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I’ve been pulling 10-12 hour work days to get the Planet Mercenary editing done. Also the Pristine Seventy Maxims book shipping. And we’re prepping some new merchandise for pre-order. Then there is the homeschooling and regular parenting. And I’m expecting the Defaced Seventy Maxims books the first week of February. At a minimum, I expect this state of busy-ness to last for the next three weeks until LTUE.

Have you heard about LTUE? It is a Science Fiction and Fantasy conference with an emphasis on teaching writing and art. If your near Provo the weekend of February 16-18. Both Howard and I will be there. I’m on some interesting panels and I’ve got a presentation about picture books on Saturday.

All the cracks between the stuff in the prior two paragraphs have been filled up with thoughts and emotions about American politics and world politics. Howard and I have been married for 22 years. We’ve had more political conversations in the past six months than in all the prior years combined. My head swirls with thoughts and fears. Some of them rational, some of them less so. I’ve done a fair bit of writing about all of it, but until I’m certain of what I want to say, I hold off on saying most of it on the internet.

This I am certain of: If you are an American citizen, please be actively engaged in making sure that your representatives are representing you accurately. Pay attention to how they vote so you can be informed next election on who you want to vote for. I don’t just hope this for people who agree with my opinions, but also for those who oppose them. We need an era of civic engagement when the average person is paying attention and holding elected officials accountable.

Outside the weather is cold, gray, wet. That is not helping the moods indoors. I range from determination to anxiety as I contemplate all the tasks I must do this month in order to keep all the necessary business things moving forward at the pace required to meet deadlines. There are external factors in all of those deadlines. I already know which deadlines to let slide if I have to in order to meet more critical deadlines, but I don’t want any of them to slide. They’re there because I want things to be complete.

This week I get to ship packages containing the Pristine Seventy Maxims book. It is the first taste of completion. For some people their Kickstarter will finally be complete. Others will have to wait until next month when the Defaced Seventy Maxims books arrive. Still others will be waiting a bit longer for the full Planet Mercenary book. Fulfilling our promises to all of these people is the primary business task of the year. There are lots of moving parts to making sure that happens.

Sometimes I look at the calendar and despair because a week of the year is already gone. Other times I have to remind myself that I am only just past the first week of the year. I’m not out of time.

Along side the business priorities I have priorities related to family and community. I must set boundaries around these things. I can’t let business swamp family or community, but I can’t allow other things to disrupt business too much. This calls for a hundred judgement calls per day where I have to decide what is most important for the next fifteen minutes.

A new semester begins for two kids on Wednesday. Their schedules are being shuffled around. They can shake off the stresses of last semester and start a bit fresh. For Patch it means three homeschooled classes instead of just one. We don’t know how that is going to work quite yet. The last bits of the old semester caused quite a lot of stress last week. Unpleasantness and disruptions all around. Hopefully we can soon develop a better rhythm.

I’ve also begun my new church calling. I’ve been asked to serve as part of the compassionate service committee. This is the core of service in our congregation. It is our job to identify who needs help, whether it be meals, rides, company, resources, or anything else. Then we try to connect people with the help that they need. Sometimes it means asking others to be the helpers. Occasionally it means being a helper myself. It is important work and it fits right in with my goal to grow my heart. I would argue that helping people directly around us is essential work, particularly when the country’s political landscape is poised for upheaval. Whether the results of that upheaval will be good or bad, it is impossible to say from this vantage point, but I can guarantee that the process will create personal hardship for individuals. Change always does. So I need to be watching and helping.

And the helping will help me. With my heart not feeling quite so tight, I will be less afraid.

I could do with less cold and with longer days. January always gets to me. So I just need to hunch up and plow on through. Each day brings tasks closer to complete. Each day is an opportunity to serve. Each day the sunlight lasts a little longer. I have 22 days left in this month. I need to use them well.

The warehouse is cleared, pallets removed, boxes shifted. I’m almost ready for a shipment of books to arrive next week. I just need to shift a few more things and sweep the newly available space.

