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We’ve been working on a jigsaw puzzle in our family room and we’ve reached the stage where all that is left is different textures of tree bark. I stood over that puzzle and felt completely discouraged. I tried one little piece then another. I looked at shapes. I switched to looking at textures. I moved pieces around, sorting them in different ways. Every so often I found the right place for a piece, but mostly I stared and accomplished very little. Then suddenly something clicked in my brain. This piece goes there and that one there. Piece after piece things fell into place. I hardly had to search at all. I just grabbed things as if I’d already known where they were. An entire section, that little side tree, came together in under five minutes. It was fun. Then I found myself back at the staring part, waiting and hoping for another click.

Right now there are parts of my life that feel impossible. I’ve stared at them and stressed about them endlessly. I’ve shuffled them around this way and that way. The bits are so scattered and so many, that I have a hard time believing that they will all fit into the available space. I have to hope that somewhere ahead of me there is a click where pieces will fall into place. I have to hope that at some future point all these frustrating fragments will come together into an attractive picture. I also have to remember that all the staring and sorting pieces, which feels fruitless, is actually what makes the click possible. All that time when I thought I was gaining nothing, a part of my brain was cataloging pieces. When my brain clicked, fitting things together became effortless. I could really use some effortless, because staring at this mess is very discouraging.

The vast majority of the packages are sent. I’ve got maybe fifty left. They’re all orders which contain non-book merchandise. They’re also all US. The international orders went out last week. This is the longest I’ve ever spent in heavy shipping mode. I’ve been managing packages for this book release since the week before Thanksgiving. This is my third week of shipping all the things. I’ll be very glad to be done.

Link was happy today. I’m so glad to see him happy. I hope that the combination of therapy and school schedule changes mean that things are finally better for him. I’m going to take it one day at a time.

I can feel the difference in my thyroid dosage. I’m not yet able to see it in my life. But that is the case with a subtle shift. The effect is barely noticeable at first. The cumulative effect is significant. More time is needed.

The warehouse is something of a wreck right now. It is littered with stray tape and piles of boxes that no one has taken time to collapse. My crew from today asked if we should do some clean up before we left. Unfortunately I’d run out of time. I had to take my son to his therapy appointment. This has been the case for much of this shipping. We put packages together as fast as we can until the time is gone. I’ll have a warehouse clean up day next week. That is when I’ll finally get to evaluate the state of the warehouse and figure out what to do with all the extra pallets I’ve got laying around. It is really nice that the shipping mess is over at the warehouse instead of taking up space in my house.

I bought the kids fast food for dinner tonight. We brought it home and they sat around the table teasing each other and comparing french fries. I watched them and thought about articles I’ve read that praised the value of family dinner. It was talking about home cooked meals. There was another article which cited evidence that sometimes the stress of providing home-cooked meals can negate the value of them. My fast food solution followed the spirit of both articles. It is the coming together that matters more than the origin of the food. We’re trying to eat together more. On other nights that will mean home cooked. For tonight we laughed over french fries.

Kiki comes home on Thursday and we get to have her until January. This time Howard will be the one to drive and go get her. I’m glad she’s coming home and glad I don’t have to make the drive this week.

The weather has been warm and the pansies I planted in October are still blooming. I love that I have growing flowers in December. I’ve also got two African violets in bloom. These are small happy things. Hopefully I’ll soon have time to light some candles and watch the wax drip. It may be silly, but I find it beautiful and it makes me happy.

It appears that the last time I was clear headed enough to sort through my email was before Thanksgiving. So many unanswered messages in there. I’ve been spending every waking minute either on family things or shipping work. The other day I tweeted:

I could do all the things if the things would just hold still for a while.

The shipping is stable and simple, there’s just a lot of it. It is the family stuff which is all comprised of moving targets.

The last of the international packages will go out tomorrow.

All of my kids went to school on time. Bonus points for them being happy as they departed.

3 out of 4 kids ate breakfast.

We set Howard up to continue sketching in books.

Kiki and I teamed up to send out over 100 international packages. We made them and dropped them at the post office without incident.

All of my kids stayed at school for the entire school day and I got no phone calls from schools during those hours.

Gleek sat down with me to talk about a school assignment that is causing her major stress. It was a conversation she did not want to have, yet she stayed with me and talked with me, instead of picking a fight with me and stomping off. We now have a plan.

We put up the Christmas tree and it has lights on it. Ornaments can come later.

