Uncategorized

Testing Again

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.

First Week of October

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.

At the End of the Trip

10/1/2018
When I got to the hotel room, after the long winding lines to debark the ship, after the last hugs to friends, after the week of beautiful sights and new thoughts to think, after all that, I crawled into the hotel bed for a nap. While adjusting the covers, they flipped over my head and I realized how comforting it was to be completely enclosed in a soft, dark cave. So I slept. Cocooning to recover from massive over stimulation of cruise/conference week.

I keep cocooning every time I lay down. I’ll lay there and flashes of memory come and go. Sometimes they are linked to a task I should probably do in the days to come: a person I should reach out to, a request to fulfill, a thought for improving next year. Other times the flash comes with a stab of adrenaline as for a moment I remember a moment that suddenly feels like I made a grievous error in something I said or did. I do my best to let those anxieties pass through me and not dwell on them. Most of them are my brain lying to me. The thoughts and memories are fleeting, they vanish unless I work to retain them. Even when I do work, my odds are poor unless I immediately write them down.

It does not help that I discovered that I had somehow scheduled my ride to the airport for tomorrow’s flight so that they planned to pick me up in July of 2019. Now I’m triple checking everything to make sure I actually get to go home tomorrow.

Yet. My head is full of images that are beautiful, faces whose existence makes me happy. I remember sitting to the side of the R Bar on board the ship and watching as 30-40 writers mixed and mingled, laughing and talking together. That was the best part, with our efforts to build the conference we worked to build a space where community could form but it depended on others to fill up that space and connect with each other. And the attendees did. They flowed into the space, they reached out to each other. They solved each other’s problems. They made friends. They formed sub groups. They took a raw framework of schedule and classes, then turned it into something beautiful and lasting.

10/2/2018
The travel day, filled with brief periods of activity and long periods of waiting for either departure or arrival. Once at home, the beginning of an orientation process.

Tweet: I have succeeded at task: make suitcase empty. Now contents are strewn across every flat surface in house and I’m out of brain for remembering where things belong. It is possible I didn’t fully think this plan through.

10/3/2018
Tweet: I’m trying to remember how to Normal Schedule, but I keep accidentally napping instead. #wxr18 #recoveryday

10/4/2018
First day I feel like I’m close to my regular capacity for thought, decision making and planning. I finally catch up on shipping, accounting, and email.

10/5/2018
Morning, the teens are off to school with instructions to acquire and make up the work that they let slide while I was gone for two weeks. I stood over my fifteen year old and talked to him about the work he’s been avoiding, saying the words “remember how unpleasant this scolding is, so the next time you want to avoid school work, avoid being scolded instead.” I’m trying to teach him to herd and harness his natural-born avoidance as an important life skill.

The house is quiet. I have a task list, and a general sense of urgency for getting things done. We need to enter the next release cycle. It is time to launch another Kickstarter with all the work that entails. Working for ourselves, we can theoretically set our own deadlines, but the fact of the matter is that accounting dictates the deadlines. We have to launch a release before we run out of money to pay bills. It is time for a release, particularly when our two vehicles have both needed repairs in excess of a thousand dollars this past month.

I close my eyes and I can still visualize the view of ocean from my balcony. I remember the hot humid air. The further I get from the cruise, the harder it will be to recall these things. Day by day I move further from the experiences I had, until some point next year when I stop measuring departure and start measuring approach to the next one. That next one is already scheduled. People on the ship were able to re-book on site. Registration will be open sometime in the next few weeks. I get to have, not this trip, but another one like it.

Until then, I seek to catch elements of purpose and incorporate them into my daily patterns. I use the internet to thread connections, social media to create contact, attempting to maintain a virtual proximity to the new acquaintances and the familiar ones.

I want to linger, to stay with the memories, write up all the thoughts, but already they begin to slip away from me. In their place, I think of home schooling assignments, finalization of book files, and a myriad of home maintenance tasks. I have to let go and move forward. I have to fully immerse myself in the portions of my life that make up the vast majority of my year. And I need to put in the work to make sure that this “vast majority” is as joyful, peaceful, and productive as I can make it be.

Adapting to High School

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.

Ready for Routine

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.

The State of Things and Cats

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.

Quick Thought About Today and Dreams

In preparation for my presentations at GenCon, I’ve been reading materials about breaking creative blocks and organizing a creative life. A thought I keep encountering is that my days should match my dreams. Any future with my words published begins with a today where I wrote those words. Any future where I am healthier begins with a today when I took time to tend to my health. I won’t have the life or dreams that I want unless I am willing to sacrifice pieces of today’s time and comfort in service of those dreams. The hard part is that every thing I want to do requires me to give up some other thing that I also want to do. Even worse, many of the things which carry me closer to my dreams require me to give up something that is comfortable/happy in order to do something that is uncomfortable/difficult. However if I just do a few things every day, over time they become easier to do, less uncomfortable, and I begin to see progress.

Switching Gears

I shipped out the last of the RAM books this morning. That concludes a Kickstarter that began last October. I was also notified that the big shipment of shirts will arrive on Friday. Once that arrives and is shipped out, I will have completed the second Kickstarter. It is possible that by the time I leave for GenCon I will have zero pending Kickstarters. Even if we pull of an amazing scramble to get the next two Schlock books ready, I’m not likely to launch that Kickstarter until I get back from GenCon.

Right now our business plan and personal finances have us going from Kickstarter to Kickstarter. The landscape of ways that audience, internet, and software tools interact means that we have to constantly be evaluating what combinations are best to supply stories to our audience while also being able to pay our bills. One of the next experiments on the list is to try out Print on Demand products like shirts. Because I am never again planning to do a shirt based Kickstarter. The logistics on this one have been convoluted at every step. In theory POD products give customers more choices and me less inventory to manage. It is a worthwhile experiment.

