Work

Catch Up Day

By / October 15, 2012

I was staring down the barrel of Monday after taking three days off of work to venture into the realm of visiting relatives and college campuses. The four days prior to that I was functioning at minimal levels due to a head cold. Stuff had piled up and Monday was the day to get it all done. The only way I could possibly do it all was to deploy lists and minions–five lists, four minions. I wrote a list for each child and left the lists on the counter. My list resided in my google tasks window. At 7 am the work began.

I wish I could take credit for training my kids right, but I can’t. The truth of the matter is that each of them made choices this morning. I made the lists, but they could easily have chosen to rebel or get distracted. Instead my kids decided to own those lists, to claim them and dispatch them as quickly as possible. By noon the house was cleaner and all the critical kid tasks were complete. (Except for Patch’s science fair project which required my participation and thus was the one item on his list which remains incomplete here at bedtime.) I grant you that we have carefully practiced doing chores. We’ve created system after system for tracking chores, assigning chores, rewarding work done, and applying consequences for incomplete work. Each system was built out of the functioning bits of prior systems that had fallen apart. There is definitely a refining process as we figure out what works and what doesn’t for each child at each stage of life. Mostly though, the kids have realized that they have power to make our lives better, that when they do work life is happier, that if they don’t things feel chaotic. Some of this learning is the result of me being too tired and stressed to save them from from the consequences. My kids are good workers because I built a structure and then got out of the way. This let their innate awesomeness have room to grow.

My list of things also shrank by leaps and bounds through the morning. The largest of these things was that I needed to be online to help answer questions and troubleshoot during the opening of registration for the Writing Excuses Workshop and Retreat which will take place next summer. It is an event I’m really excited to be part of, but which I’ve not been mentioning online because there was only so much space and it seemed important to let those who follow the Writing Excuses blog have the first chance to register. They wasted no time at all. The event was sold out within ten minutes. Mary and I were online for an hour more just to double check everything and iron out a couple of minor behind-the-scenes organizational issues. So next June I’ll be headed back to Chattanooga for another writing retreat. Only this time I’ll have Howard with me and I’ll probably get to do some teaching. I’m looking forward to it.

By the time my kids were finishing up their lists I was barely half way through mine, and I was losing steam. I always assign myself more things to do than can be reasonably done in the allotted time. This is because some days I really can get it all done. Most days I just can’t. Also I have to put every random task I think of on the list or I will lose track of them. I often put things on lists for next week or even next month so that I can forget about them today. Somehow the afternoon turned into a slog for just about everyone. Then we all had to wade through patches of cranky in the evening. Yet here we are at bedtime with most of the things done. I do feel caught up, like tomorrow can be a normal day instead of a sprint. That will be nice. We need a steady pace for a while.

The Steps to Deciding on Merchandise and then Managing It

By / October 4, 2012

My inventory day yesterday required me to stare at all of the various merchandise that we’ve made over the last few years. Then I started thinking about the decision making process behind creating that merchandise and I thought it might be useful to outline how that works.

1. Cool idea! This is the fun part of creating merchandise, before any work is invested. We’re able to say wouldn’t it be cool if… we had miniatures, there were a t-shirt with a maxim on it, we had schlock patches. Howard and I come up with fun ideas all the time. Fans come up with them too and tell us about them. They have to pass the rest of the steps before they can exist.

2. Broad appeal? For every cool idea, Howard and I have a discussion of whether it will appeal to most Schlock fans or if it will only interest a few. No merchandise will interest everyone, but the more people we can interest the better. Other wise we have a basement full of stuff that no one is buying. Books and calendars interest many fans, water bottles and miniatures only interest a few. We can still make the lower interest items, but it affects pricing and quantities.

3. Costs. There are different kinds of costs involved in merchandise. Production costs are the most obvious. We have to find a supplier who manufactures the merchandise we want. We would dearly love a bowl-sized yellow mug printed with Tub of Happiness, but we’ve never found a supplier who can do it the way we imagine. Space is another cost. Bowl size mugs are physically large and I only have so much room to store things. Every inch of space I give to mug storage can not be used for book storage–and books sell better. There are costs in effort as well. T-shirts take lots of effort because I have to track sizes as well as styles. Merchandise also gets rejected because of shipping concerns. We tend to avoid things that break easily in transit. We also avoid things which require new packing methods. I’m already stocking eight different types of shipping containers. Storing those shipping supplies also takes up space.

