Work

Warehouse Day

By / July 27, 2011

My teenage boy and two boys borrowed from a neighbor were my minions this morning. The four of us moved three and a half pallets of books from my garage to our storage unit. Each pallet held 56 boxes of books. Each box held 22 books. Each book weighed one pound. Doing the math, we come up with approximately 3800 pounds of books moved this morning. I rejoice that my van survived hauling all of that in only four loads. I drove slowly, particularly down the hill. All that mass made it hard to stop quickly. This is one of the final steps to finishing off a Schlock shipping.

This year I decided to take the warehousing even further. We hauled all the empty pallets and pallet tops back from the storage unit where they’ve been taking up space. We also hauled out several large bags of paper and plastic garbage. At the moment we have 6 spare pallets and 24 pallet tops. Hopefully some kind soul from the Provo freecycle community will be delighted to have them and will haul them away for me. Right now they’re “decorating” a corner of our driveway and adding an air of class to the house.

The other warehousing I have to do in the wake of a shipping day is to find places for all the extra shipping supplies to belong. I also have to rearrange my storage room to make space for another book. Then there are the last few orders which required extra help to get out the door. Those are all done now. The storage room is mostly rearranged. I just have to find the energy to carry stacks of boxes and rolls of packing paper down the stairs. I’m hoping for a burst of energy later this evening. At the moment I just want to sit for awhile.

Shipping Day: Emperor Pius Dei

By / July 26, 2011 / 11 Comments

At the beginning of the shipping day we scramble to explain process to an ever-growing group of volunteers. twenty people stand and wait for me and Janci to sort out what we are doing. We have to pull out our dusty memories of what worked last time and make them fit over the physical changes in the store space since the last time we shipped. We have to assess quickly and assign jobs. Everyone is kind and patient. They are glad to be there, but I feel frazzled.

In the middle of the shipping day we have five tables with 4-5 workers at each. They’re working fast and smoothly. The book boxes are beginning to empty. The stacks of packages near the back door grow. Janci and I have time to stand back for a minute and agree that everything is going well. Two of my volunteers brought their toddler sons. These little boys walk with their dads, grabbing stray papers and putting them into the trash. I would not have expected it to work, but it does and they are adorable. Another volunteer has her infant bundled to her chest and reaches around to apply labels. Everyone is working and talking and laughing. I take some pictures and tweet our progress.

Later in the shipping day, we have begun to run out of things. The lists of invoices and labels have gotten shorter. People are asking for new lists much more often. There are more questions. The orders are more complicated. I scramble to help find missing books which have the Elf sketch, resorting to having Howard draw new ones. I stare at the tall stack of Ebbirnoth sketched books and know that the stack is tall because somewhere I made a mistake. I think I just counted wrong, but I look at the packages stacked by the door and wonder if these Ebbirnoths should go in there. But we don’t have a matching scarcity of something else to balance the extra Ebbirnoths, so I must have counted wrong.

At the end of the shipping day, we run out of labels and lists. I tell the volunteers that their job is to sit and wait for the sandwiches to arrive. They must eat the sandwiches because my kids would rather eat pizza than left over sandwiches. The food arrives and so do two new volunteers. There is nothing left for them to do. I tell them this and they look a little disappointed. I point them to the sandwiches and to the table of give away items, saying they earned them by showing up. I hope that is enough to make up for their trouble in coming. Howard sits down and draws a little sketch for each volunteer. He draws in all the books that they bring to him.

After the end of shipping, most of the volunteers are gone. The few that remain help us return the tables to their correct configuration. We pull out a vacuum and clean up the array of potato chip crumbs. My van is full of left over boxes and packing paper. And books. I drive these home and leave them to sit in the hot afternoon. In the cool evening I will get my kids to help me unload. Until then, I sit and try to quiet the fretful thoughts. It all went well. People had a good time. Just over 1000 packages were assembled and shipped in four hours. Once again we broke our own record for fast shipping. I think we can call that a job well done.

Photos and Tweets from the day:
7:45 am: Today is Schlock book shipping day. It is probable that I will tweet as we go. There may be pictures.

7:50 am: Me to @howardtayler : We can start shipping now, I have alerted the medias. (Twitter, Facebook, Google+)

8:30 am: Minions finished loading my van. Babysitters have their instructions. I’m off and running.

10:00 am: The chaos has settled in some. Note to self: next shipping stagger the start times. 30 people waiting for instructions is stressy.

10:30 am: Both the complicated orders tables and the simple orders tables finished Parcel Post simultaneously. Think this means it is going well.