Through all the business experimentation and shifting, both Howard and I are constantly aware that pretty much all of our income is based in Schlock Mercenary. We’d like to have other income sources, other books, other worlds. Unfortunately it is sometimes difficult for me to shake free from all of the administrative work so that I can focus on the creative work necessary to make other income sources happen.

When I was young and trying to picture my adult life, Small Business Owner was nowhere on the list. I did not know that to be an author also requires me to run a small business.

GenCon is looming large in my attention. I only have three weeks until departure. Most of the organizational work is done, but the writer’s symposium schedulers expressed an enormous amount of faith in me. I pitched five presentations expecting them to pick two or maybe three. They put all five on the schedule. I’m excited about this, but I have to make sure that I am up to speed on all of the presentations. I need to do this well, and that means brushing up in advance and making sure I have the latest available information.

But first I need to get past this week, which has a cluster of appointments for family related things.

Thought Experiment

If I were not worried about money, how would I spend today? It is a thought experiment. It isn’t the question of unlimited money and how that would transform my life, but just one of current needs met. If I could maintain my status quo, bills paid, with no additional effort, what then? The exercise is designed to help me see my priorities. Which work would I step away from because it is motivated by the need for money? Which work would I lean into because it is work I truly want to do? My answers change depending on the day. For today, I would spend the day more like I do when I’m on a writing retreat. I would go for walks in pretty places. I would read. I would think thoughts. And I would write. Other days I discover more of a desire to organize and improve my spaces.

With the thought experiment complete, I now need to figure out how to shoehorn into my day some of the things I would do if my day were unconstrained.

Linkfest 2018

Sometimes I read an online article and I want to keep track of it for some reason. I might want to write a blog post. I might be planning to send the link to someone else, but now isn’t the right moment. It might be any one of a dozen things. What I tend to do in a case like this is paste the link into an email draft then close it. I was doing some digital housecleaning and noticed that my drafts folder had topped 50. Keeping links in email drafts is a sloppy way to store them. So instead I’m going to put all of them into a blog post with an easily searchable title. This is something of an experiment to see if this works as a long term link storage mechanism. So here are things I wanted to keep track of in the past several years, roughly sorted by category.

Business links
An etsy guide on writing a GDPR qualifying privacy policy.
A checklist for making sure your business is GDPR compliant.
A guide to getting started setting up a Shopify Point of Sale.
A list of crowdfunding options that can be linked to a website.
A detailed set of instructions on how to correct identity theft and credit problems. This was very thorough and explained not just what to do, but why doing these things was for your benefit.

Things about Mental health or parenting
An article saying that the increase in teen depression is probably caused by screen use, which I want to site in an eventual blog post talking about how the picture is far more complex both societally and personally than “screens are to blame, take them away.”
A concrete guide for parents who want sensible (not fear-driven) ways to guide their children’s tech use. This is written by a woman who has spent her career studying the interactions between tech and teens. She knows her subject.
An examination of race and emotional labor in the show Mudbound. Gave me some new thoughts to think.
Looking into the future for a child with autism. Key quote: “Your future should look like the best parts of your present.”
A powerful piece of writing on the interior of grief. Quote that particularly struck me, “There are some things in life that can never be fixed. They can only be carried.”
Thoughts from Jay Lake on grief. Key powerful thought: ”
It’s so damned hard, being careful of my own emotions and others. The people around me don’t feel free to express their negative thoughts for fear of upsetting me. I don’t feel free to express my negative thoughts for fear of upsetting my loved ones, family and friends. We all dance this strange dance of toxic consideration like elephants on ice, slipping and occasionally crashing.”

Things with religious content
An article for Mormons talking about how maybe we shouldn’t claim sole ownership of all truth. Which I’ve saved as a potentally useful link for helping some expand how they think about the religion we share.
A blog post about making religion more than a checklist of things to do. We shouldn’t be just aiming for checkpoints without examining why.
An article on making a prayer book. I’ve since discovered that writing prayers is a useful mechanism for me to focus my devotional thoughts.

Writer resources
A twitter thread with links to articles about the weird stuff that birds do. Potentially useful for worldbuilding.
The way that schizophrenics experience the voices in their heads depends on the culture they were raised in.
An article on why idle time is crucial to creativity. Grabbed this one to show to my son who lives most of his life with a screen in his field of vision.

Social or political topics

A woman examines her reactions to MeToo accusations, specifically where her own desire to minimize comes from. This is a fascinating glimpse into psychology and why we sometimes get defensive about things.
A woman examines the idea of redemption in the era of MeToo.
Words from Mike Rowe on following dreams. “Don’t follow your passion, but always bring it with you.” I thought I’d disagree, but discovered that I don’t.
A list of specific things to do to fight hate. This is from the Southern Poverty Law Center and helps deconstruct why some of our first instincts to fight back against hate speech are ineffective at best and harmful at worst. They instead give concrete, useful ways to redirect energy from empty confrontation into useful action.
A woman of color discusses cultural appropriation vs creative synthesis.
A woman who is tracking the abnormal things in the current US administration. This one is from week 10. I’ve been meaning to go check and see if she’s still making lists more than a year later.
An article on the problem of liberal bias in science.
You can’t actually boil a frog by heating it slowly.

The word Howard and I created to describe how fun it is to smoosh words together in the German language. wortrauchenvergnugen, literally Word smushing pleasure.