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One of the things I have been doing in the past couple of weeks is to occasionally pause and note how much better this December feels than last December did. Last December I was in a swirl of familial transition, very prone to getting pulled off balance, and not at all sure what the next steps should be. This year, almost none of that. Or rather, all of it to lesser degrees because transition and uncertainty are givens for any living thing, but I am not falling into pits of fear and tears. I can credit much of it to the fact that all four of my kids have found their own ways to balance. And I learned how to not be right next to them the moment they wobbled so that they had a chance to learn how to balance without leaning on me.

My goal for this year as I stated in this post was to build a life with less fear in it, to learn how to live, breathe, be less afraid. As I move through this December I can finally see some of that work coming to fruition. I still have more work to do. I just finished reading Brene Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection and I’m embarking on reading The Gaslight Effect by Robin Stern which already has me rethinking my instinctive reactions in certain social situations. The work of not being afraid will continue, but in 2019 I will take it a step further. I will learn to be courageous.

If failing to write words is fear, then it is courage to write the words anyway and allow them to be read. And judged. Not knowing if the words will be inspiring or boring, useful or disappointing. It is this kind of courage I need to cultivate in the next year of my life. Quiet courage that does the work without looking like courage at all.

This is a snippet from a newsletter I sent out a few weeks ago. It was the first newsletter I’ve sent in years. I chose to format most of it like a letter from a friend rather than an Author Update. My effort was answered within twelve hours by an email from my newsletter service that I had a very high unsubscribe rate. So I’ll reconfigure and take steps to filter so that only the people who want that sort of newsy letter actually get it. This is the quiet courage I want to cultivate. The kind that gets negative feedback on a creative effort then gets up and tries again.

The need for this sort of courage became obvious to me when (in November) I was hit with a series of blows to my professional confidence. No one who delivered those hits intended me harm nor did they realize they’d caused it. Which was actually part of the harm. I was insignificant enough that they didn’t even realize they’d hit me. I had to step back and recognize that the only reason that these events registered as harm at all was because I was looking to external sources for validation on my creative efforts. Such an easy trap to fall into.

I had to decide whether to crawl into a hole and hide until it didn’t hurt anymore, or to get up and keep moving trusting that eventually it wouldn’t hurt anymore. I suspect that the amount of time it hurt would have been the same no matter which path I picked. Healing takes the time it takes, and we can rarely speed it up, though we can definitely slow it down. I did some hiding and some moving. And I rearranged my days a bit, using the holiday season as a reason to shed some tasks that I had been holding over my own head.

All of which is how I came to be a few days before Christmas and thinking the sorts of thoughts I usually think about between Christmas and the new year. I don’t mind the thoughts coming early. It is nice that I’ve been able to create enough space for them to exist. Yet another way that this December is so much better than last year.

Sometimes we review beloved entertainment from our childhoods and cringe at the terribleness of it. Other times old entertainment hits the sweet spot of being cheesily bad without being cringe worthy. Tonight I took over our big TV to watch the 1981 version of Clash of the Titans. I giggled all the way through, part out of nostalgia and part because of the ridiculousness of what was on the screen. It helps that we recently watched Mystery Science Theater 3000 so I was primed to riff on old movies. This meant I could watch a scene, remember how I felt about it as a kid, see how I felt about it now, and imagine what sort of jokes would liven the scene up even more. Like the moment where soldiers very seriously announce that they’ve looked everywhere, they rode all the way around the lake, while the “lake” is in the foreground of the shot very obviously being a small pond. Or when the stygian witches make a big deal about how Perseus’s red cloak is now imbued with magic… only he’s never worn a red cloak at any point in the movie this far. It makes its first appearance two scenes later.

I imprinted on this movie a bit when I was 10 and 11. It was the source material for games of pretend at recess. When it came on TV, my family recorded it on video cassette, so I was able to re-watch it. It turns out I still have most of the lines memorized, not to the point that I could recite them, but I always knew what would be said next with what inflection and tone of voice.

