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My day started out well, but around noon I started to feel muddled and unfocused. I had trouble concentrating and I couldn’t find my notebook. Several years back I adopted a one notebook approach to journaling. Any type of notes I need to write down all go into the same book. So scribbled notes about merchandise for Schlock mystery boxes sit right across from an extended journal entry where I’m sorting my brain. It is a system that has worked fairly well for me. Of course there is one significant drawback, as evidenced when I couldn’t find the book today. I’ve never truly lost one of my notebooks before. I might be uncertain where exactly I placed it, but I can usually lay my hands on it in five minutes or less. My brain knows the book is important and does a good job of indexing when and where I set it down. Today I couldn’t find it. I did my usual finding steps, and it didn’t turn up. I even drove over to the warehouse, but it wasn’t there either. I had a clear memory of using it on the day I took my daughter back to school, but not since then. I’d forgotten that I spent a portion of Tuesday sitting with Howard in his office and apparently left the notebook there.

Even with notebook in hand, I still felt a bit muddled so I went and took a shower. That was when I realized why. My head was full of a dozen sorting and organization projects. Trying to hold all of them and prioritize them and their steps was breaking my brain. So I flipped open my (thankfully located) notebook and began to write. Two pages of closely written notes later, I feel much more clear. The amount of organizing I’ve outlined is enough for several months. But now that it is all on the page, I can see which projects need to come before other projects. Hopefully that will be enough to let me get started. Unfortunately many of them are out in my unheated garage, and it is December. But I need to get at least some of them done because I need to re-locate the Christmas decoration storage to the garage instead of taking up space in my daughter’s closet.

It isn’t convenient that my brain picked now to mentally reorganize all of the things. We’ve just hit the big shipping season. As people are purchasing for the holidays I end up shipping out 10-20 packages per day. I’m grateful for every package I send out. They pay for January and February bills. Sending them takes time. I also have layout and design work for publishing projects. Those things have to come first, no matter how much my brain wants to just dive into organizing all the things. I may be able to sneak in both, but it means I need to be motivated and get moving first thing Monday morning. And I need to not allow home school to sap all of my project energy. While simultaneously not allowing home school to slump and not get done. It’s going to be a busy week.

I had a women’s lunch today with extended family. It was hosted by the woman who is the closest thing I have to a mother-in-law. She’s the woman who all but adopted Howard’s younger brothers after their mother died. And while she was adopting people she extended that adoption to Howard even though he was already in college. At least once per year she hosts this lunch to gather daughters and daughters-in-law so we can sit around a table and catch up. I love these lunches. I love these women. They’re so good, and work so hard serving their families and communities. We went round the table giving a summary of how all our kids are doing and a status report on our lives. There is no pressure or competition to make our kids sound good. In fact, we’re just as likely to spend time talking about the struggle we’re having with a particular child mixed in with loving descriptions of why that child is amazing (and driving us crazy).

Most of the women are stay-at-home mothers with husbands who earn the household income. I might be the only exception to that. In other years I’ve included information about my work in my status report. This year it was nice to be in a space where I could set work aside and just talk about my kids in detail to people who were actually interested in all those details. I’d had a similar realization talking to a friend only a day earlier. My brain is filled up with minutia about my children and most of my conversations aren’t appropriate venues for airing that minutia. It was incredibly healing both yesterday and today to share a small detail and to have the listeners react in a way that shows they know exactly what that small detail means to me in my life. They rejoice for my kids accomplishments and grieve for their struggles because they know and love my kids. Professional spaces don’t give me that validation, not about parenting. And parenting spaces don’t comprehend how to validate my professional pursuits.

After the lunch was over, I thought about all the things we shared across the table. There were so many similarities between our children and their struggles. Possible solutions were offered and ideas were exchanged. I realized that what I’d attended was a small-scale professional conference between women who take their parenting seriously. Networking between parents is every bit as critical as networking between professionals working in the same field. Sometimes the village necessary to help raise our children is right around us, other times we have to seek it out and work to maintain it. Naturally this lunch was also a meeting of family, women who have known each other for decades. We have watched each other grow up, get married, manage toddlers, and now begin launching oldest kids into adulthood. These are my sisters though I have no genetic relation to any of them. I’m so grateful to my friend, the adopted sort-of-mother-in-law who knows it is important to schedule these annual lunches.

