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The second week of school is complete and we’re beginning to see the patterns which are settling into place. It will take several more weeks before the patterns are fully set, but I like the shape of things so far.

High school girl has been stepping up and managing all her things despite (or perhaps because of) a last minute decision to discontinue one of her medicines. She loves most of her classes and hates none of them, which is a very nice change from last year.

Junior High boy isn’t stepping up, but he’s willingly admitting when he doesn’t engage with class. This gives me the chance to communicate with teachers and build structures that require/encourage him to participate instead of hide in a book all day. The home school portions of his schedule are also under way. He’s going to be work all year long, but that is the story of 14 years old. At least this year we’re working with a smart kid who doesn’t want to do “boring” and “pointless” school work. That is much preferable to massive anxiety disorder that reduces boy to minimal functioning and depression.

College girl is discovering that her semester is lining up in exceedingly convenient ways, so that she will be able to be done on campus by December. Also her life is made much better by the fact that one of her roommates is an apartment-complex-approved cat who functions as an emotional support animal to one of the human roommates. Fortunately the cat is quite happy to spread the emotional support to humans beyond his owner.

Post-high-school-non-college boy is living at home and intends to begin applying for jobs since he isn’t ready for college at this point in his life. In the interim, he’s been working for me as a shipping assistant and working on some projects of his own. He’s begun to take charge of things in his own life and has been adulting around the house more. He’s on his own path for launching into independent adulthood and we’re going to give him the space to grow up more for a couple of years.

Howard is home from his month-long travels and has immediately found an exciting new project about which we can’t currently disclose any details. He’s no less busy than he was in the first half of this year, but is far more relaxed and happy with the things he is doing.

I’m spending the month of September shipping packages and finishing off the last details of the Planet Mercenary Kickstarters. I’m also setting up for the products and releases that we’ll need to handle between now and the end of the year. I’m putting more attention and effort into tracking the kids’ educational stuff. I’m finally able to be the back-up to their teachers and provide necessary structure so that the kids can’t get away with not doing their work. By beginning to mid October my schedule is going to open up. I’m going to have spaces like I haven’t had for a year or more. I’m not sure yet what will flow into those spaces.

It all feels …nice. Normal. Not chaotic. Without a foreboding sense that everything is imminently falling apart. All my people seem to have stabilized, which is a really nice change from the past four years. I haven’t had everyone stable simultaneously since late 2012. It feels like that state is going to continue for a while, but whether it does or not, I still get to have this space where things are calm, so I’m going to make sure I take time to pause and notice that things are good.

The school year started barely twenty four hours after I returned from GenCon, so there wasn’t much time for me to re-calibrate my brain in between. Fortunately some portion of my brain just remembered how everything needed to go, so we got up on time and got kids out the door on schedule. They’ve now been in school two days, which means they’ve had the first iteration of all of their classes. I’m pleased to report that my high school junior is excited by most of her classes instead of feeling oppressed by them. This is a huge improvement over last year. My 9th grader isn’t actively excited by classes, but he’s not dreading school either. I’ll take that. The college girl departs for school on Friday. Come Monday I need to help the post-high-school non-college kid apply for jobs. Also I need to sign up the 9th grader for some independent study classes. The best part is the complete lack of foreboding. I feel like this year is going to go well instead of being terrified that it won’t.

GenCon was good. I struggled with anxiety and brain noise a lot more than usual. It made some things harder than they needed to be. Planet Mercenary was well received and had a solid start at making its way out into the world. We had some important business conversations which may lead to fun projects. I got to spend time with my booth crew, who is like family. One of my favorite events every year is the crew dinner that we have on Sunday evening after all the work is complete. Then we can just enjoy being together. Maybe it was because of the 50th anniversary, but this dinner was full of reminiscing and stories of GenCons past. It was fun to hear about things I hadn’t been present for, and to relive things that I had. I also got to hang out with writer friends, which is also a joy.