No one watched it with me. Howard is five years older than I am. This means that the movie showed up when he was past the developmental sweet spot. Or something. His memory of the film is being disappointed in it. So he didn’t really want to sit through the whole thing, but he wandered past occasionally and I’d fill him in on whatever ridiculous thing was on the screen. I was pleased to be able to note that this movie had 10 speaking parts for women and 8 for men, which surprised me to notice and may explain some of why I found it compelling. The women-as-goddesses matched the men-as-gods in petty squabbling, as is appropriate for Greek gods. The heroine is a damsel-in-distress some, but there are also moments when she took control. And her most damsel-in-distress moment is one that she deliberately walks into in a noble attempt to save her people from destruction. I can see why I liked her and wanted to be like her. I can also see the unconscious societal biases that are stamped all over the film: women are valued for beauty, love at first sight, ugly = evil. I absorbed all of that too. As we all do from entertainment we love, particularly at early ages. There were some things I had to unlearn later. Also a common life experience.

Analysis aside, I’m just glad that I got to spend this evening being happy while watching a compelling munged-together hodge podge of story lifted from Greek myth and presented with only the vaguest attempts at any sort of historical accuracy.

The young dancers moved awkwardly on the stage, their motions tentative and lacking in confidence. Unlike elementary school performances where the dancers move freely and joyfully whether or not they’re in time with the beat, these teenagers were the embodiment of self consciousness. I could see it in every motion. The arm which should extend out two more inches to really hit the mark. The hip motion which ought to move further from center of balance. The foot that needs to plant more firmly. The beginning dancers on the stage moved cautiously, more focused on matching motions to beats than on making the motions flow. It was a stark contrast to other numbers with more experienced dancers. Yet they were beautiful. All of them. The confident and self-conscious alike. They had the courage to get on the stage and show what they had learned, whether or not it was perfect. My favorites were the ones who smiled as they performed, they felt the joy of motion and music, which was far more compelling than perfection of steps.

As I watched this high school dance performance I considered what happens to children that moves us from the unselfconsciousness of childhood and into teenage years where our every action and word becomes constrained inside a box of “what will people think.” Even those teens who deliberately disrupt the norms are still reacting to the norm by defining themselves as outside of it. Then some of us, but not all, manage to break free and be who we are without reference to others, just as some of the dancers on the stage had learned to extend to the very edges of their bodies and even to project themselves so that they seemed larger than their forms could contain. For a dancer the only way to achieve this confidence of motion is practice. They must learn their bodies, their center, their edges. They must train mind and body to work in harmony. So it seems that the way to achieve confidence of self is also practice.

How does one practice self? For a writer this question might be more familiarly framed as “what is my voice?” And the same answer applies to both voice and self. You find voice by writing many things, and self by attempting many things. Over time you discover which of these things feel natural to you and which don’t. “Attempting many things” does not mean an endless round of activities. Some people do find themselves in sky diving, hiking, running, dancing, but finding our self is both smaller and larger than the activities we do. It is imitating a friends sense of humor or their accent, either consciously or unconsciously. It is wearing different styles of clothing. It is seeing how various interactions make us feel. In hundreds of tiny ways we experiment with self daily. Practicing, learning, getting better at it. And hopefully we reach a time in our lives where we have a solid sense of who we are. Then we are able to live to the edge of our skin and make our choices confidence of motion.

But if we are not there yet, we must remember that there is also beauty and courage in the beginning dancer. The one who is willing to get on stage without being perfect. The one who will be a better dancer tomorrow because they experience the stage today. Be kind to your self whatever stage you are at, because you’re beautiful.

Design Work
Gather art for Retrospective Sketchbook, then do preliminary layout, then write commentary, then rearrange the layout because I’ve finally figured out how the book actually needs to go, then go find additional art to fill gaps, then write more commentary, then hire a book designer to make the whole thing shiny.
Preliminary layout work for the next Schlock Mercenary book Big Dumb Objects.
Layout and write additional material for Escape from the Friggen Jungle
Create a marketing page to go on the back of Planet Mercenary packages.
Help design five challenge coins
Prepare PDF files for Broken Wind and Delegates & Delegation

Warehouse and Shipping
Prepare store for holiday sales
Inventory every item in the warehouse for taxes
Package up 100-300 Planet Mercenary games for release in retail stores
Order in supplies for holiday shipping
Do the holiday shipping.
Go through dead mail pile and attempt to contact customers one more time
Put scratch and dent books into store
Set up the Backerkit fulfillment for the latest Kickstarter

Administrivia
Once I have counts, place orders for coins
Once I have Kickstarter funds, pay down the credit card used for book printing.
Keep the calendar up to date, scheduling events in 2019 and 2020
Ongoing accounting
Ongoing customer support

Household
Ongoing homeschool preparation and follow-up
Managing some upcoming medical appointments
Help my kid apply to some colleges
Ongoing laundry and housecleaning tasks
Rake all the leaves (buy a composter?)
Harvest walnuts
Research cupboards, how to design, how to order (The next step in our long, slow kitchen remodel.)
Christmas is coming with all the planning that entails.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten something that should go on these lists.

