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I wish that I’d had a better answer when the heavily accented voice on the phone told me that he was from the IRS and was calling because there was an arrest warrant out on my social security number. His statement was patently ridiculous to me because I know that the IRS communicates via first class mail, not call center phone calls. Also notifications of arrest warrants arrive with uniformed officers at the door, not phone calls. And arrest warrants are issued against names not social security numbers. There was so much wrong with his statement that I listened in silence to find out what strange thing he would say next. But he hung up, I guess he assumed that my silence meant I’d already hung up.
Thing I wish I’d said:
“I’m sorry all my arrest warrants have to go through my lawyer. Would you like his number?”
or
“From now on all my communications from you must go through my lawyer. I’ll have her call you. May I have your contact information?”
It still would have ended with him hanging up, but I would have felt more clever having traded one fiction for another.

I wish I’d looked down at the icy steps before attempting to walk on them. The result was bruises on various sides of me because I twisted on the way down in a vain attempt to not go down. Nothing broken. I just have a new disbelief for all the action heroes who fall out of vehicles, jump out of buildings, take punches, and then are able to move enough to repeat all of it the next day. I don’t think that human bodies or post adrenaline works that way.

I wish I’d been either more or less assertive with the lady at the couch store. I stood around waiting for 20 minutes with no sales people in sight. When I expressed this frustration, she immediately reacted with defensive statements that implied that I was an irrational customer that she had to manage. I wish I’d either not been cranky with her at all, and thus had a pleasant interaction. Or I wish that I’d been firm and clear that, no, the fault was not mine. Yes I really did push the button which is supposed to summon help. Yes the red light was blinking, it is not blinking now because there must be some sort of auto shut off after ten or fifteen minutes. No I did not accidentally push the cancel button. I made it blink red and waited, and waited, and waited while growing increasingly cranky. Then I finally went searching for a salesperson and found one who was just coming back from break and was more interested in exculpating herself “we just don’t have much coverage on Mondays” than in being polite and helpful to a cranky customer. I bought the couch I wanted because I’m not going to let a store clerk divert me from my purpose, but I walked away from the encounter with a bad feeling floating around in my brain.

On the whole I think I’m glad that my regrets are passing ones. Things that will have become irrelevant and forgotten within a week or two. Those are much better than regrets with real weight and staying power.

My head is full of random thoughts this evening. Perhaps if I lay enough of them out in a row they can count as a real post. It works for beads and necklaces, right?

I’m not entirely certain where the second half of last week went. Though thinking back there was some birthday preparation, birthday celebration, sickness in the form of head colds, head colds that transformed themselves into chest colds, a sprinkling of appointments, and some work on Planet Mercenary. So if I wanted to go looking for where the week went, I know where to start my search.

We’re two weeks out from LTUE (ltue.net) They’ve put up the finalized schedule and I’m excited for the things I’ll get to talk about.
Managing a Giant Project
Marketing on a Budget
Tragedy in Children’s Literature
Crowdfunding
Distributing Your Novel
Picture Books
And most particularly for the presentation I’ll get to give:
Putting Emotional Depth into Your Children’s Fiction

It will be a very fun event and if you’re at all interested in genre fiction, either creating or reading, or playing as a video game, or watching on a screen, then LTUE has something that may interest you.

I have many things to accomplish before arriving at LTUE. Fortunately one that I thought would be complicated turned out to be simple. The iPad we used for our cash register got dropped by someone who was trying to take moon pictures in the dark. The cracked screen is not great for customer confidence, so our business shelled out for a replacement. Happily our software works with an iPad mini, so now we have a better, newer, smaller, faster device and it is already running the software we need. It is amazing to me what modern electronics can pack into such a small and slim device. I’m buying a case for it just so it doesn’t feel so fragile. Also so that should it get dropped, it has more projection than the old iPad had. Also, the kids can’t use this one. Especially not for pictures of the moon at night.

This weekend I was reminded that teenage birthday parties are much easier for me to run than little kid parties. I never would have allowed one of my little kids to host a party with fifteen guests. The amount of crowd and behavior management would have made my inner introvert want to flee in terror. But a teen party is fine with that many guests. All I have to do is provide a location and food. In this case the location was an indoor trampoline park. Gleek and Patch can both barely move today after ninety minutes of trampoline tag yesterday. Fun was had by all. My spaces were not invaded, and the birthday went well.