I’ve been working hard on Planet Mercenary. Much of what I’ve been doing is organizational. I took on half of the art director job, deciding what art we need done, contacting artists, and assigning work. It seems strange that spending so much time sending and responding to email counts as being productive, but it is necessary.

Work on the house remodel is on hold through the end of January. Both Howard and I need to keep our project energy firmly focused on Planet Mercenary.

Many of the parenting tasks are on hold this week. There are things we need to do in order to help all the people in our house have healthier lives, but we’re not pushing any of it forward during the space between Christmas and New Year’s Day. The new year is coming fast. I drive Kiki back to school on Monday, where she’ll hopefully have a calmer semester than the last one was. The other kids start back to school on Wednesday. It would feel like a fresh start, except that our school district doesn’t end the semester with Christmas break. Instead the end of the semester is a week and a half into the next year. So we always arrive back at school feeling muddled and rushed to get all the end of semester things done.

I don’t actually know how I feel about having a new year. This one was a muddled mess of things getting better on a personal level and feeling more perilous on the public stage. I don’t want to live in dread and fear, but I’m cautious about talking myself into hope and optimism. If things end up being hard, I don’t want to have to deal with cleaning up shards of shattered hope while I’m dealing with the hard. So mostly I’m putting my head down, trying to ignore the change over of the year, and put one foot ahead of the other on all my projects. Bit by bit they’ll all get done. Since all of them are specifically designed to make the world better (even if only in small personal ways) that step by step approach is a “Make the World Better” effort.

My first exposure to Role Playing Games was laying on the floor underneath the table while my three older siblings hunched over Advanced D&D books, rolling dice to kill masses of Gnolls. I was six. When they started up a new campaign, I begged to play. They reluctantly allowed me to. So for me Role playing meant books, dice, hand drawn maps on graph paper, and many loose sheets of paper. Around age fourteen I gave up on Role Play. It was too socially complicated since the only people who would play with me were boys and the vast majority of my peers didn’t understand it at all.

When my children were young and I watched them play, I realized that their free form play was essentially a Role Play without dice, paper, and rules to give boundaries to the mutual story. I remembered my own imaginative games as a child. I was able to imagine so strongly that I could almost see the things I was pretending. I also remember the day that pretending stopped working for me. Two friends had come for a sleepover. We were in the opening negotiations of dressing up and beginning the story when one of my friends paused and said “This is silly.” In that moment I couldn’t see it as anything but silly. Self consciousness banished pretend play forever. I was twelve.

Interestingly, twelve was also when I began to focus more on writing stories. Pretending on paper was much more socially acceptable than putting on dress ups and waving pretend swords in the backyard. When I reached adulthood I recognized that one of the biggest values of D&D and the paper RPGs that followed was that they gave adults permission to play pretend again. I assumed I would see the same pattern with my own children, that around twelve they would swap over to structured play bounded by rules and paper.

I was wrong. Twelve faded into thirteen and then fourteen while my kids still ran about in the backyard with friends. They also took it online, not into the structured mmorpgs that adults gravitated to. Instead places like Minecraft or Roblocks became platforms for role play in the same free form mode that I saw in my backyard. Gradually, with no fanfare, the online role playing took the place of running around in the yard. My kids have participated in role play (which could also be called cooperative storytelling) on Mincraft, Roblocks, DeviantArt, Google Docs, Terraria, Skype, and probably two or three other places that I don’t know about. It seems as long as the program has a way to connect with friends and a chat function, it can be used for role play.

I’m happy to live in a world where imaginative play is not the sole province of children. Play is good for all of us, no matter what our age may be.

This list could also be called, Reasons I am Glad to Live in a World of Modern Medicine.
Pediatrician
Family practice doctor
Obstetrician
Gynecologist
ENT
Many nurses and PAs
ENT surgeon
Radiation Oncologist
Cardiologist
Cardiac care nurse
Pediatric urologist
Gastroenterologist
Ultrasound technician
X-ray technician
MRI technician
CAT scan technician
Phlebotomist
Pediatric surgeon
Pediatric neurologist
EEG technician
EKG technician
Psychiatrists
Pediatric Psychiatrists
Licensed therapists
Anesthesiologists
Pharmacists

All of those for a family of six that is basically healthy. It is possible that some of the things we consulted these professionals for would have resolved on their own without intervention, but some of these interventions were life saving. Without medical intervention I would likely be dead by now, slowly choked to death by a throat tumor. Howard might not have survived his myocarditis in 1999, or his C Diff infection in 2013.