Functionally I have three teenagers in my house. One is twenty years old and has a common autistic pattern of asynchronous development, which means chronologically he’s twenty, but in many social and emotional ways he’s in his mid teens. He’s the one I’ll be launching into a residential program in January, which has the similar life weight as heading off for college. We’re riding the push-pull emotional roller coaster of a child who wants more independence than he’s quite ready for and who doesn’t want to learn from his mom anymore. The other two are chronologically teens, but they struggle with some mental health issues which have pushed them into self awareness and communication skills that are beyond their years. They are often puzzled or frustrated by the behavior of “typical” teenagers. (I put typical in scare quotes, because it only exists statistically. No individual you examine will ever be completely typical.) I’m very grateful for the growing self awareness of my two youngest and I hope that the twenty year old is able to develop something similar using his neuro-atypical thought processes.

Parenting these three is a significant time commitment right now. Particularly since the various atypicalities have pushed us into a partial homeschooling arrangement. Their best learning paths require both on campus time and some classes done at home. I don’t have to create curriculum, but I do have to be the enforcer of schedule and the organizer of assignments. Lately I’ve been an exercise buddy for my son who is doing a PE class. Thirty minutes of walking every day for two weeks. The walking is good for me because I need more exercise. It is good to spend time with him just talking about all of the things. He’s good company. I can see all the ways these exercise requirements are forcing him to face some personal demons as well as get him up from his computer. The home school stuff is being really good, and is obviously the right educational pathway for us right now. But the mental effort I expend on it can be exhausting.

Parenting is tiring. This isn’t news. And I’ll definitely take the fatigue of assisting my child’s growth over the despairing weariness of watching my child getting smaller and more depressed. I guess I’m just pausing to acknowledge that I’m tired and that parenting is using up much of the creative space that opened up when Planet Mercenary stopped demanding full attention.

There is an ongoing conversation playing out online. It manifests in tweets, articles, arguments, massive headlines, and reports of charges filed. This conversation is about how our society will restructure the social rules about gender. It leads to some very real dismay from people who are now worried that they don’t understand the social rules in a place where they used to be comfortable.

The problem stems from gender based social rules. These gender based rules were a given for generations. There is one set of social rules for dealing with a woman and another for a man. We treat boy children different than girl children. Male coworkers have a different set of expectations than female coworkers. This is the reason that some people become acutely uncomfortable when they meet a transgender or non-binary person. They are not sure which set of social rules should apply, and often they respond to that discomfort with anger. They want to force the non-conforming person to fit into their binary expectations.

I’ve felt that discomfort myself, and it was only when I recognized the source of the discomfort that I was able to resolve it. I had to consolidate my categories. Instead of male person and female person, I now try to just have person. Instead of male colleague and female colleague, I try to just have colleague. There are a few situations where this doesn’t work, like the social arenas surrounding dating, love, and sex. Those areas will require more categories, not less, because gender and attraction are very relevant to the social outcomes that people hope for. And it can get extremely complicated when dating social interactions are mixed together inside a workplace, college, or other location that isn’t explicitly for romantic purposes. I haven’t had much practice with this multiplication of categories since I’m monogamously married and happy with my romantic situation. Since I’ve taken dating and romantic connection off the table, the gender of the person I’m dealing with should be irrelevant to the social interaction we are having. This is true for the vast majority of my interactions

I’m still sorting my thoughts on all of this. My opinions continue to evolve as I listen to people who are finally being heard more widely than they ever were before, and as I listen to those who are clinging to (and grieving for) a social structure that they understood and felt comfortable inside. It is a complicated conversation with many nuances and special circumstances. And it is a conversation that will never be complete because social norms are always up for discussion as generations change and as technology forces people to interact in ways they haven’t before. The internet is a huge disruptor of social order, but it isn’t the first and it won’t be the last.

For my part, I’m listening, trying to offer respect, getting it wrong, fixing my errors, and working to adapt.

Waiting for a train to go
or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or the rain to go
or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
or waiting around for a Yes or No
or waiting for their hair to grow…
…or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants
or a wig with curls, or Another chance
Everyone is just waiting.
–Dr. Seuss, Oh the Places You’ll Go!

I’ve posted this quote before. It always runs through my head when I realize that part of my brain is waiting for an event. Today I’m waiting for multiple things. The most prominent being the fact that I’m waiting for a shuttle to take me to the airport, where I will wait to get on a plane, then wait to get off a plane, then wait for a ride to get to my destination. Of course the shuttle isn’t due to arrive for three hours. Theoretically I could get a lot of work done in those hours, in practice it is difficult to get my brain to engage with the work because I know I’ll have to stop in order to leave. In part, writing this post is helping my creative brain warm up to the idea that we can do something useful with the next three hours instead of just making the time pass quickly by watching Netflix.