4. Price point. We have to evaluate all the various costs of the item against the price we think people are willing to pay. Some really cool ideas are simply not profitable because they cost too much for the amount of money they can earn.

5. Budget evaluation. We only have so much money available to fund new merchandise. If we have to choose between printing a book and making goopy Schlock in a cup, the books are going to win every time. Every item of merchandise we choose means there are at least three others which we can’t fund.

6. Design. All of the above steps are discussion and research. We can do those in the space of an hour if things line up right. This one is when Howard commits art. We have to find space in Howard’s schedule to create whatever thing we’ve pictured. Many cool merchandise items stall in this stage for a very long time. Sometimes we even lose track of them because we’re too busy.

7. Production. This stage begins with sending files to a supplier. Usually there are a couple of rounds of merchandise approval, but mostly this stage is made of waiting.

8. Marketing. With merchandise in hand we have to sell it. Sometimes the marketing begins before the design and production phases. When we run a pre-order it is often to answer the questions of appeal and quantity. It also helps to build interest in the merchandise. Older merchandise still benefits from marketing attention. Most of our marketing plans are “Howard will announce it from the Schlock blog and tweet it.” This works great for Schlock merch. It did not work well when we put out Hold on to Your Horses and realized that Howard’s audience is not mine. For non-established businesses the marketing discussion needs to be up there around step 3, before any money is spent.

9. Inventory management. And now we’ve come full circle back to my inventory day. I have to keep track of all the merchandise so that I do not sell more than we have in stock. It is also critical that I be able to find merchandise and ship it within a day or so of when it is ordered. I have to manage both the physical inventory in my house and the inventory listed in the online store to make sure that they match each other.

Merchandise is a lot of work, but there are rewards that aren’t measured in money. We love the moment when someone walks up to our booth at a convention and lights up “Oh I have to have that t-shirt! It is perfect!” We agree. It’s why we made the shirt. I just wish that more of the cool ideas passed the rest of the steps into reality.

Inventory Day at the Schlock Warehouse

By / October 3, 2012 / 1 Comment

When my front room looks like this:

Then I know it is time to have an inventory day. These packages are the returned merchandise from Chicon with a couple of boxes of books from the UVU Book Academy thrown in for good measure. The Chicon boxes only just arrived because the truck they were in had some cross country adventures on the way back to us. Fortunately the merchandise inside was all fine, just the boxes were battered by being shipped across the country and back again.

An inventory day is when I sort through boxes and put all the merchandise back on the shelves in my shipping room so that I can find it again when I need it. Sometimes an inventory day also requires me to re-arrange my storage arrangements as merchandise sells out and other merchandise is added. Today I’ll definitely be needing to rearrange because one of the things which arrived from Chicago were these:

We have 14 of them and I’ll be putting them into the store as soon as I get some proper product photos taken. That will happen after I’ve figured out where to store them that is not in my front room. The Schlock Mercenary shipping and warehousing department takes up an entire unfinished room in our basement.


There are also two storage units off site where we store large pallets full of boxes of books.
My shipping station is set up more or less in the middle of the room where I’ve got easy access to most of the merchandise.

You can see that I keep the most shipped inventory close along with various sizes of boxes and packing paper. I print invoices and postage in my office, but then I stand at the shipping station to pack the boxes. We usually average between five and ten orders per week during most of the year. November and December tend to average ten to twenty orders per week. During pre-orders we’ll get anywhere from a hundred to a thousand orders depending on what shiny thing we’ve put up for sale. The massive pre-orders are handled differently from the daily shipping.

One of the fun things about an inventory day is discovering that of the ten copies of Hold on to Your Horses that I sent to Chicon, only one came back. One is the perfect number of books to have after a convention, because I know that I sold as many as possible and there is only one left to ship home. Cobble Stones also only had a single copy return.

In addition to all of the Chicon packages, we had a single package from GenCon. The T-shirt collection we had in storage there had become somewhat random. We decided to ship them all home and re-stock completely next year. The box contained some shirt designs which we’ve discontinued.

I put them all into our store so that we can clear out the old inventory and make way for new things. Selling the old inventory makes physical space and provides the funds necessary to make new things.