The only point I have here is that I am extremely grateful for modern medicine and I would really like to be able to continue to afford preventative care which allows us to stay well and lets us be contributing members of society. I don’t know what 2018 will bring on the healthcare front. I don’t know how much of my income will have to go toward premiums (in 2017, it’ll be about 25%) I don’t even know if I’ll have the option to purchase a healthcare plan at all. I will be pleased with any political party which delivers affordable healthcare that allows me to see the listed specialists as I need to. I will be angry at any party which makes seeing doctors more difficult and more expensive.

For now I guess I should be glad that the current round of testing and appointments will likely be concluded before the end of the year so that they can go on this year’s deductible instead of the much higher one for next year.

The house is quiet and feels calm in this hour before everyone goes to sleep. Bedtime used to be the most energy intensive part of my day as I attempted to convince small children that they should lay still long enough for sleep to arrive. I spent years laying down with kids, sitting in the room with kids, or sitting out in the hallway being door guardian. None of those things are required anymore. I do have to remind my teenagers about bedtime, but mostly they accomplish it on their own. On the whole, I like this stage of life better. Bedtime was so hard, particularly because it required super-human patience when my energy was already used up.

But I miss reading stories out loud.

I have shelves full of children’s books, everything from picture books to middle grade. They are full of stories. I remember holding those books and speaking the words that made those stories come to life. I miss having faces turned toward the story, absorbing it. I still get to read aloud sometimes, mostly to other people’s children. But I’ve been wondering if there is a way to convince my teenagers to sit down and listen while Mom reads them Christmas stories. I might get away with it because Christmas makes everyone a bit nostalgic.

Christmas is like a time capsule. This year as I pull out the decorations and ornaments, I discover thoughts and emotions that I accidentally packed away in prior years. Remembered joy and sadness come out of the boxes along with objects that haven’t seen the light of day in eleven months. Ornaments bring back memories from decades ago and from last year. This is both a lovely thing and a difficult one. Since last year I was not in a good place emotionally, this year I have more emotion to process than usual. It helps that the home construction is forcing us to change many of our Christmas patterns. The tree is in a different room, there is no piano on which to display our Christmas pyramid. The physical changes we’re making in our house will create a before and after. That too will get folded into our holiday memories.

I haven’t yet pulled out my stock of Christmas books. They used to line up on the piano, now they’ll need to go elsewhere. But I want them out. I want to have those stories close to hand. And even if I don’t get to read them aloud to my children, I can read some of them to myself. I’m looking forward to seeing my friend the Grinch and remembering once again that we don’t save Christmas, it saves us.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas? Well, not exactly. But that spot where the ladder is will be where the Christmas tree goes. That’s the plan anyway. I need to get the last of the sheetrock removed. There used to be a closet where the ladder currently stands. This is step one of a long, slow process to remodel our kitchen. I was supposed to make some calls this week to price out other aspects of the remodel. Unfortunately I’ve been feeling unfocused.

Though there were a couple of bright spots. On Tuesday we got the wet proofs for the Defaced Seventy Maxims book.

These are pages of the actual paper printed by the actual machine that will do the printing for the book. It is our opportunity to really see if what we’ve planned will work. And it does. Tomorrow I need to comb through the proofs one more time and then give the okay to print.

On Thursday, today, we got advanced copies of the Pristine Seventy Maxims book.

Those few moments of opening the package are always anxiety ridden. I suddenly am convinced that I’ve made a huge error and ruined the entire print run. So my first few moments holding a new book I feel a mix of excitement and dread. What if when I open it, I suddenly find the fatal error? We haven’t found the error yet, which means it is a typo level error rather than a “this book is ruined” error. I can live with that. The book is beautiful. I can’t wait to see it side by side with the companion book.