I’m waiting on a larger scale as well. It shows clearly in my paper journal where I allow myself to be repetitive with my thoughts and words. Lately there have been a lot of lists like this:
3 weeks to Thanksgiving
6 weeks until college girl is permanently home from college (graduation in Spring)
7.5 weeks until Christmas
8.5 weeks until 20yo starts his residential “Autism school for Adulting” program.

I’m counting down because the change in who lives at home will be a big shift in our household dynamics. I’m curious to see how it will play out. Also I’m very excited for both kids to be moving forward into the next phase of their lives. There is also an element of making myself accustomed to the idea that my second child will be leaving home. I’d resigned myself to a long, slow launch that I figured would take another five years or more. But he’s anxious to get out and build his own life, so this guided program lets him move out far earlier than he could do solo. It has been less than a month since he decided he wanted it, applied, and was accepted. I’m still re-calibrating.

And I’m struggling to not switch over into waiting mode. Waiting mode isn’t very creatively productive. Instead I remind myself that I’ve been waiting for this trip to a writing retreat for almost a year. I need to not spend the retreat focused on waiting for something else. And that starts by not spending the next 2.5 hours waiting for a shuttle.

1. Writing RPG text is as much about educating GMs about how to do their job as it is about rules. I think about this a lot as I’m writing instructions for Game Chiefs.

I have to remember that some of them are super expert and can make a good game out of any material, but they appreciate material that makes their job easy. Others of them have never run a game before they picked up Planet Mercenary. For them, we include educational components that might feel like obvious review for more experienced Game Chiefs. I suppose in this I’m heavily influenced by the first RPG book I ever worked on (Xtreme Dungeon Mastery by Tracy Hickman & Curtis Hickman). That entire book was about teaching people to be good game runners. So some of that philosophy spills into all the game text I write. Educating the GM (person who runs the game) is the most effective way to ensure that groups have fun while playing. Of course educating players helps too. I have to balance education with not bogging down text. Lots to consider as I’m writing.

2. In order to do right by the GC Secrets PDF I have to do more writing than I thought I would. It keeps expanding.

I’m adding words to help out those less experienced game runners and the less experienced players. I’m adding words to answer specific questions that people have asked, which helps fill in the gap between what is in the head of the game writers and what we actually put on the page in the printed book. I have to battle with myself over how much to add. Part of me wants to make sure that this is the very best and most comprehensive document that I can make it. Part of me really wants to get this document done. It is the last deliverable for the Planet Mercenary project. The last lingering piece of a giant set of tasks that has taken over my creative life for two years. I’ve loved it. I love the writing I’m doing on it right now, but I also want to have it done so that I can declare the Kickstarter officially complete. Then I can have a break of several months before I need to start thinking about what Planet Mercenary release we want to have prepared for next summer.

3. I really wanted to have GC Secrets completed before I leave for my writing retreat on Thursday. I wanted brain space for something fresh.

For the last eight months I’ve been looking ahead to this writer’s retreat as an oasis. It was a reward that I would get to after all the things were done. It is discouraging to realize that I didn’t get all the things done. So instead of having several weeks of clear brain with which I could decide what to write at the retreat, I have this lingering writing assignment that will have to be packed along with me.

4. Brain space for something fresh isn’t going to happen unless I create that space with a crowbar in between writing GC Secrets.

I’d thought about using the retreat to write the picture books that have been niggling at my brain. Maybe I’d write some essays. Maybe I’d pull out my years-neglected middle grade novel and see if there is still something there I feel excited to write or if the project died while gathering dust. I can still do some of these maybe, but instead of having glorious space, I will have to steal that space from writing that is long overdue.

5. Ack! In 2 days I’m leaving my house and going to a place where I don’t know all the people already. Cue social anxiety.

The anxiety has been percolating slowly all month. Early in the month I ordered some Fentiman’s Rose Lemonade so that I would have an interesting drink to share while others were sharing whiskeys and wines that I don’t drink. It was comforting to think I could contribute something to that social portion of the retreat. But the package got broken in transit, and the shipping company didn’t inform me of this until after it was already too late to re-ship. And now there is a weird portion of my brain that whispers why am I even going when I have nothing to offer. Apparently part of me believes that, unless I’m able to provide some tangible item or emotional service, others won’t want me around. Classic social anxiety. So I went out and bought gourmet chocolate that I can pack along in my suitcase. It isn’t the same, but it is something. (And yes I know that I was invited and my friends have expressed delight that I’m coming. I’ve been nothing but welcomed. Social anxiety makes noise anyway.)

6. Yay! In 2 days I can put down all my house and business responsibilities to just write. Maybe I’ll have brain space after all.

Up above I mentioned oasis. I am so very looking forward to escaping the constraints of my regular life. I want a chance to unwind and re-set so that when I come back a few days later I can be glad to pick up all my regular things. I love this life I’ve built, but even things we love get heavy if we never take a break from carrying them.