Sorting through all the boxes showed me that it was time to upgrade one of our stacked pallets into a shelf. So that is my next task for today: assembling shelving. At the end of it all, I will have gone up and down the stairs countless numbers of times. I suppose I can call it exercise. Putting the storage and work space in the basement means that we end up carrying things up and down stairs regularly. Until we’re able to budget for an actual warehouse/office this is the best solution we’ve got.

Being Back at Home

By / October 1, 2012 / 1 Comment

One nice thing about being away from home for a week, it makes me glad to return to all the little tasks of the house. I’d completely forgotten that there is a satisfaction to dishes and laundry. Doing these things definitely becomes a burden over time, but being away from them for a week let me remember when I first started doing my own laundry and felt very grown up about it. This evening I enjoyed the process of planning and preparing dinner, even taking time for extra touches like putting a pitcher of water on the table so that everyone could remain seated instead of constantly bobbing out of their chairs to go get drinks or salt. I need to try to remember that these things are nice instead of always feeling burdened by them.

Kiki cried last night. At first it just seemed part of her head cold or perhaps just a cranky day. However it quickly became apparent that the real reason was that I had come home. She’d been strong and responsible all week long, with me home she could relax and confess how hard it had all been. Except, she told me, it wasn’t all hard. Lots of it was interesting and fun. She liked being grown up, but it was really nice to stop for awhile. I hugged her tight and reassured her that I want nothing more than several months of all of us staying home. It was what she needed to hear, not just that I would be here, but that I wanted to be here. She’d been picturing me off having a gloriously fun time only to return to the work of mothering. I did have fun, but I also spent a lot of time wishing that I were at home doing my regular things.

The other kids did not cry, but they were all quick to drop what they were doing and come hug me. Then they ran back to their things. None of them had tales of woe or worry. They were just glad to have me back.

So today I’ve been picking up where I left off. I’ve shipped out the orders which accumulated in my absence. I cycled many loads of laundry. I tackled the accounting. I slept in my own bed. All is well. Yet there are still reminders of my trip. I just picked a leaf out of my keyboard, remnant of sitting outside to type. I’ve also decided to aim for writing 500-1000 words per day. Those words can be blog posts or fiction. I’m not going to post word counts publicly, I’m just going to try to stretch a little and see where it takes me. If I don’t do something, then it would be all too easy for me to just dive into routine. I watched today how all those little tasks, which I was newly happy to do, each took a bite out of my day until it was consumed. If I want to write, I have to prioritize writing. So I shall.

For now, it is time to step away from the computer and complete the remaining small tasks of the day.

League of Utah Writers Annual Round Up

By / September 10, 2012 / 1 Comment

This Saturday Howard and I will be attending the League of Utah Writers annual Round Up. I’m very excited. I get to be part of a panel discussion along with Howard, Brandon Sanderson, and Emily Sanderson. We’ll be talking about the crazy transition when suddenly the creative career becomes the only career and how that affects the family. Since Brandon, Emily, and Howard are among my favorite people it is going to be fun. I’m also eyeing some of the other sessions. They’ve got people talking about creative non-fiction, poetry, etc. It looks like there is a lot I can learn. If you’re interested in writing and have the time, the Round Up is a good place for you to be on Saturday.

Cost Benefit Analysis on a Convention

By / September 5, 2012

The first day after a convention is for sleeping off the exhaustion, but the next day is for cost benefit analysis. A successful convention gives more than it costs in emotional, career, and financial rewards. We’ve had lots of successful conventions. Sometimes the sales aren’t great, but a business contact is made which opens up a world of new possibilities. Other times there are no particularly shiny business opportunities and the sales are mediocre, but we get to share laughter and conversations with lots of good people. There are always good things and bad in every show. Howard comes home and unpacks his brain, complaining of the unpleasant things, joyfully telling about the fun stuff. As he talks, we try to figure out how the next show could be made better.