The post GenCon accounting is mostly complete. There are a few more things I must do before I can put away the GenCon folders until sometime in January. I’ve also begun wrapping my brain around the piles of shipping which need to be done. I ordered more shipping supplies so that come Monday I can begin plowing through work. I also began reaching out to potential bonus story artists, which is a task I really should have done before I left for Europe, but which fell through the cracks. The Adventure PDF, the GC secrets PDF, and the half sheet inserts for the handbrains are also on my To Do list. I’m hoping to wrap up all of these things by the end of September so that I’m available for new projects after that.

Tomorrow I post Kickstarter updates and help my college girl pack up her life for what is (hopefully) her final semester of college.

Here is the thing about history, society and individuals are always choosing what to pass down to our children and what not to pass along. Every time someone creates a history textbook they have to choose what goes in and what has to be left out because there isn’t space for everything, so the book from which children learn is a small subset of history. Every time a teacher uses that textbook they have to choose where to focus their teaching time, because there aren’t enough hours to teach everything that is in the book, so the portion of history that enters common knowledge for a generation is further reduced. Any time a historical movie gets made details are pruned away or rearranged for narrative purposes. Sometimes that makes people upset, so they make another movie where different details are pruned and rearranged. It gets even more complicated when we’re interpreting history, when we’re explaining what a battle or event means. Events, places, dates, names are fairly fixed, but the meanings we assign to those fixed historical points are always in flux. There is no One True Version for history.

I’ve been thinking about that this week as I’ve seen news of protests and counter protests surrounding confederate monuments. The meaning of these symbols to individual persons depends on which interpretation of history that person chooses to accept. Cities have begun to remove these monuments because the majority has come to believe the interpretation that symbols of the confederacy are harmful. All of it: the decision to remove them, the protests about it, the counter-protests, the videos of people using trucks to topple statues without city consent, these are all a vigorous argument that our society is having about who we want to be and which versions of history get to thrive while other versions get relegated to pockets where they are specifically discussed as ugly instead of glorious.

Also this week, I watched a movie I haven’t seen in a decade. It is a Western comedy film called Hallelujah Trail that my mother loved and we recorded it off TV to VHS and then I re-watched it dozens of times to the point where every line was familiar. It was delightfully ridiculous with mass covered wagon chases and gun fights where no one died because there was a sand storm and no one could see anyone else. It used all the props of a western, but the spirit was screwball comedy. It had come to mind lately and I wanted to see it again. I considered tracking down a copy (It was only on DVD once and has been out of print for a very long time) and watching it with my kids. But I knew it was a western from the era when Native Americans were treated as villains or as caricatures. I knew it would have things in it that are offensive. Instead I found it on YouTube and watched it by myself.

The opening bars of music made me so nostalgically happy. I still remembered every line of dialogue. The fun mix of western and comedy genres was still there. However there was also a veritable bingo-card of offensive stereotypes. Some of them were half-conscious: Native American Indians deliberately played as drunks for comedy purposes; some of them were unconscious products of the time the movie was made: strong-minded, independent woman’s plot resolution is to get married and give up being a suffragette and temperance marcher. And the whole movie centers around a shipment of whiskey with a wagoneer wanting to deliver cargo, a militia wanting to make sure it gets to them safely, US Cavalry trying to keep order, temperance marchers wanting to destroy it, and the Indians wanting to steal it. The whole movie is about being drunk, wanting to be drunk, or trying to prevent drunkenness but then getting drunk because of “emotional distress.” All of which (in hindsight) seems like a strange choice as a beloved movie for a family of Mormons.

As I watched I had a sort of cognitive dissonance as part of my brain loved each scene for its deep, personal nostalgia and another part of my brain viewed with a modern eye analyzing all the ways this movie gives offense to a swathe of people. I finished the film and knew two things: I still love this movie and I can’t in good conscience share it with anyone else or teach them to love it. I will quietly not show it to my children and they will have no grief that it fades into unwatched obscurity.