7. This week I read an article about how social media is a productivity killer, yet here I am tweeting about writing instead of writing.

I read this one: Why Idle Moments are so Crucial to Creativity
And this one: Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? Which I blogged about here: Teens, Screens, and Mental Health

Those articles, combined with all the evidence that social media and fake news have led to sweeping changes in the political landscape of multiple countries, has me being a lot more conscious about the time I spend online and what else I could be using that time for. Throw in a dose of Felicia Day’s You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost): specifically the chapters where she talks about losing two years of creative life to World of Warcraft. The point is driven home. Less internet = better balance of life and probably more creativity. Something for me to work on.

8. Back to the word mines.

Sort of. I wrote up this blog post, which is writing, but isn’t me working on GC Secrets which was the writing I ought to have been doing. Except maybe this is equally as important…and I’m going to stop the brain spin there. GC Secrets will get done, and this post was worth writing. No need to pile guilt into the thought-mess that already exists in my brain.

It feels like Friday even though today is Wednesday. This is primarily because Fall break begins tomorrow. It is also because today was the last day of the term, which meant Monday and Tuesday were spent with last minute scrambles to turn in work and not fail classes. But now we’re in the afternoon. All the assignments are turned in. Classes are complete. No one has to get up early tomorrow. So it feels like Friday.

In this drifty free-from-deadlines afternoon, I’m pondering how my kids are beginning to be self steering. College girl has known her life path for six years now, but the other three have been lost and floundering. They’ve been in that space where childhood is over and they desperately need a focus, something to motivate and provide identity, but they don’t know what it should be. As of this month all three younger kids have found a focus and a way forward. They each came to it in their own way and in their own time. Mostly without fanfare, just an “oh by the way mom, I want to be a ________.” For the two in school, the change is subtle, but profound. Their dreams depend on attending college, so all classes matter a bit more than they used to. This doesn’t make getting things done easy. The struggles are real, but it does mean they’re engaged with the struggle instead of trying to dodge it completely. They’re starting to steer, and that is wonderful.

Today is a one of those small triumphs that pass unnoticed. They succeeded at end-of-term push. They’ve kept up with their online classes. There is measurable progress. There is more to do. We have more terms ahead of us, more work to manage. But I can let today be calm and quietly triumphant.

I have lots of creative friends. They are mostly writers, but I also know artists, musicians, editors, jewelers, etc. Many times I hear my creative friends express the dream of being able to do their creative pursuit full time. There is an entire discussion to be had about whether that is the right choice for emotional reasons as well as financial, but that is not the discussion I want to focus on today. Particularly since the “right” answer depends heavily on individual circumstance. What I do want to provide is some information about the realities of living on a variable income, because when most of my friends say they want to do full time creative work, what they mean is that they want to freelance and be their own boss. Freelancing and owning your own small business rarely come with a regular pay check, particularly at first.

The concern that most people have and fret over is that their creative work will not bring in enough to pay the bills. This is the primary problem that people have to face when launching a full time creative career, but what most people don’t wrap their heads around is how a variable income requires different handling and provides challenges even when you are earning enough money. Looking at the particular challenges of a stable, but variable income is something that creative people should consider when deciding whether full time creative work is right for them.

1. You can’t treat a large lump payment as bonus money. Unless you are a freelancer with a long-term, steady assignment, most of your income will come in lumps. They might be small, regular lumps, or giant lumps at irregular intervals. Managing lump payments can be a hard adjustment for a person who is used to budgeting on a steady income. When you have a big chunk of cash sitting in the bank, the temptation to splurge is strong, there is so much money right there. Except that money has to cover bills for six months or a year (or three years, or five years.) If you splurge when the money arrives, then you’re in trouble later. Many creatives temper this by having multiple checking accounts and paying themselves a reasonable “salary” at regular intervals. Or they incorporate as an LLC or S Corp to do the same. This restores the ability to budget on a monthly/ weekly basis. The advent of patronage platforms, such as Patreon, also provide tools to even out the gaps between payments. If you have creative work that earns royalties, then ongoing payments of those royalties can also provide stabilizing payments.

2. Large lumps of money have tax implications. If a large payment comes in December, then at the end of the year it looks like you made a really good living. You will be taxed for all of that money sitting in your account as if it is all profit. The lump of money may even push you into a higher tax bracket. This frequently happens to people who run Kickstarter campaigns where the money arrives in one year but the expenses (printing, manufacturing, shipping) are paid in the next. As far as the IRS is concerned, cash in the bank is profit and should be taxed. This can be offset by changing to a form of accounting called accrual accounting, but once you make that change, you can’t switch back and there is additional paperwork forever. Most creatives just take a tax hit on the years they make a lot, and file a loss on the years when they make less. Unfortunately this often means that the big tax bill lands in the year after the prosperous year and contributes to making that next year into a financially lean one. Boom and bust.