Sadly Chicon (WorldCon 70) lands in the red for us. Howard had lots of fun. He’s spent hours telling me about conversations with fans, writers, personal heroes, and friends. He had our dream team of booth help, a crew that stuck with him not just for retail, but also who bolstered him up during the emotional ride of the Hugos. We have fun pictures, and business cards of people to contact after the show. Unfortunately we planned poorly and spent too much. Taken over all, the show simply did not pay all that back. Howard began the show with a slight emotional deficit because of the low buffer and GenCon fatigue. We figured that sales in Chicago would be higher than they were in Reno since the convention itself would be larger. We budgeted accordingly, arranging to have extra booth help and ship the necessary product to support that. Our expenses where higher than they had ever been before. This was not helped by the fact that Chicago kept surprising us with extra fees for things like parking. We did not lose money. The booth sales covered our expenses, but not enough to pay for the week of lost work, or the stress involved in preparing and running the booth. We sold less in Chicago than we did in Reno.

Our analysis of why is ongoing. It was certainly not our help which was fantastic. The booth was always hopping with conversation and transactions. The truth is that retail sales are always capricious. The dedicated fans will always find us and brighten Howard’s day by standing there to talk to him while he draws. They are our bread and butter, the reason we are able to continue to do this crazy work, which doesn’t seem like it should be able to support a family of six and a colorist. We love the people who seek out Howard. But if the dealers’ room is hidden off in a corner (as it was in Chicago) it reduces foot traffic. Fewer people wander by the booth to be exposed to Schlock. Sometimes there is just a mis-match between the general convention populace and Schlock Mercenary. The comic can’t appeal to everyone. It appealed to a smaller proportion of people in Chicago than it did in other areas of the country. That happens too. Either that, or a larger portion had already bought stuff online. We misjudged and let the cost of coming nearly wipe out profits.

If it were only insufficient profits, the conversations with people would be more than enough to balance out the emotional ledger, however Chicon also had the Hugo awards. Being nominated is a huge honor, and a tremendous benefit to Howard personally and to Schlock Mercenary as a business. All weekend Howard had people coming up and telling him that they had discovered Schlock because of the Hugo nominee packet. But once Howard arrives at WorldCon, he starts to feel the strain of hope. He begins to realize that he’d really love to bring home a Hugo trophy and he’s probably not going to. Then in self defense, he tries to negate that hope, which leads to him denigrating his own work to himself inside his head. It becomes a weekend-long effort to try to not think about it too much, while all the time people are coming up to wish him luck. (Some of them do so while confessing that they voted for someone else. Yes. People do that. Lots. Hint: if you didn’t vote for someone, the appropriate thing to say is either nothing at all or “Good luck. I’m rooting for you.” Not “I didn’t vote for you because _______, but I’ll vote for you next year.” Pretty much anything other than “good luck” is pouring gasoline on the flame of creative neuroses. You do not have to fell guilty or apologize for your votes. Howard is strong and can laugh this type of thing off. Not everyone can.) Win or lose, the Hugos require a huge emotional expenditure. Howard works hard to find his fellow nominated friends and help them deal with the stress. He struggles to find helpful words. He tries to make sure that he is always gracious no matter how people approach him, even if what they say manages to gut-punch him right in his insecurities. It is exhausting and exciting and thrilling. But ultimately even excitement is exhausting. High emotions always take a toll, even if they’re positive emotions.

Presumably winning a trophy pays for all of that effort, someday maybe we’ll be able to report how that works. However, I’ve spoken to people who’ve won and they tell me that having the statue can make the next project harder to tackle, the fear of not being able to live up to prior success is real and can be crippling. There is also the emotional ride of having won when your friends didn’t. Whether or not Howard came home with a Hugo, I knew this week would require some emotional rebalancing.

Special note to anyone who may, in the future, be arranging the pre-Hugo ceremony photography. It can be a mad scramble to get this done in the time allotted. I know it is a hard job, like herding cats. People don’t hear announcements or disregard them. However, if you run out of time before the ceremony, do not ask the losers to come back after the awards are handed out and be photographed with the winners. Just don’t. Those who lose do not have the emotional resources to put on happy faces for the camera. The winners are in shock and may feel guilty for winning over the others in their category. Don’t make them stand together while they are still in the first hour of processing this emotional shift. Before the ceremony it is “all in this boat together” after it is different. If you don’t get the picture before the ceremony, let it go.

