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It has been noisy in my head, noisy in my house, and noisy on the internet. I have been trying to focus despite all the noise, but sometimes that is difficult. We’re in the final week before launching the Kickstarter for Planet Mercenary: The Role Playing Game, which is an RPG set in the Schlockiverse. I’ve been deep in graphic design and concept development. I’m very excited about the project and hope to have some cool things to show you very soon. My kids are home for spring break and we’ve been doing some house reorganization as a result. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that the various types of noise combined to punch some anxiety buttons. It is nothing I can’t handle, but it does mean I’m spending energy handling anxiety when I want to be spending all of my energy working on Planet Mercenary.

In my more thoughtful moments, I’ve been pondering the ways that one person’s emotional needs can come into conflict with those of another. I see it all the time with my kids. This one needs very much to tell every single bit of her story. That one has accumulated resentment because he listens all the time and is never listened to. Just this morning I was posting to a friend about the unlimited self-centered myopia of teens. I know that at some point in their twenties they’ll finally figure out that 95% of other people’s choices have nothing to do with them. I expect that they’ll come and tell me about their grand realization. Then I’ll say “Wow. you’re right. Glad you see it.” Though what I’ll want to say is “Gah! I’ve been trying to hammer that into your head since you were twelve.” Of course, teens aren’t the only ones who do this. Adults are guilty too. I catch myself at it all the time.

As I’ve been out and about on the noisy internet, I see another human tendency in action. People tend to project their own internal critical voices onto other people. I know I do this, because I’ve been stung by it on multiple occasions. I read a comment and feel judged, but if I come back later, in a different frame of mind, I can see that there are alternate readings of those words which don’t mean what I read into them. I’ve also seen it in my kids. I come into the room calling their name and they snap angrily “Yeah. I know you want me to come do the dishes.” In fact, I’d entered to ask if they wanted a treat from the store. With my kids, I have to recognize that when I get a response that is out of proportion to what I said, then there is something else going on inside my kid’s head. I know that is true when I’m the one snapping at them. I’m almost always grouchy about something entirely different.

We all live in our own worlds inside our own heads and sometimes those worlds collide in very unpleasant ways. Right now my internal world is a noisy place, but I’m reasonably certain that if I just keep muddling through things will quiet down again.

I needed to reach Monday at full efficiency. I was scared that I would not because I was the opposite on Friday and Saturday. But Monday came and I worked at top speed. This is necessary because the next few weeks are filled with project launches. I was handling art contracts for the Planet Mercenary RPG. Planet Mercenary is going to require a Kickstarter and there is much work to do preparatory to that. I need to make spreadsheets and do math. I was wrestling with the script for the next bonus story. I’ve been exchanging email with the designer for the new Cobble Stones covers. I’ve been helping manage administrative tasks for the Out of Excuses workshop and retreat. My partially-homeschooled son needs me to keep his schooling on track and to require him to work even when he doesn’t feel like it. There are are couple of birthdays coming right up. Today was the opening of exhibitor housing for GenCon, which is always a stressful free-for-all trying to get the rooms we need. And to help fund all of the things, we needed to run a sale in the Schlock store. (Coupon code BIRFDAY15 for 20% off your order.) The sale has done well, for which I am extremely grateful. The funds that are coming in will enable all of the other things. Turning inventory into funds with which to buy new inventory is a necessary business process. I’ve spent large portions of yesterday and today over at the warehouse sending packages.

This is a busy time. It is the sort of busy that I love. Yet every single moment I’m aware of the half dozen things which I ought to be doing and am not. So, I’m stressed. And I’m very worried that I will disappoint people. In fact a part of my brain is constantly convinced that I already have. I try to ignore the feeling as much as I can because it doesn’t help, and I’m pretty sure it is lying to me.

In the meantime it is Tuesday. I’m grateful that I have so much of the week left. Yet I feel like it can’t possibly still be Tuesday because I’ve done so many things since Sunday night. Tomorrow I get to retrieve Howard from the airport. He’s been off in Chicago recording episodes for Writing Excuses. I’ll be glad to have him home. Even better, none of us have any travel scheduled until June. We’re going to have several months in a row where we can stay home and do all the projects. We’re going to need it.

I woke up this week. Not literally. It’s not like I spent the first three weeks of January (and November and December) sleeping all the time. I was awake far more hours than not. Yet this week feels like waking up. It is like remembering what well-rested feels like because the baby began sleeping through the night. That analogy is actually fairly apropos. Because this week I was not called over to a school to manage an emotional crisis. Not once. Which is a startling difference from the last few months when the vast majority of my work days were interrupted.

January is always a strange month. The beginning of it is often buried in tasks that are required to tie off the loose ends from the year before. I always have piles of accounting work to do. This year I also had many meetings, doctor’s appointments, and arrangements relating to my son’s new schooling format. Additionally, we had new health insurance. We’ve had the same insurance plan for a decade, so I had to wrap my head around the coverages and costs. The process has made me realize how very bad our old plan was. For the first time we have help covering all the mental health care that we’ve been paying out of pocket. So the news was mostly good, but I couldn’t be sure it would be until I started using the plan. January also needs to launch the new year’s efforts. This means that I have to wrap my head around the project list and start moving toward new goals. I used to be able to do all the transitioning in the first week of the year, leaving the rest of January for a mid-winter project. This year was more complicated. There were lots of loose ends. There are also lots of projects to launch.

At least now I’m finally rolling on new and exciting efforts. LTUE is only three weeks away. They’ve posted their schedule and I’m excited for the topics I’ll get to discuss. Before that I get to go on a personal trip to visit a friend, which I’ll very much enjoy. I’ve finally contacted a cover designer to get better covers for the Cobble Stones books. I’ve been etching glassware to see if I can find a process that is feasible to produce product for Schlock customers. We’ve also been having Schlock RPG meetings for the big project we’ll be launching later this year. The one thing I haven’t done enough of this week was working on actual writing. Some weeks are like that, but I really need to get back to it, particularly since my solo presentation at LTUE will be about breaking through writing blockages.

It has been a good week. I’d like to have another one like it.

I wish that I had the spare energy to dive into my son’s science fair project and exploit it’s educational value. I long for the patience to encourage him to do every step himself. I want him to learn about putting together a complex undertaking and to feel accomplished when it is done. Instead the project lands in a time when I don’t have that energy to spare. The project will get done, but it will not be the educational experience it could have been if I had more to spare.

Ditto my daughter’s history fair project which has a similarly grandiose intention, and which falls on the same week as my son’s science fair project.

I’m grateful that my kids have schools and teachers who offer them amazing opportunities to learn. I wish that we didn’t have to turn down so many. But there is no way that we can do science fair, and history fair, and spelling bee, and geography bee, and knowledge bowl, and after school robotics class, and orchestra, and, and, and… We have to choose. I wish there were some way to transport a portion of these opportunities to other children who have slim pickings in the opportunity department.

I feel guilty for complaining about abundance, even though I know that abundance can cause as many problems as scarcity. I particularly wish this on civil rights day when I think about the words of Martin Luther King, think about how far we’ve come as a society, and how much better we could be than we currently are.

I’m grateful for the people in the past who helped forge the world I live in. I’m grateful for my friends now who are willing to put themselves in the line of fire to forge a better world for my children. I hope that I can be one of them as I’m needed. This is a day for wishes and gratitude.

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.