3. Credit and loan application systems are confused by variable income. Most systems use last years tax returns as a predictor for this year’s income, which is not accurate if you’re living the boom and bust cycle seen by many creative folks. Financial institutions also expect to see a bi-weekly or monthly pay stub and use that to calculate monthly income. If your income is variable, it is likely you don’t have any pay stubs. So any time you apply for a loan or credit, you end up having to explain (over and over) where your income comes from, why you don’t have regular pay stubs, and how you are a responsible adult who will be able to pay back the money. You’ll have to dig up additional paperwork and proof of income that folks with a pay stub don’t have to deal with. So make sure you keep documents of your income with invoices and 1099s. You might need proof of income later.

4. United States Healthcare tax credits expect stable income to calculate how much subsidy you get. If you’re going to be a full time creative, you probably won’t have employer-provided health insurance. Right now this means signing up via the independent marketplace. (Who knows what it will mean next year or the year after that, US healthcare is in flux and I’m writing from a US experience base.) Most of the math done to decide if you qualify for a subsidy depends on you having a good estimate of what you’ll make next year and that income being approximately what you made the year before. If you underestimate your income, you may be charged a penalty for taking more credit than you should have. There is no penalty for over-estimating income. Many creatives avoid penalties by never taking a monthly subsidy. Instead they pay out the full premium amount and wait until tax time to get refunded for whatever the subsidy would have been. However this means that in a bust year, when money is tight you have to shell out for those monthly premiums and if your prior year is a boom, you won’t have any medical refund to help pay for those premiums. The refund comes after the year when money was so tight you needed it.

5. Your tax returns affect United States federal grants for higher education. A financial boom year means that you look rich when filling out the FAFSA. It means that during a bust year, when you could really use the financial help, you may not get it because of a prior boom year.

6. Items 2, 4, & 5 serve to exacerbate the boom and bust cycle that often happens in creative work. This means that a big lump payment is cause for trepidation as well as rejoicing. A large payment that isn’t carefully managed can guarantee a complete crashing of finances only a year or two later if the next large payment doesn’t arrive in time to rescue things.

Living on a variable income can be challenging, but if you’re fully aware of all the potential complications and how to buffer them, a variable income can be just as viable for ongoing living as a regular paycheck. For some people the anxieties and uncertainties of irregular pay days are preferable to the anxieties and uncertainties of potential layoffs or having to work with people who are chosen for you rather than whom you choose. Other people do better with that predictable paycheck while pursuing their creative efforts in the hours not claimed by their employers. The challenges listed here are not the only ways that living on a variable income is different than regular income, but they are some important points to consider when deciding if full time creative work is right for you.

Yesterday was a rough ride on the parenting front. Today there was a series of small things that gave me hope that my kids are growing in the directions they need to go.

Homeschool was accomplished without drama and for once we got through all the tasks I’d hoped for.

I took two kids to an archery range and they enjoyed it so much that never-leave-the-house boy is interested in going back once per week.

Never-leave-the-house boy has also joined an after school game club where he’s acquired an interest in Magic: The Gathering. Suddenly we have an incentive program for accomplishing school work as he wants to acquire more cards.

There was spontaneous showering and laundry washing by children who used to not care nor change clothes ever.

High school girl is managing school without meltdowns and has been actively engaged with all of her classes.

Twenty year old made an appointment to go play racketball with someone who does not live in our house. He’s going to get to go out and do a social thing.

Twenty year old has also identified an educational program that may enable him to reach for his long-term goals. We’re touring the facility next Tuesday.

College girl has been sailing through her last semester and has taken on a leadership role among her peers in a studio class. She’s working hard, but enjoying the effort.

None of the kids are where we hope they will end up. (Though college girl is closest, only lacking an independent income.) I would like for never-leave-the-house boy to be able to speak to people at school and engage with his classes and peers. I’d like for high school girl to find some regular social activities that connect her with people and some ways to serve that help her have meaning in her days. I’d like for twenty year old to learn enough of the small adulting skills that he can live independently. We can’t do these things yet, and that is discouraging. But we spent several years where I watched them all get smaller and smaller. Where everything was getting worse and getting harder. Now we have hard days, but I can tell that the shape of the difficulty is about growing. Growth is rarely comfortable. After a day with crying, it is nice to have a day with hope.