10:30 am: Note to self: Three tables simple orders and two tables complicated is the right balance.

10:40 am: Boxes of postage starting to empty. This is good.

11:00 am: Youngest ever Schlock shipping helper. Three weeks old today. We’ve given her a supervisory position.

11:00 am: This is crazy. We’re going to be done before noon. I credit the record turnout of awesome volunteers.

11:30 am: …and we’re done. New volunteers showed up in time to eat food and visit. Sorry we ran out of work. #sortof

12:30 pm: Mailman brought the small truck. He’s going to have to make a second trip.

1:30 pm: With the work all done, @howardtayler sits around and draws picture for folks.

Shipping and Convention Prep Status Report

By / July 22, 2011

We are in the last run up to Emperor Pius Dei shipping. This is the season of our lives when the kids tend to themselves because I am busy. Fortunately for me, they are old enough to do so. Balancing the shipping work with family care used to be a lot harder. Shipping season has also been made tremendously easier by hiring a shipping assistant. She’s been helping me for four shipping events now.

Today will be bundle assembly. We’ll be putting together Emperor Bundles and shrink wrapping them. This will make our lives worlds easier on the shipping day because the volunteers will be able to grab a single wrapped bundle rather than 7 individual books. Bundle assembly involves hefting around boxes of books, rearranging the contents, and then hefting the boxes again. Next week I need to round up some strapping young men, hopefully with a truck, to help me shift three pallets of books from our garage over to the storage unit. Then Howard will be able to park in the garage again.

After all that is done, and the odds-and-ends of shipping is cleared away, I’ll ship Howard off to GenCon and dig in to the serious preparations for WorldCon. We’re going to be playing tetris with two vehicles, 8 passengers, luggage, and booth supplies. Fun.

Moving Onward after a Quick Turn-Around Rejection

By / July 13, 2011

“I’m afraid this isn’t a match for me, but thank you for the look. I appreciate it.” Said the answering email a mere four hours after I’d sent of the query with a quiet prayer to accompany it. I’d sent it off knowing I was unlikely to hear anything back for months. I was glad of the space. During those months I was free of obligation to that project. During those months I could unwind my tendrils of hope to attach them somewhere else. I know many authors view the long waits for query responses with distaste. I’m sort of glad about them.

Instead I’m staring at the simple words and know that it is time for me to do something again. The ball is back in my court. Instead of waiting, I’m back to researching. I’m also having to quell a whisper of sadness. The tendrils of hope were truncated. It is easy to tell myself the agent didn’t even read the query, but I’m pretty sure he did. It just wasn’t what he was looking for. Then I wonder if the query itself is at fault, if he’d just seen the book then the outcome would have been different. The speculation is pointless. At some point this book will catch the eye of an agent, or it won’t. My job is to write the best book I can, the best query I can, and to send them out. The rest is not my job.

I haven’t the energy to begin researching again tonight. The wisps of sadness are too strong. So I clicked through my regular internet rounds and saw that another person has volunteered to help with the shipping party. Sadness dissipates when faced with such good will. I am fortunate. Then Patch appeared at my elbow even though he was supposed to be in bed. “I just wanted to give you a hug mom.” And he did.

Tomorrow will be full of work. I must assemble a shipment of things for GenCon. I need to help construct a covered wagon for the pioneer parade on Saturday. I need to garden. I’m looking forward to all of these things.

Books Arrived, Work Begins

By / July 12, 2011

Books arrived. We shifted 1500 lbs of them into the house. Howard and Travis signed them. Kiki and I stamped them. Then we recruited some teenage boys to shift them all back out and down to Dragon’s Keep. Howard can commence with sketching tomorrow.

Lots of lovely people emailed me to volunteer for the book shipping day. I have the volunteers I need. I am too tired to make more words right now, so I give you some pictures of today’s work.

Scattered Thoughts on the day Preceeding Book Arrival

By / July 11, 2011

I got to 3:30 pm and realized that I had not yet accomplished a single thing on the list of tasks I assigned to myself today. I got stuff done, but it was all little jobs which didn’t get written down on my task list. Thus I was completely deprived of being able to click the little check box.

I pondered my unfocused morning and remembered that I didn’t get to bed until 1:30 am. Partly this was the fault of a good book, the other part a child who didn’t cooperate with bedtime. I did not compensate for the late bedtime by sleeping later because I’m trying to maintain a good schedule. Sometimes when I’m over tired the whole day feels like a slog. Other times I snap into a high-energy, high-efficiency state and get a million things done. Today felt like the second, but my efforts were scattered instead of focused.