We had a couch with a cracked frame. This was covered under warranty, but we had to haul the couch in question up to the store. My car is small-ish, the smallest it can be while still able to seat six people simultaneously. Yet with all of the rear seats folded down I still have six feet of cargo space. The couch was seven feet long. Some creative bungee cord placement and some slow driving got us from my house to the store. And none of the cushions went flying out, which I knew wasn’t likely, but my anxiety tried to convince me would happen. The store gave us credit which we’ll apply to a new couch of a different model. And we’ll hire their delivery team to bring it to us. (Hiring their delivery team to come pick up the broken one was not an option. I asked and they were confused, so I gave up.) Best of all, we won’t have to attempt to use a cardboard box to shore up the sagging middle as we’ve been doing for the past 3-4 months. Hint: cardboard boxes are insufficiently strong to hold up the middle of a couch with a broken frame.

I attended a College and Career Readiness (CCR) meeting for my twelve year old. The primary purpose of the meeting is to turn in the piece of paper which lists preferred classes for next year so that the counselors can put together schedules. But human beings seem generally incapable of gathering people together without slapping additional ceremony or messages on the event. In this case, they spent multiple metaphors trying to convince show kids the dire dangers of not thinking ahead to college and career. I understand why they do it. It is their job to teach kids about their options and to teach about possible consequences. Yet I always spend these meetings turning to my child and whispering that they should not freak out. They have plenty of time and no one expects them to have their live planned out in seventh grade. I did the same for my son at this meeting. I also spent some time thinking about how the path they were pushing, toward college, loses sight of the fact that the goal is being able to build a life you want. It also didn’t explain the nuance that most people don’t pick one career and stick with it for forty years. People change, they learn new things, they switch jobs, go back to school, start fresh. So even if you choose wrong, all you lose is a little time. You can choose again later. We picked some classes and escaped.

I just finished Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson. I’ll end this conglomeration of thoughts with my favorite quote from the book.

Don’t make the same mistakes that everyone else makes. Make wonderful mistakes. Make the kind of mistakes that make people so shocked that they have no other choice but to be a little impressed.

It feels like I spent half of today in fruitless phone calls to customer support. One was an hour long tech call with a trusted company who has unfortunately outsourced their customer support to a country where I have trouble understanding the accent. I gave the tech guy remote access and then got to sit there and watch while he did the same things over and over as if somehow things would magically go differently this time around. Then he found one little setting to change (which I hadn’t known existed) and did a new thing over and over until I got fed up and ended the call. Then in only a few minutes I found the link he kept clicking past so I never got time to see it. It was the “set up account” button. No wonder his attempts to sync things kept failing. I did not have an account in a place where I needed one.

The second customer support call, to find out warranty information on our couch that broke, was even more frustrating. I waded through a phone tree to be “placed on hold” except it was a dead silent limbo that made me think my call had been dropped into a pit somehow. A second wade through phone tree got me to an endlessly looping hold recording. I got to listen to the loop for 20 minutes before I decided to do something better with my day. At least with the tech call I was able to reach a resolution. For this I’m still going to have to wait on hold or drive myself 30 minutes to the store.

In good news, I figured out how to e-file some important tax forms. This was essential because Utah laws have changed and I’m no longer allowed to file them on paper. (Hence the tech phone call.) This means that my year end accounting is complete. Now all I have to do is gather up all the necessary tax documents so that our accountant can file taxes for 2015. That is when I’ll learn if the financial management I did in December was sufficient to reduce our taxes to a comfortable number.

Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be more able to dive into creative work. We’re finishing up the Planet Mercenary card deck. We’re also beginning to move fast on edits and re-writes for the rest of the book. I keep looking at my calendar to see the spaces that I have available. Most of my days are pretty free, where in 2015 they were constantly impacted by school things and diagnostic appointments for kids. For now it is time for bed so I can get up and do creative things tomorrow.

I hear the sound of rain outside my window. It is a friendly sound, one that I like. Though it is strange to be hearing it while looking at pictures from friends who are buried in snow today. All of our snow has melted. It is possible we’ll get more, but right now we have rain.

It was a quiet Saturday. The kids occupied themselves. I did too, splitting my time between relaxing and working on Planet Mercenary. I never even got dressed, just changed from one set of uber comfortable pajamas into another set when I got out of the shower. A part of me thinks I should have spent my day differently. Mostly though, I’m fine with it.