Also rolled up in the weekend was my absence and the reasons for it. I was pretty miserable because I was sad to miss out on friends and even more because I was actively working to disconnect the anxiety triggers which I’ve had connected to WorldCon since last year. “Disconnecting anxiety triggers” is a lot like defusing bombs, very tense and no fun at all. I tried not to let any of that leak into Howard’s experience of the event, but I was only partially successful because he is perceptive and I am honest. All of which is enough for it’s own story sometime, so I’ll leave it at that.

Among the good gifts that Chicon gave to us, are some valuable lessons. As we pick apart what worked and what didn’t, we’re better able to plan for future conventions. The glaringly obvious thing is that we have to figure out how to make WorldCon in San Antonio cost less. If we can lower the financial and emotional costs of the event, then the rewards will be sufficient to have Howard coming home excited for the next event. Obviously we need to spend less money setting up the booth, but we also need to have more comics in the buffer so that the week off of work does not feel so expensive. We need to make time for Howard to play. There were friends that Howard did not get to spend time with because he was tied down at the booth. We need to figure out how to get Howard to allow himself to play, to recognize that the emotional rewards of a convention are far more important than the financial ones. If he gives up most of the emotional rewards in pursuit of financial ones, his convention experience suffers. I think I’ve managed to locate my personal emotional landmines surrounding WorldCon, which will make next year easier. There’s more detail and quite a lot of talking in circles as we sort it out. In the end we don’t regret Chicon, we just have a list of what to do differently.

If you are one of the people who came to tell Howard you love Schlock. Thank you. If you bought something, or just said hello, or asked Howard for advice, or chatted with him at a party, then you are the reason that Chicon was not a disaster for us. You are the reason that Howard came home determined to pour his effort into the comic, instead of collapsing into a fugue of despair. To paraphrase from a Doctor Who episode: Chicon for Howard was divided into piles of good things and piles of hard things. The fact that, at the end, the pile of hard things was a little bit bigger is our fault and does not at all subtract from the goodness of the good things. If you did anything at all to add to Howard’s pile of good things. Thank you. He’s been telling me about what you did and I am grateful.

We live, we learn, we move onward.

The Eve of School

By / August 20, 2012

Summer is not gone, but it is waning. I can see it in the walnut husks on the tree that are beginning to crack and blacken. Soon walnuts will litter my lawn and deck. I also see it by the grapes growing heavy on the vines. Any day now the local robins will discover they are there and begin raiding. The signs are all around me, but summer still has some scorching hot days in store. What we’ve run out of is summer vacation. That is finished, complete. Tonight will not be one of staying up late just because. I will be carefully managing bedtime because this is the first school night of the year.

I remember when the onset of summer vacation felt rife with possibility. I made long lists of things I wanted to do, places I wanted to take the kids. Summer was play time on a grand scale. Once I began working, that changed. I could no longer alter my schedule around that of the kids. I had business obligations which did not defer to vacation, in fact some of the business tasks increased because of summer. Those big summer conventions take a toll. Instead of contemplating summer as a wide open possibility, I know in late winter what things must get done during the summer months. I do lots of spontaneous day trips for the kids whenever a free day hits, but we don’t plan and promise in advance. An unexpected result of this is that here I am, at the end of the summer, without a list of things I meant to do and didn’t. I haven’t spent these last few weeks frantically trying to finish items on that list. Instead I sit here on my porch, done with things of summer, prepared for things of fall.

It is possible that my feelings of completion have more to do with resignation. Ready or not, school will begin. I did not feel ready two weeks ago when I rounded the corner into August, I did not want to think school thoughts. But then later that same day, I did. It was like I found the drawer where all the school thoughts were stored. Once found, I was able to air them out and see what needed mending. It also helps me feel complete that I’ve done so many house tasks that have been waiting. I finally took a saw to the dead tree in my front yard. It has been rendered into a log, a stump, and a pile of branches. I’ve been staring at that ugly, dying tree for years and now I don’t have to anymore. Granted, I still have to clean up the tree shrapnel, but the major work is complete. The same with the summer conventions. In the next couple of weeks I’ll finish off these odds and ends of summer and we will fully transition into a different rhythm of life.

I am done with summer. I am ready for school. But there is a large part of me that wishes for a pause. A space in which I could spend two weeks to unfurl all those summer possibilities which we were too busy to contemplate this year. A space with the difficult pieces of summer complete, but the difficult parts of school put off for a bit. I would dearly like a pause. Perhaps I’ll find some of that in the writer’s retreat at the end of September.