At least I got the library books returned. And I bought a fresh basil plant at the grocery store. It is silly how happy that little green plant makes me. I snipped some leaves off and put them into a sandwich. Yum. Howard will probably not like the smell of it, he often doesn’t like having plant smells in the kitchen, but perhaps since this one is a food plant instead of a floral plant, he won’t mind. For now it is all bright and green on the window sill.

I’ve spent too much time checking social media today. Howard and I have been exploring the usefulness of Google+ and I’m liking it a lot so far. The only part I don’t like is being scattered across so many places. Three short-form social media sites are too many. I’ll probably drop even further out of facebook as time progresses. Twitter is nice and immediate. I’ll keep it. My long-form internet forums are my blog site and the mirror of my blog on Livejournal. Unfortunately I’ve seen a huge increase of spam commentary on Livejournal. I find it annoying to have to go swat these down manually.

Books arrive tomorrow. I’ve reached the state where part of my brain is disbelieving of this. As if I can kill the stress by denying the trucking-company-stated deliver schedule. When I open the boxes tomorrow and can hold a book in my hands the tension in my shoulders will unwind. I will have maybe five minutes of relaxed accomplishment and then all the stress will ratchet back up again as my brain switches gears to the final run up to book shipping. We sent out the call for volunteers today. At the moment I’ve had 4 people respond. I will beat back the lack-of-volunteers stress by pointing out to my brain that at least all the boxes arrived on schedule. A Fed Ex truck delivered them this morning. The driver helped me stack everything in the garage and even let my kids climb into his truck for a minute.

Later tonight we have family activities and I need to get to bed on schedule. For now I need to focus my eyes on that task list and see if I can get some of it done.

Counting and Inventory Ordering

By / July 8, 2011

A few years ago I wrote up a series of posts which walked through my process for preparing the mass mailing of new Schlock books. You can find the posts by clicking my “shipping” category or just clicking this text. I still run the shipping preparations in essentially the same manner, except that I now have an assistant who comes in and helps me with most of the steps. In fact I often refer to those posts to help me keep track of how everything is supposed to proceed. I’m currently inhabiting both the sorting and inventory preparation stages. This means that most of the sketched editions are sorted, but the orders without sketches are not. The books have not yet arrived, so we can not dive into doing the actual sketching. But there is inventory preparation which does not involve books.

In my years-ago post I didn’t mention this other inventory preparation, probably because books were the only merchandise we had at the time. Since then we’ve added magnets, stickers, prints, miniatures, and Writing Excuses CDs. We don’t have t-shirts this time, but other times we have. This means I have to comb through the ordering data and make sure that we have adequate quantities of all of these items for shipping day. This year we’re good on magnets, but the painted miniatures and stickers will need to be ordered. I have to do that asap so that we can get them back in less than two weeks. Merchandise is not the only inventory we need. Shipping supplies are required. This morning I calculated exactly how many of each type of box we will need to fill all the orders. The shipping day fails if we run out of boxes. Several times we’ve had to make an emergency run for additional strapping tape. Keeping track of all of it should feel overwhelming I suppose. It used to, but this is my 8th book shipping event. I’m no longer completely terrified that I’ll get everything wrong. Instead I’m just a little stressed that I might forget something which will be annoying to fix.

Busy has Arrived

By / June 30, 2011 / 3 Comments

Last night I was unable to sleep until 3:30 am despite going to bed around midnight. My brain was spinning with things to do and anxieties related to them. This is in sharp contrast to last week which was all drifty and lazy.
The things my brain spun in circles trying to solve:

I was notified that a space had opened up in the gifted program for which Patch was an alternate. Howard and I looked at all the factors and decided to accept the placement. This decision makes next fall a harder adjustment for Patch. As a result, both Howard and I will have to spend more energy to be available to him and to Gleek who is also entering the same gifted program. We finally made the decision to go ahead when we realized the only thing holding us back was knowing how hard it is going to be. If I spend my life trying to avoid hard things I’d never get anywhere worth being.

Books arrive in one week. By this time next week our garage will be full of books and we’ll be busy schlepping them around so that Howard can sign them and then sketch them. I’ve also got invoices to sort, shipping boxes to order, supplies to gather, volunteers to organize, and bundles to assemble. All of this is familiar work, but I need to not lose track of any of it. Our book shipping day is July 25.

GenCon is in one month. This means that the minute the new books arrive, I need to turn around and ship a bunch of them to our support crew over there. It also means we have to hammer out designs and plans for the booth space so that everything can be set up intelligently. I will not be going this year, so I have to make sure that Howard and his crew have all the pieces that they need. Also I need to buy plane tickets for Howard.