Tomorrow I’ll have to leave the house. We have church in the morning. In the evening I’ll go fetch Howard from the airport and I’ll get to hear stories from his convention trip this weekend. I’ve bee twitter lurking and he appears to have had a good time. Sometimes when Howard is at a convention, I’ll feel sad that I’m missing the fun. I do feel a bit sad when I see pictures of people I know who I would like to be with. But over all, I’m glad to be at home this weekend. Routine is very attractive to me just now. I would like a bunch of it all in a row so that I can catch up on all the projects that have fallen behind schedule.

I have been very project focused in the past few days. At least I have been when I was able to focus. Unfortunately I spent some of this week dealing with brain zaps, which are a known side effect of discontinuing some SSRI medications. Some people never get them, others do even when they taper off the medicines slowly, as I did. This experience has me convinced I should never ever end one of these medicines abruptly. You’d think that having a new anti-depressant would reduce the effects of stopping the old one, but apparently not. Fortunately they seem to be subsiding, which is good because I have lots of work to do.

The Planet Mercenary project is the biggest thing on my desk. There is a massive amount of work that needs to be done to get it ready for print in March. On the other hand, some of the work is being really fun. Yesterday I was finishing up the latest iteration of the playing cards and they were making me snicker out loud. I love that they have little stories and that I can picture how they will work to make a game more enjoyable.

Force Multiplication is the next Schlock book, and it too needs to head off to print as fast as we can get it there. Fans have been waiting for it. Also I wrote the bonus story and I’m excited for it to see print.

I have the usual January accounting load. I’ve done most of it, but I still need to create 1099s for all of the contractors that we use through the year. This time the count has more than doubled because of all the art we’ve purchased for the Planet Mercenary book. There is quite a bit of set up work associated with this.

The 70 Maxims book also needs to go to print in March. This one will move more quickly than the Planet Mercenary book. It has a lot fewer words, no index, and very few images to manage.

I think the parenting project has (finally, after 3 years) hit a lull where I’m not having to do diagnosis or crisis management for any of my kids. I’m a little reluctant to say this because there is a superstitious piece of my brain that thinks saying it out loud will jinx it.

One of my current projects is teaching Link to be a good work assistant. We’ve put him on the corporate payroll and are paying him a bit over minimum wage for the hours he works. This means teaching him how to be willing to work on my schedule instead of his. He’ll also be learning about tax withholding and basic money management. I think he has the potential to be an excellent assistant. This will become critically important when we hit May, June, and July when we’ll be shipping out all the projects that we’ve been spending the last six months (and the next three months) creating. Fortunately Kiki will also be home to help, so I’ll have two trained assistants.

Organizing the house is a constant project. There is always something to sort or to clean.

As I’ve been feeling better, writing is coming back to me. The process is slow because so much of my available creative energy is being poured into Planet Mercenary. I’m actually doing a significant amount of writing for that project. I’ll be getting writer credit as well as editorial credit. I’ve been blogging more, which makes me happy. It is a measure of my escape from depression and anxiety. My novel in progress is still waiting in the wings for me to have time to open it up again. I know it is there, but haven’t yet decided to put my effort into it.

I’ve been reading more, which is another measure of the escape from depression. I pick reading over binge watching Netflix. Right now I’m trying to (finally) finish reading the last three books of The Wheel of Time series. Then I’ve got Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson, Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, Sister Mine, by Nalo Hopkinson, and half a dozen other books in my stack of things to read. I want to fill my head with stories and ideas.

I know I have other projects sitting around and waiting, but at this moment I can’t think of them. Which is fine, because I really need to do all of the above first.

Sometimes success looks like a failure to those who misunderstand the journey you’re on.

I’ve thought about this frequently as I watch Link take the reins of his own life and forge an educational path which diverges from the majority of his peers. I thought about it when I helped Kiki cancel a freelance contract. I’ve thought about it each time I have to advocate for Gleek and explain that drawing in class represents a triumph over the the other coping strategies that we’ve managed to extinguish. I thought about it when I gave Patch a high five when he managed to pull a D out of a failing grade. Each of these things was a personal triumph though they might look like failure from the outside.

I need to remember this when I look at my own projects and get ready to feel like a failure. Success can be redefined en route and it may look nothing like what I pictured when the project began.