This is the choice all adults must sometimes make. Sometimes a movie, or statue, or ideology, or way of living, no longer fits the shifts of society. Sometimes we have to let the past go in order to have a better future. This can be hard when we love these past things. In my case, with this movie, it is only a mild wistfulness that my kids will never love a thing that I loved. The decision becomes heart wrenching if the thing that must be allowed to pass is a core part of your identity. I see that the rage and violence surrounding confederate monuments comes from a place of grief and fear, but the decision to relocate them is the one that helps us build a society where we’re trying to redress the wrongs of the past and a society where everyone is treated equally regardless of ethnicity or skin color.

It feels like such a short hop, only four hours in a plane, so much shorter than the trip I just took with multiple hops and full days of travel. Hop, and I’m in Indianapolis. It is familiar here. I’ve been this place before. This exact Hotel. I will soon see people that I get to see only once per year. The prior trip was a venture into new places, foreign lands. This trip is more like a family reunion.

I’ve arrived late in the evening, though back home it is less late, so I am awake. Howard met me here, but he came from far to the east. He is sleeping now, still working to re-set his internal clock to the day/night rhythms of this place. He has two more days in which to adapt before the show begins in earnest. I’m glad to see him. He is even more glad to see me. We’ve only been apart for a week, but he’s been away from home for over three.

One of my worries in advance of his month-long travel was that breaking his patterns for so long would break him somehow. I forgot that brains are significantly location dependent. I remembered it again when I got home and discovered that all the shipping thoughts which I’d set down for weeks were apparently stored in the driver’s seat of my car. They were right there waiting for me when I climbed in for a quick errand. Howard will be able to slip back in to his home thoughts and work again. Yet when he returns he’ll have new thoughts and experiences, just as I did. Travel caused me to see familiar things in new ways. I would have liked time to explore that experience, but the turn around to this trip was filled with urgent tasks.

Now I am here. GenCon begins on Thursday.

We have an internet package on the ship, but it has a strictly limited MB ration. I may be able to continue to blog words, but no pictures. I possibly won’t be able to do many words either, in which case, I’ll still write things up, hopefully to post when I return to the world of internet. We’ll see.

It has been a full week since I last had enough space to think writer thoughts. Shipping has consumed most of my hours for the past three weeks. There is one week more before I switch over into travel mode. In between shipping, I’ve had two doctor’s appointments and one medical test in the past week. Swallowing is harder for me than it should be. This is probably an after effect of radiation therapy I had twenty years ago. The difficulty was minimal and static for decades, so I adapted. It has felt a little worse lately, hence seeing my primary care doctor, an ENT, and going in for a fun test where I swallow barium sludge so they can x-ray while it goes down. Yesterday was a more specific test where they will ruin food by mixing it with barium and then took x-rays while I chewed and attempted to swallow. The most sadly terrible one was the oreo cookie with barium filling. I walked out of the test with a diagnosis of “dismotility of the swallow mechanism” some instructions for eating carefully and a referral to a speech therapist who will give me a set of exercises designed to strengthen throat muscles.

This is one way where life is not like fiction. Fiction is organized with narratives unfolding neatly, usually in chronological order. Plots and sub plots are clearly delineated. Life muddles everything together, tangled and overlapping. Pretty much everyone I know is caught up in a web of things that keep them busy, things they need to get out of the way so they can do other things that they want to do. I have to remind myself that the tangle is my life. This July my life is about shipping, swallowing, hauling my kids to work in the warehouse, watching them work, and preparations for my upcoming trip. It is also about fixing food, taking out the trash, going grocery shopping, negotiating for use of the big TV in the family room, replacing worn out clothing, and hundreds of other little tasks. What I have to remind myself is that all of the To Do items are in support of this life I’m living, and in the moments when I can clear away the stress of the To Do list, I recognize that the lifestyle I’m supporting is one I’m happy to occupy.

It is Sunday morning and for the first time in weeks, I have a space where I feel like I am allowed to set aside shipping thoughts for a day. I worked all last week and even more yesterday to make sure I had this space. Invoices for next Tuesday’s shipping are printed and sorted. I can’t begin printing postage until tomorrow. All the supplies are either in hand or enroute. I already know what lists I will ship on Thursday. There is email I could manage, but it can wait until Monday morning. I have space to breathe and to contemplate the fact that by the end of this week I will have shipped almost everything. What remains will be international orders and orders containing handbrain screens.

