next week is not allowed to have any appointments in it. This week I’ve spent every minute running from thing to thing to thing. I want more space next week. Unfortunately appointments are already accumulating in the week after next, but they won’t be too much if I can finish the shipping next week. This next week will also feature some behind-the-scenes decision making that will determine the shape of my July and August projects.

I’m tired. I wake up tired, which tells me that I’m depleting reserves and need to schedule some slower time in the near future. I did have a bit of serendipity yesterday. The packing paper delivery was delayed by a day which meant I couldn’t do shipping yesterday. Instead I knocked out a bunch of other tasks and errands. Hopefully the packing paper will arrive before today’s scheduled shipping. Otherwise the shipping gets pushed off onto Saturday instead. Or Monday.

But in between all the shipping and errands and appointments. Life is good. I can tell that some of this busy-ness will subside soon and I’m looking forward to that.

For the past three weeks I’ve been focused on sending packages of books to Kickstarter backers. This effort coincided with lots of the social / community events which were pandemic canceled now being post-vaccination rescheduled. It is all good, but it has also been taking up so much of my brain that time to process and write has been in short supply. Today was spent giving energy and rides to people I love and who I want to see succeed. Now the day still has hours in it, but I’ve used up most of my brain power allotment. So here is a list of things I’d like to write about thoughtfully and at length:

Being surprised to not have more emotions about going back to places like church or seeing people in person for the first time in more than a year. Wondering if that is an indicator of my own increased emotional health, or just the natural result of my introverted nature.

The ways my kids have grown up and stepped up to take assistant roles in the shipping process. They’re problem solving rather than waiting for direction which is not who they were when we last shipped books two years ago.

Finding value in developing accountability systems like a weekly grocery shopping date with my married daughter that gives us a regular social hangout while also accomplishing a necessary life task.

The development of video and livestreaming as a part of our lives that is likely to continue for a long time to come.

The frustration of wanting to be part of digitally including more people in an organization (church) but being blocked from doing so by someone who can’t see why I would even want to do that. I’m not giving up at one blockage, but some brain is going into problem solving this.

Noticing that despite not having big emotions about returning to pre-pandemic activities and relationships, I am definitely seeing and moving through these communities differently. The work I’ve put into learning about advocacy for the marginalized has me noticing who isn’t in the room and thinking about why.

The specific work I’m putting into community building and individual mentoring which is being very emotionally rewarding for me, but which I can’t talk about in too much detail because the stories aren’t mine to tell.

Being happy to see the blue jays in our yard, but also recognizing that they are bully birds who drive away other birds and prevent my old lady kitty from sitting outside enjoying the sunshine. Then pondering how similar dynamics might play out in human situations.

Ignoring the news and much of social media because I have no energy to spend on advocacy or relationship building beyond the community and people right in front of me. I’ll get back to having a wider focus later.

I have a newsletter to write this week. I hope I can find enough focus to say something more coherent than this list.