I ran across yet another article that confuses correlation with causation. This time it is KSL saying Why You Should Rethink Your Netflix Binge There was a study done that noticed a strong correlation between people who watched a lot of television and those who had less cognitive function later in life. The trouble is the study has no way to show that the television watching caused the lower cognitive function. It could just as easily be true that people who have lower cognitive function are more likely to watch lots of television. I know that for me one of the biggest signs of depression is that I binge watch Netflix. When the depression backs off, I’m just not interested in watching that much. I’d rather be doing other things. For me it is definitely the depression that causes the binge watching not the other way around. One anecdotal example is not proof of anything, yet it may lead to a line of inquiry. What if we treated habitual binge watching television as a symptom? What if when we saw it in a person’s life and sought out where else they might need help or healing? Symptoms vanish without any work if the core condition is healed.

I met my friend for lunch. We hadn’t seen each other for several months and both of us had many things to tell. Over the next three hours we talked. I ended up taking home most of my food because talking was more important than eating. As I spoke I was surprised to realize how much good news I had to share. Somehow in the past few months many of my things have become incrementally better. There have been no major transformations, just an accumulation of days and choices that trended in good directions. I hadn’t quite realized this until I listened to myself talk to her.

Of course I also spilled my frustrations over the things that are still hard. This included the new, and still ongoing, situation with one of my kids. Yet even there the only real source of discouragement is that between where I am now and the point where it will all be fine again are an unknown number of emotionally charged conversations. I will have to navigate it all carefully and the thought makes me tired.

There are only a few more days between me and the launch of a new year. For me the year truly begins next Monday when we resume our regular school and work schedule. I’ve already mapped out the things I will be doing on the days in between. Those days will pass quickly. I’ll be taking them one by one, because that method has worked the last few months. And maybe somewhere up ahead of me is another moment when I can look back and see how much better things are.

On first glance it is just a box of chocolates, a nice gift. But this box was not purchased, every chocolate in that box was hand made by a great-grandmother assisted by her children and grand children. There are 55 different kinds of chocolates in that box. Creating them is a project that spans from September through December. Or so the note that came with the box tells me. This box came as a gift from a neighbor who knows we’ve been having a rough time. I feel honored that he chose to include us in what is obviously a treasured family tradition.

This is not the only gift that has come to our door in the past few days. We have kind and generous neighbors so there have been all sorts of snacks and treats. I am grateful for them all. Each is evidence of the goodness of people. They took time to think of us. I am especially grateful because other than writing a few Christmas cards, I haven’t had energy to think of Christmas beyond the walls of my house.

I look at these gifts and I’m once again astonished at the many forms that people use to express their creativity, gratitude, and love. Many of these people would be surprised that I use the word creativity in reference to their cookies or roll of wrapping paper. Yet even a hastily purchased candy bar with a note slapped on it is a creation. It seeks to create a feeling of connection and remembrance. It seeks to strengthen a friendship. The thoughts really do count for a lot.

We were only in the store because there was a birthday party. It started soon and Gleek needed a gift for her cousin. The store was bustling with Holiday energy and Gleek found many things that made her squee. We had gift in hand and were headed for the front of the store, when a cover caught my eye. I’d been moving so quickly that I had to backtrack three steps in order to take a closer look. I picked it up, glanced at a couple of pages, falling in love with the little round idea in its pages. I need this book. I felt it with certainty, so I did what I rarely do, I just added it to the stack and kept moving.

The check out line was, naturally, bracketed by items ready to be impulse bought. That was where we saw the 642 books. Again: I need this book. This time I considered longer. I had time since Gleek had to deliberate whether she wanted a 642 book or a craft book for herself. My rational mind had arguments against extra purchasing, but for once I listened to the child desire. More than child desire, it was as if a piece of me recognized itself and leaving the books at the store would be wrong. They came home with me.

My instinct was not wrong. What Do You Do With an Idea? is charming in all the right ways. The 642 book will help me on the days when it feels like I have nothing to say. Not that I’ll use ideas from it for the blog, but that it will help me practice writing regularly again, which has been harder this past year.

Acquiring a new picture book made me remember the other picture books I have that hold a special place in my heart. I’ve collected them together on the shelf. I went to run my fingers over the spines and I remembered how much fun it was to read them aloud to my children. I miss the nightly snack and story time. I miss putting inflection into my words and watching young faces react to the story. I’m certain that story times will come to me again. There will be young children in my life in years to come. For now I’ll just treasure the stories and read them to myself.