The program my son is attending has requested additional testing. I was surprised by my strong negative reaction to this request. Particularly since at times in the past testing was exceedingly useful to figure out how to proceed. We’re going to do the testing, and jump through any other required hoops, because we need things that are best available through this program. However I’ve spent the last week sorting feelings and trying to figure out why I’m feeling angry and resentful about a fairly reasonable request for further information.

Today I got into my files to find reports of prior testing done for this son. The file is thick. This kid has been tested with pretty much every academic, psychological, or intellectual instrument that exists, starting at age 2. Including, I discovered, the exact test that his current program is requesting. So now I need to go have another conversation with the staff to decide whether they want to accept test results that are three years old or if they want updated results. I bet they’ll want updated results.

I think I’ve lost faith in the usefulness of further testing. The tests were incredibly valuable in prior years, but repeats won’t add useful information. Also, I can’t escape the feeling that “We’d like to run a test” directly translates into “We don’t know how to help.” Which is a discouraging thing to hear from people who are supposed to be experts. It turns out that even in a program specifically designed for societal outliers, my son is an outlier. Which puts me back in the space of negotiating and trying to forge a way forward off the beaten path.

I hadn’t intended to participate in Inktober. I generally don’t commit to anything link Inktober or NaNoWriMo because I’m already juggling enough things every single day that adding an additional daily pressure just hasn’t appealed. I’ve figured that if I want my life to be different, I should permanently readjust my schedule to make up for the thing I lack rather than doing a one month push that I drop at month’s end. I see the value in stretching oneself for a month, but haven’t felt like the timing or practice coincided with my needs.

So I am surprised to discover that I’ve now done four Inktober drawings and posted them on my Instagram. The first I meant as an encouragement to people who might feel intimidated that their art isn’t good enough to participate. The other three each expressed something that was in my head that day. It pleased me to combine word and image to capture an idea.

I don’t know that I’ll continue daily Inktober. Tomorrow’s prompt is “cruel” and I have no desire to add cruelty to the world. Perhaps I’ll jump to a prompt from a prior year. Perhaps I’ll let it go and only participate in Inktober as the prompts match my thoughts for the day.

We’re in book-push week where the last pieces are falling into place so that we have books ready for print. This time there are two simultaneously. My week is a mix of regular work, still trying to unload the last of the t-shirts, final book prep, beginning Kickstarter set up, and end-of-term scramble to make sure kids pass all their classes. Only the end-of-term is less of a scramble than it has been in years. For the first time I’m saying “Hey maybe we should bring this grade up a little since we have time” instead of “You need to hurry and finish this list so you don’t fail this class.” Perhaps we’ve finally found the right balance of classes, or perhaps they’ve just matured enough to step up. Either way, I’ll take it with gratitude.

This week was further made interesting by a four and a half hour power outage which completely disrupted Monday evening plans. During the outage I had time and silence enough to contemplate power and the loss of it, also habit and convenience. All of these thoughts came in relation to the national politics of my country which feel like an angry tangled mess, and also the recent dire reports about climate change. In both cases I need to make my life less convenient in order to make the world a better place for everyone.

I have to remember that the second day of a new schedule is the hardest. Since my kids are on an A/B schedule, that means we get two second days during the first week. It means the first week of school feels really long and exhausting. By the beginning of the second week, things have begun to settle. We’ve identified which classes won’t work and have shaken scheduled changes out of the appropriate school personnel. We also had just enough anxiety incidents to remind the school admin that my kids are on the far edge of the “normal teen anxiety” bell curve. And I’ve just about managed to calm the self-doubting thoughts in my head which inform me of all the thoughts that I’m sure other people must be thinking about my parenting choices.

This week will feature two 504 meetings where I sit in a room with my teenager, some of their teachers, and a couple of school administrators. We’ll talk about my kids’ diagnoses and what they need in order to be able to succeed in school. For my daughter the meeting is pro forma. She’s been in the school two years and doesn’t really need anything different than she’s already got. My son is a different story. He carries some coping strategies from junior high that may not fly in high school classrooms. It is important for him to sit in a room with his teachers and negotiate what coping strategies will work for everyone.