WorldCon is in six weeks. I have an outline of a plan which gets me, Howard, four kids, two booth helpers, associated luggage, and all booth supplies to where they need to be. It is time to start fleshing out the outline and pinning down details. The details will show me the faults of my outline, this has already happened. We have to be in Reno a full day earlier than I thought we did. I have to extend the hotel stay, hopefully that will work.

School starts in seven weeks. I will have to cart all my kids home and then immediately turn around to start them off in school. My brain is still going to be post-convention unsettled and I won’t have time to settle it before I have to start working with schools and teachers.

Somehow in the midst of all of the above, Howard needs to not just maintain the buffer, but get ahead on all of it. I’m supposed to be writing. The kids are supposed to be doing chores. In theory Gleek and Patch are practicing times tables and reading books. Kiki is working her way through an online course which it now looks like she won’t be able to finish before the end of the summer. Kiki is supposed to be learning how to drive, but we haven’t yet felt brave enough to take her on the freeway. Laundry and dishes are omnipresent. Things keep growing in the yard and I have to suppress the unpleasant ones so the nice ones can flourish. Howard needs to brainstorm bonus stories and outline the things he wants to write in the retreat this fall. And my house is full of people all the time.

It is my intention that on July 4th I will re-capture the blissful denial of last week. On that day I will be excused from everything except hanging with my kids, having a chalk drawing festival, eating ice cream, lighting fireworks, and visiting with neighbors.

No wonder I couldn’t sleep.

Pre-Order Neurosis

By / June 27, 2011

The first Pre-order day is always full of free-floating stress looking for things to barnacle. All those months of preparation and planning, all the financial calculations and predictions will be resolved within the next few days. This is when the customers show up to buy, or they don’t. If they do, then we get to proceed toward shiny future A, which includes paying our bills and shipping out a thousand books in less than 30 days. If they don’t, then we have to flee toward contingency plan B. Then there is the unlikely possibility that customer turn out will exceed expectations and we’ll get to trot briskly toward some castle in the sky. (Where we’ll discover that floating castles are a lot more work and expense than one would expect.)

Orders have been open for an hour, and we don’t know yet which financial future we’ll be implementing. Howard and I end up standing in the kitchen away from obsessively checking our computers. Except that we talk, and naturally the conversation turns toward big picture plans. We talk about what to do if this pre-order causes us to sell out of The Blackness Between, forcing an immediate reprint. We think ahead to the next book release. Would it be better to work on the next book in line, which needs recoloring, or should we jump ahead to Massively Parallel which is ready to go? We can’t answer any of these questions today. The right answers depend upon the results of pre-orders and it will be Wednesday or Thursday before we have an accurate prediction on those. So we should table all the questions and wait. We try, but if we’re separate we gravitate to our computers to check on sales. If we’re together our conversations drift toward future plans. Catch 22 and we’re stuck orbiting the question of pre-orders.

In theory the best idea would be for us to get away from the house and ignore the pre-order entirely. Unfortunately I represent the entire customer support department. This requires me to be on hand to help customers who are having trouble with the system or who just need a question answered. We will send Howard away as soon as Dragon’s Keep opens. He’ll go focus on drawing comics. I’ll be here, keeping tabs on things. Theoretically I can get some other things done, small things which don’t require extended focus. In practice that hasn’t happened yet. Instead I’m hovering, watching orders trickle in, and babbling on my blog.

Return of the Business Sandra

By / June 25, 2011

Late last night Howard and I found ourselves tangled in a conversation which lasted almost an hour. We were both tired, emotions were a bit raw. He was frustrated that I had been drifting. I was sad that my calm happiness had resulted in stress for others. Howard was actively worried about the upcoming pre-order. My brain kept circling in sadness and mucking around in emotions.

Then in the space of three sentences, I found myself shifting from analyzing emotional motivations to listing off merchandise things and why I thought that we would be fine despite the specific sources of Howard’s concerns. The business manager in my brain came out of whatever dark closet in which she’s been buried and she took control of the conversation. Within five minutes Howard was feeling calmer, I had a list of things to do today, and the world seemed upside right again.

I have to remember that while it is important for me to acknowledge and experience the touchy-feely parts of my psyche, there is something to be said for that strong part of me who just gets stuff done. I’m going to have a busy few days and I need my business brain to handle them. However in the quiet moments when the work is all done, I also need to figure out what impelled me to bury that part of myself for two weeks. Vacations are allowed and important, but this wasn’t a declared vacation, it was more an unannounced abdication.

My brain gets weirder the more I pay attention to the stuff it does.