For the first time in months I’m able to contemplate my upcoming trip and make plans for it. Howard and I will be traveling to Europe to take part of the Writing Excuses conference and workshop on a cruise ship in the Baltic sea. I have never been to Europe before. It was always something that was out of reach both financially and in terms of schedule. But the Writing Excuses conference has made it possible. I don’t know what the trip will be like. I expect to see and experience amazing new things. I expect to have to eat unfamiliar foods some of which I’ll like and others I won’t. I expect to get homesick and to come home with my head full of new thoughts. It is going to be a good trip.

Howard’s trip will be more extended than mine. He will stay in Europe after the cruise to tour some castles and then attend WorldCon in Helsinki Finland. I’ll return home to check on the home front, answer emails, manage business things, likely ship some packages, deal with school registration issues, and dozens of other small management tasks. From Helsinki, Howard will fly directly to Indianapolis for GenCon. I will join him there for a week of convention. At the end of that we’ll fly home together and won’t want to leave the house for a good long time. I arrive home the day before my kids begin school and six days before I have to drop my college kid off for her (hopefully) final semester on campus.

I’ve watched these trips coming on the calendar. I’ve felt the pressure of them. I worried that I wouldn’t get enough shipping done before time to go and that I’d then feel guilty for running off on a big trip while backers were waiting for their packages. Now it looks like I won’t have to carry that guilt. I’ve got two weeks of hard work ahead to make sure that I have shipped everything I can possibly ship before departure.

I’m halfway through the second week of Planet Mercenary shipping. The third big shipping day is scheduled for tomorrow. The postage is all printed, supplies are there, work crew gathers at 8:30 tomorrow morning. And I am tired. Some of it is physical tired. A six pound package doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re shifting 400 of them, that means we’ve moved more than a ton. Then there is moving supplies and boxes of books to keep the work stations stocked. But even more than physical tired, my brain is tired of all the tracking and pre-planning that is necessary in advance of a big shipping day.

Fortunately a good night’s sleep will help.

In the mean time all six Taylers took an hour to light fireworks in our cul de sac. It was only us out there instead of the forty or fifty people who gathered yesterday. Some years we like the energy of participating in a big group event. This year we were happier with our own little celebration. It was a nice way to finish off a long day of work.

The details of last week’s shipping efforts are detailed over on the Planet Mercenary update page. I’ll be posting similarly detailed updates over there each Friday until the shipping is done. The short version is that I need to ship 1000 packages (or more) per week until everything is in the mail. I’d take it slower except we have convention travel coming at the end of July. I really want the packages sent before that.

We’re starting to see pictures and reports from people who have gotten their packages. It makes me want to hurry and send all the rest so that no one has to wait for much longer. Unfortunately I keep hitting my physical and mental limitations and have to take breaks. Also there are other life things which have to be taken care of.

All of my thinking has turned into lists instead of long and careful thoughts. I will be really, really glad when Planet Mercenary is delivered.

I’ve spent the past week mired in words. Most of them were in emails as I was communicating with the 600ish people who backed both Planet Mercenary and the Handbrain screens to help them combine their orders. All that communication was rewarding because so many people expressed excitement and thanks about the impending shipping of the project. Also I know that every bit of organization that I do now will be less organization work that I have to do later.

The other words I’ve been wrestling this week are the words for the next Schlock Mercenary bonus story. I’ve hammered out the shape of the story and the cast, but I need to tune the details of the story. Then I have to fine tune the words. Focusing on it is hard because there are so many other things that I could also be doing with my hours.

List of other things:
Errata documents for Planet Mercenary
The Game Chief Secrets PDF
The 2017 GenCon adventure
Preparing for shipping out thousands of packages

I’m in the final crazy push to the end of July, when things should finally slow down.