I don’t know if this is universally true, but high school is harder to navigate and adapt for a special needs kid that junior high. It isn’t that the staff don’t want to help. They do. They are every bit as kind and willing (or the opposite) as the staff in junior high. There seems to be something systemic, a structural expectation that these teenagers need to be managing themselves. Also I think the high school staff gets a bit jaded from dealing with almost-adults who know enough to game the system. This means one of the staff jobs is to not let the teenagers get away with stuff. There is also a structural expectation that parents should back off. If I maintain a static level of intervention across junior high and high school, I will be seen as helpful by junior high staff and as helicopter parenting by the high school staff.

Until they’ve had one of my kids melt down in their class and they realize that what looked like hovering was me doing the bare minimum I could do while still preventing meltdown.

An argument can be made for not preventing the meltdowns. That it is by going through stress that kids learn to manage stress. I think about this every time I step in to resolve an issue instead of stepping back to let them figure it out. I’m trying to be better about stepping back. It is a learning process for us all. And I suppose it is an argument in favor of the structural expectations of high school. Merely by being more difficult to navigate, they force us to change how we handle the anxieties. We have to grow. And growth is the point of school.

Social media shows pictures of my friends at Worldcon. Howard is there too, along with my oldest daughter. They are being creative professionals, visiting with friends, making connections. It has been years since I’ve been to Worldcon, the last one I attended was Reno in 2011. That is seven years and ages ago. Some of those years I’ve been very sad about missing it, but Worldcon almost always lands right when my kids are beginning school. In the past seven years I’ve been anxious enough about the onset of school that I decide to stay home. The same was true this year. I am at home while people I’d love to see are at Worldcon.

This year I am not sad. I’ve been enjoying seeing the snippets shown to me by social media, but I’ve been quite happy to be here in my house finishing projects and providing stability for a pair of teenagers who begin high school tomorrow morning. One will be a senior, with all the extra importance that lends to everything. For the other, this is his first year in the big building.

I think the reason I am not sad is that I am ready for some quiet. I’ve been functioning with endless thinky tasks for months now. I have similar lists of tasks ahead of me. Yet by staying home I’m able to complete things. A task that is complete no longer takes space in my brain. I’m taking this week at home to clear away the clutter. I’m cleaning house both physically and mentally. So that this week as we settle into the school schedule, I will also have a new rhythm for work. I’m ready to shift into school mode.

Life is not slow in the weeks before GenCon. It is also not slow when I’m in the middle of Kickstarter fulfillment. Particularly not when the first batch of shirts arrives incorrect and my contact at the manufacturer seems to have a magical ability to answer questions I didn’t ask and not quite answer questions that I did. It is like every communication is a near miss. I’d already decided never to do another t-shirt related kickstarter, I’ve also decided not to work with this particular company again. Which is sad because when we used them a few years ago, they were great. However, as of Saturday I have all of the items I ordered and 5/6th of them are correct. At least I think they are. Monday’s job is to carefully count quantities of colors and sizes.

In between dealing with shirts, I spent most of my week scrambling to put together promotional materials for GenCon. The last several years at the booth we’ve said things like “I wish we had Schlock URL cards” or “It would be really good to have a single sheet about Planet Mercenary that people could look at.” It is a lost opportunity to spend so much time, effort, and money to run a booth and then not have these basic marketing tools. This year we will have them. finally. They’re done and I just have to go get them printed up on Monday.

On the home front, one of my kids has finally decided to take their medicine (literally,) and their world has gotten measurably better. Which is what medicine is supposed to do. I’m still in the emotional place where I’d really like for the solution to be that simple, but I’m not quite believing that it is.

It’s also been about a month since we added a third cat to our household. His name is Milo and he’s a littermate of Callie, who we adopted last February. Last February the people who owned both of them planned to keep Milo as an emotional support animal. But this summer they realized that the ways their lives are changing, Milo would be happier if he could be reunited with his sister. He came to us on July 3rd. We’ve spend the requisite few weeks acclimatizing all the cats to each other. Callie and Milo hissed and growled at first, but now they get along great.

It is interesting to watch how the differing personalities of the cats fit different emotional needs in our household. Milo is the one who is content to be held and snuggled. Callie continues to be charming and a creature of instinct. Kikaa is less grouchy about the intrusion of other cats now that the younger ones pounce on each other instead of attempting to pounce on her.

All is going well, and I have a busy week and a half ahead of me before I depart for GenCon.