It was a good day, but one with very little time to rest. Up next: going to bed so that tomorrow can be another good day.

Today’s story could be about shipping. That was certainly my first focus for the day. Howard rallied the kids to help me prep the house. Some neighbor kids came and put calendars in packages. I ran errands, bought a ladder and other shipping supplies. The shipping schedule in the next two weeks is complex and wraps around the Thanksgiving holiday. Hopefully it does so in ways that will not impinge on the family celebrations.

I could also write a story about how I really wanted to get out of the house, so I packed up the kids at a moment’s notice and took them to see a movie. Being out was good for all of us.

Today also had the sadness of an important event for Patch which was missed, not because we were busy, but because we were distracted. I sat with him and shared in his sadness, because there wasn’t anything I could do to fix it. I couldn’t even suggest a substitute, because there really isn’t one.

Then there are the dozens of smaller stories. How the kids reacted when we told them the plan Howard and I have for some of our Christmas celebrations. The funny thing the cat did which made me laugh. The potted flowers I bought so that I’ll have flowers in the next couple of months.

One day. So many stories. And a brain too tired to tell any of them properly.

I keep paging ahead on my calendar. I’m looking ahead to the next few weeks. Sometimes I’m leaping ahead months to see the shape of things to come. I have to refresh the calendar information that I’m storing in my brain, because in order for all the pieces to fit, I have to know the shapes of the holes. It is an endlessly shifting puzzle.

Today I pulled out the invoices and began sorting them. Every time we do a complex shipping, I think that everything afterward will be easy. Then we think up new and exciting ways to make shipping even more complicated. This time we’ve got two sketched editions and two slipcases. I’m doing my best to take one step at a time. I’ve shifted things around at the warehouse to maximize floor space for the delivery. I haven’t yet begun to line up help, because I don’t have a defined schedule. It would be nicer if I did, but everything always shifts around. The calendars were supposed to arrive next Monday, but the printer mis-printed their hardcopy proof. I declined to accept it and they’re sending a new one. Not a big deal, except it delays the delivery. Instead of having calendars the week before we expect books, I suspect that both will hit at about the same time. Not what I’d hoped for, but I’ll deal with it.

I was glad to have a work day that was not impacted by urgent parenting tasks. It’s been a couple of weeks since that happened. I’m behind on most of my scheduled work.

Schlock Mercenary:

Prep for shipping (This includes sorting invoices, counting sketches, ordering boxes, etc.)
Warehouse reorganization (There is stuff that needs to be shifted around to make space for the incoming delivery of pallets.)
Schlock RPG preliminary layout
Challenge Coin PDF
Regular shipping
Schedule next XPC meeting

Household and parenting:

Diagnosis cycle for two kids. (This includes additional doctors’ appointments, emotional processing, etc.)
Helping two kids catch up on back work from absences
Not ignore the other two kids.
Rake leaves (make kids rake leaves.)
Basic home maintenance (Dishes, laundry, chores)
Shell two boxes of walnuts currently sitting on my back porch.

Writing / Creative:

Write about 6000 more words until I hit The End.
Begin the first cycle of revision.
Start drafting the next book.
Cover re-design for the Cobble Stones books.
Test Kindle’s new picture book platform, possibly put HH and SWH on there.
Do some picture book promotion for the coming holiday gift season.
Work on the 2014 family photo book.

Back Burner:

Finishing painting the front room and remodel that annoying coat closet.
Pay someone to re-roof the house.
Trim all the trees. (In March)
Finish writing the two picture books I have in mind.
More essay books.
Do something pretty with the dirt patch which is where our deck used to be.

In hindsight I can see that this was a heavy week. I didn’t realize earlier because none of the things in it were individually large. It was just one little thing after another until I was hunched over and exhausted from the weight of them all. Every time I finished a thing, there were three more things sitting and waiting. Or sometimes jumping up and down and screaming at me that I really ought to have done them last week. Then there were the things that lay in silent heaps making life feel cluttered. That last one is about laundry. I’ve felt quite a lot of laundry guilt this week. Laundry guilt is cumulative and I’ve accrued quite a lot of it.

I do want to get off of the “hope this works, nope, time to try something else” roller coaster that we’ve been on with Link’s homework and with Patch’s anxiety. Both are looking up today, like we may have actually identified solutions, but I’m a little afraid to believe in it yet. I’m also sad because my Kiki had a sad thing today and she called to talk to me about it. Now I wish I could hug her and make it all better. Sometimes there isn’t anything I can do except listen and that is hard.