Dear Road Sign,
“Road Congestion at Scipio Summit, Expect Delays” Does not adequately convey “You will be parked on the freeway for so long that people will be walking their dogs and men will be heading into the bushes to pee.” I think that word does not mean what you think it means.

Dear fellow drivers caught in a traffic jam,
I understand that you are frustrated at being stopped on the freeway, and that you really want to get home, but please don’t be stupid. Driving on shoulder of road = stupid. Driving wrong way up freeway onramp because you didn’t take the exit 100 feet and twenty minutes ago, also stupid. Fleeing onto frontage roads and then reconnecting with the freeway in reckless ways so that you cause additional accidents, supremely stupid. At least six of you were this last kind of stupid. Less than an inch of snow on the ground, just drive slow and patient then we’ll all get home.
No love.

Dear Brain,
Why did you decide to hand me the title and plot for a picture book where Amy’s Mommy is the central character? Amy’s fans don’t want a book about Amy’s Mommy. Okay, maybe parents of Amy’s fans might want it, but it is still a strange and difficult-to-market niche. Also, we have other projects where our attention should be focused. We don’t need to be drafting sentences, okay fine, I’ll write them down.

Dear fellow travelers after the traffic jam,
Thank you for being far more sane and patient that I was afraid you would be. You didn’t cause any more accidents after we cleared the mess. Thank you.

Dear home,
I love you. Glad I got here.

Sea glass is what happens when people leave broken glass garbage on beaches or toss it into the ocean. The shards are moved about by waves, scoured by sand, and eaten by salt until all the sharp edges are worn away. The entire surface of the glass gains a frosted appearance as a result of this treatment. The process is slow, taking twenty to fifty years to render dangerous trash into something that is beautiful and sought after. The glass pictured in the above photo is artificial, made in a tumbler for people like me who want the allure without paying the prices associated with true sea glass.

I bought my little bag of glass last week. I’m not certain why the memory of sea glass popped into my mind, but I remember being much younger and finding tiny pieces of it on a beach trip. Those pieces are long lost, but the memory lingered and it was strong enough for me to look up and purchase a bag. For years I’ve been quite happy without sea glass in my life, this week I needed it. Since its arrival, I’ve been trying to figure out why. What piece of my soul responds to the idea of sea glass right now? I hold the pieces in my hand, listen to the way they clink against each other, watch how they refract the light. I don’t know that I’ll ever find a definitive answer to my question, but the following things are part of it:

Glass of all kinds has been more beautiful to me since last June when I helped to clean out my Grandmother’s house. She was a collector of beautiful glass. Some of that glass came home with me.

Beaches and oceans are deeply peaceful for me. Most recently I experienced them in conjunction with the Writing Excuses cruise. That trip was difficult and wonderful. It was the source of insights I don’t want to lose and memories I’d like to keep close.

I’ve felt tumbled about and at the mercy of large forces outside my control. I’ve felt this for years as I wore myself out trying to help my children. I like the idea that being tumbled about can make a damaged thing into a beautiful one.

Ive done this before, collected images and objects without being sure why they interest me. I have a file on my desktop where I collect images that speak to me. Sometimes examining these things helps me to understand myself, particularly the parts of myself that I’ve tucked away because they are painful or vulnerable. So I’ll be getting a little bowl to put my sea glass on display, and I’ll keep looking at it and waiting to find out what it means to me.

Thanksgiving is accomplished. We went nowhere, played video games, watched movies, and read books all day. There was food, and for once the kids didn’t snarf it down and leave the table in less than ten minutes. We ate, laughed, shared stories, and cleaned up together. One of the things I am most grateful for at Thanksgiving is the way that the world backs off. Emails taper to a trickle. Social media slows down. None of the organizations to which I belong schedule anything because they all assume people are busy with family. So for a day or two, my world shrinks to just the people in my house. It is peaceful. My house is filled with good people. Tomorrow work begins again, and by Monday we’ll be fully into the swing of Christmas season. But for tonight I have the quiet calm of Thanksgiving.