Sending Howard to a Convention

By / August 15, 2012

Wind rushed past the sides of the van as the wheels rumbled down the freeway. Howard and I were on our way to the airport so that he could board a plane to GenCon. He would be gone for a week, I wanted to spend the thirty minutes of drive talking. I wanted to be with him as thoroughly as possible to make up for having to do without him. But I was tired. I cast about in my mind for conversational topics and kept pulling up the equivalent of tin cans and old boots. It wasn’t that my head was empty. My head was over-full with thoughts about the convention he faced, the things which could go wrong, possible ways to address the things which could go wrong, and then further along the causal chain of could-go-wrong clear out beyond the bounds of rationality. I looked over at Howard. He gripped the steering wheel and occasionally expressed frustration with the drivers around us. He was as full of stress as I was, yet the only thing to do was drive Howard to the airport and deal with everything beyond that when it came. We’d spent all morning scrambling with last minute business tasks. This was our chance to shed all that and be Howard and Sandra together, if only we could dodge the business thoughts and talk about something else. I commented on how the smoke from distant fires collects in the Salt Lake valley. As we descended into the valley I peered across to the barely discernible mountain ridge on the other side. Then I sat back and realized that Howard and I had fallen silent again, surrounded by thoughts we weren’t saying. I could feel the edges of business anxiety in my head. I wanted to be chatting and laughing with Howard about something cheerful, but the best we managed was a mellow companionableness as we drove down the road.

Howard hugged me tight before rolling away with his two suitcases, one full of clothes to wear, the other full of merchandise which arrived too late to be shipped. I did not stay to watch him enter the airport, the curb was needed for another farewell. The drive home from the airport was also silent, until the fourth time I had to drag my brain back from a path filled with useless worry. Then I turned on music and sang loud enough to drown out my thoughts. I continued to distract myself until late in the evening because my brain was ready to believe that I’d committed a failure of paperwork which would render Howard’s convention trip into an utter disaster. I fell asleep convinced that I’d be awakened at six in the morning by a panicked phone call.

I woke at eight, no phone call had come. Email gave me a quick note from Howard “Nice hotel and a good night’s sleep. So far so good, off to the convention center in 20 minutes.” He’d successfully arrived using the flight I’d booked. He’d stayed in the hotel that I’d reserved. Neither of these things had resulted in catastrophe, my weight of responsibility felt lighter. All the various preparations I’ve made since last January will either work or they won’t. It is all out of my hands. I am so happy to have it all out of my hands. I’m certain the booth set up brought its frustrations and stresses, but I did not witness them or be stressed by them. Instead I get to see Howard’s tweet at the end of the day “Rocked the booth prep for GenCon today. Planning to totally rock the show tomorrow.”

In comparison with Howard’s day mine is tame. He helped assemble the miniature shop in which he will live and work for the next five days until he disassembles it and comes home. I spent the day putting things in order, building shelves to store t-shirts, stretching out in my spaces. Sometimes when Howard goes on a trip, I sort of gasp with relief and collapse into a pile of post-convention-preparation uselessness. It is a definite “cats away, mice will play” feeling. For the span of time while he is gone, I can take more time off of work. Sometimes it worries me that I feel relief to have him gone. Then there are other times when I miss him terribly and can’t go to bed before early morning because the house feels wrong without him here. Today I went about my work and in the quiet spaces I missed Howard in a quiet way. My meanderings kept carrying me back to the kitchen and the flowers he bought for me on Monday because Monday was a rough day. Then I discovered the treat he hid for me to find. I’ll be glad when Howard can come back home to relax with me. Though it is going to be several weeks more before that occurs.