On the happier side, Howard has finished drawing all the calendar pages. They’ll soon be colored and lettered. Then I’ll drop them into place and send the calendar off to print. That will be a nice piece to have complete.

Tomorrow is Halloween. I have an elementary school parade to attend in the morning. There are pumpkins to carve in the afternoon. And the evening will be Trick-or-Treating and answering the door. Hopefully in between those things, I’ll also be able to carve away at my list. It is shorter now than it was it the beginning of the week. I’m slowly making progress. Maybe I’ll finally have time to solve the laundry.

I’d forgotten what pre-orders do to my brain. On the surface it looks simple. We open ordering and quietly collect orders until the time comes to ship books. Except I have to track and double check those orders. I have to print invoices and make sure that I pull out the regular orders so they don’t get stuck in limbo with the pre-orders. There is also customer support email for people who need help with their orders in some way. And the influx of income brings with it some accounting tasks. We’ve had bills piling up in the expectation of having that income and now is the time to pay those bills. The result is an influx of dozens of small tasks which flood into my brain and fill up all the available spaces.

Since last Monday I’ve barely had time to take breaks. Sometimes my brain would give out and I would end up watching a show for a while, but even then I was aware of the press of Things Which Need to be Done, but Which are Not Getting Done Right Now. I flow from business task to parenting task to household management task. It does not help that the household tasks have sprouted a bunch of fall deadlines. If I want flowers next spring, I have to plant bulbs before the weather gets too cold. If we want pear butter to eat over the next year, I have to cook those pears on the back porch before they rot. There is a tree branch that scrapes our roof in storms, we need to get out and trim it off before the weather gets cold. My mind catalogs and tracks all of these things. Some parenting things also have deadlines this week. The term ends on Friday and Link has some scrambling to do in order to make sure that he passes a couple of his classes. He is discovering the consequences of letting things slide earlier in the semester. I’m biting my tongue on “I told you so.” Even though I did. Repeatedly. Experience is a better teacher for this than any lecture I can give.

Some time on Saturday I realized that I’d passed a threshold. I started being actively resentful when I had to remind a kid of a chore more than once. I also resented any additional requests which I’d not already slotted into a space in my brain. Fortunately I recognized these resentments as a sign of overload. I went to Howard and let him know that I’d hit the overload point. This means it is time to adjust. In the next weeks I’ll be knocking things off my schedule. I’ll be bowing out of some responsibilities and warning people that between now and the end of December I become flaky. I have so many things going on that I will inevitably forget some of them. I feel less guilty about that if I warn people in advance that it will happen.

The good news is that some of this will settle out by the end of this week. The new term will reduce parenting and homework pressure. I processed several batches of pears over the weekend, eventually I’ll run out of pears to cook. Once the fall gardening tasks are complete I can ignore gardening until pruning season in March. So, hopefully I’ll have a brain-busy week followed by some lull time, followed by the crazy-busy of shipping in the early holiday season.

Sorry for the radio silence. Pre-orders for Massively Parallel opened for the Schlock Patreon supporters on Monday. Which meant I was answering a lot of email and doing a lot of accounting. That slowed down just in time for the full pre-order to open on Wednesday which meant even more email, accounting, and prepping for shipping. As things stand right now, we’ve paid for the print run. That is a good place to be on day 2 of pre-ordering. It is a huge relief for us, because this was the most expensive print run we have ever done. It cost as much as a new car.

I’ve also spent some time wandering around in my warehouse and trying to picture how everything will fit. Because this is the largest shipment we’ve ever received for volume. We’re expecting 32 pallets of books and slipcases. We’ll have to immediately re-stack things tall. In fact this shipment is so big that the shipping company called us to make sure that we had space enough to take delivery. Ultimately it will have to arrive in two trucks and I hope that we can have a couple hours between trucks so that we can do the stacking. I’m pretty sure the trucking company will cooperate with that.

Mixed in with all of those business things, I’ve also been trying to catch up with home things. I’ve got pears which will rot unless I preserve them, so I’ve been cooking pear butter. There are also grapes and walnuts. So my kitchen is a place of many projects. We’re coming up on the end of the term and I’ve got a kid who is scrambling to raise some grades before it is too late. I get to assist with that. Basically I’ve been running full-tilt all week long. It’s been a good week though.