Mind and Body

By / August 14, 2012 / 2 Comments

Hi! I drank caffeinated soda this morning. Can you tell I’m on caffeine, cause I can totally tell I’m on caffeine. I can tell because the clouded and lethargic thoughts of yesterday have turned into the sharp, focused, and highly distractable thoughts of today. I chose caffeine this morning because Howard leaves for GenCon in just five hours and yesterday I accomplished none of the preparatory tasks I was supposed to complete. Some of that was because of pre-convention stress and denial, but the larger part was something physiological. There is a bug which has mowed down Kiki, Link, and I. Link fell asleep while playing a video game and stayed asleep for the next sixteen hours. Kiki and I did not fall asleep, we just felt like going to sleep, or like crying about everything. We’re sick. It will pass. Unfortunately I have to fulfill my role as talent wrangler and business manager before I can collapse into sleep for sixteen hours like Link did. So I am medicating myself with caffeine in the hope that I can consolidate my limited energy for the day into a small enough time span to get the necessary work done. After that, I’ll collapse into a heap and watch movies for the next day or two. This is the theory, thus far my brain on caffeine has scampered like a squirrel across the necessary tasks, but has also darted all over the place composing parts of blog entries (such as this one), done math to figure out how old my kids will be in 2020 when WorldCon may take place in New Zealand, contemplated a major clothing sort, planned how to repaint my bedroom, and made a list of things to do today. At least I’m moving, which is an improvement over yesterday, but it does highlight the connection between mind and body wellness.

This time last year I experienced a major physiological and psychological event. I had a panic attack during the Hugo ceremony. The experience threw me out of balance, or rather, it demonstrated in a not-to-be-ignored way how out of balance I had been for a long time. I’ve spent much of the last year trying to find the hundreds of small ways that I’d pulled myself out of kilter and to set myself to rights. The process has been slow and has required me to rearrange my physical spaces in order to figure out my emotional spaces. I’ve had to isolate stresses and determine why they are stressful. I’ve deliberately shaken up my usual patterns of behavior and thought, making a River Song journal, maintaining a Pinterest board, eating new foods, going new places. Then I watch my reactions to these new stimuli to see if they will lead me to hidden pockets of grief which have been driving my behaviors. I’ve learned that my body will tell me when I am stressed even if my mind is too busy to notice. When my teeth ache, it is because I’m pressing them together subconsciously while sleeping or doing other things. I do that when I’m carrying suppressed stress. This means that aching teeth is a sign that I should stop and dig around in the back of my brain to see what else is going on. There are other physical signs, I’m actually kind of amazed how accurately various kinds of stress manifest as different aches or strains in my body. Paying attention to my body teaches me things about myself.

The life benefits of good diet and exercise are commonly known. There is, naturally, much argument about the definitions of “good diet and exercise.” This is because bodies are different and the perfect diet for one person is not ideal for another. Some of my experimentation in the past year has been figuring out what forms of nutrition to which my body best responds. I’m also observing how stress changes my food cravings, or perhaps eating poorly alters my stress levels. I’m still not certain of the causality. I just know that times of high stress correspond with high chocolate and ice cream consumption. When I am stressed my nutrition deteriorates because I’m less able to spend extra energy planning healthy food. Stress shuts down the food planning circuits in my brain. This means I need to create some optimally healthy for me default meals and turn them into brainless habits during times of lower stress. I think my ideal diet is lactose free, lower carb, and reduced sugar intake. When I’m on this diet I think more clearly. When I’m exercising regularly, this is the diet I crave. Mind and body feed back into each other so that everything either falls apart or works smoothly. I fall into bad patterns and haul myself out of them over and over again. Though, hopefully, my pattern cycles are actually a spiral where I am gradually bringing myself to a healthier place for both mind and body.

I’ve often wished I could separate body chemistry from my ability to think. I usually lament this when I’m dealing with an excess of emotion due to thyroid imbalance or hormonal fluctuations. I can’t separate them. Everything is entwined, which makes change difficult and complex. All I can do is pay attention to the things my body tells me about my mind and vice versa. I can make sure that I don’t try to use a short-term emergency fix, like caffeine, as a long-term solution. And with that thought, I need to take my distractible squirrel brain and apply it to the problem of putting the appropriate clothing and supplies into Howard’s suitcase.

A Visual on the Invasion of Shirts

By / August 9, 2012

Pretty much every flat surface in my family room is covered in shirts.

And that is only counting the Scorch Marks shirt. Most of the Tagon’s Toughs shirts have been stowed elsewhere, except for a few which are destined to go into packages later this afternoon.

“Elsewhere” is currently located in my office until I get the storage space reconfigured to allow for shirts.

Those big white boxes are full of folded shirts. Next I get to begin the part of this shirt invasion that I really like, which is sending all these shirts to their new homes. Time to print some postage.