Work

Audit Day at Tayler Corporation

By / June 21, 2011 / 2 Comments

The text on my phone said UTAH DEPT WORK, so I answered it. That was how I discovered that our business had been randomly selected to be audited by the Utah Department of Workforce Services. They wanted to check our finances to ensure that we were paying necessary unemployment insurance on all our employees. The woman on the other end of the line was very pleasant. She introduced herself as Jan and explained the process we’d go through. She even cracked a conversationally-appropriate joke. We set up an appointment for the following week.

I used to live in terror of audits. I feared that the IRS would swoop down on us, tell me that I was doing all of the accounting wrong, and then demand lots of money which we couldn’t afford to pay. My fears were born of my inexperience at accounting. I’d learned it all on-the-job. I’d made huge organizational tangles and then had to untangle them. Those fears only faded after years of annual tax visits with a certified accountant who assured me that my bookkeeping was just fine. It was a measure of my acquired confidence that the word “audit” did not send me into a panic attack.

Jan sent an email with a full list of the things she needed to see for the year 2010: payroll records, w-2s, w-3s, 940 & 941 forms, 1099 forms, income tax returns, a check register, and a general ledger. I scanned the list and knew exactly what each item was, where it was filed, or how I could make my accounting software spit it out for me. Collecting everything would have taken less than an hour, except that the general ledger was 378 pages long and took a while to print.

On the appointed day, Jan arrived at my house. She entered with a pleasant air of competence. I had no doubt that she was fully capable of getting hard-nosed if she needed to be, but she was starting at friendly and hoping to stay there. We sat at my kitchen table. Jan pulled out her computer and began setting up. She apologized because she was wearing a bracelet with a bell on it.

“It looked so cute and pretty when I bought it. I had no idea that the sound was going to drive me crazy.” Jan held up the tiny bell so I could see it. “I’m going to have to get wire cutters and clip it off.”

“We have wire cutters!” announced Gleek, who’d been attracted by the jingling noise. Gleek darted to the garage and fetched the clippers. So I clipped the bell off the bracelet, and Jan gave the bell to Gleek who ran off happily. Jan and I smiled at each other and the real work began.

There was a little awkwardness at first. I knew I needed to be available to answer questions for Jan, but mostly she just needed to look at the papers I provided. I didn’t want to hover, but I couldn’t leave the room. After about 10 minutes I found a good solution and used the time to hand sew some of Link’s scout badges onto his bandoleer. Jan and I chatted a little as she worked. She was interested in Howard’s job as a cartoonist.

“I admire creative people.” Jan said. “I can’t draw a straight line with a ruler.”

Some of our discussions were more to the point. I explained why we pay Travis Walton, that he is a professional artist with his own business and he contracts work from lots of different people. This satisfied her that he was in fact a contractor rather than someone who should be treated as an employee. Several other names came up and I explained who they were and what we had paid them to do. I was honest in my replies. Not only is honesty the best policy, but this was a chance for me to make sure that my definition of “employee” matched the state definition. Jan was never accusatory in her questions, she just needed to sort information appropriately.

“That’s it.” Jan said as she closed her computer. “I’ll write up your report and send you a copy via email. It’ll all be zeros, because you’re good.”

Howard happened to be in the room to hear this announcement. He asked, “Out of curiosity, on a scale of one to ten, how did we do on providing the information you needed?”

“With one being the hardest and ten being the easiest, I’d say you guys were an eleven.” Jan answered with a smile. Then with a little prodding from us she told a couple of stories about difficult cases. She told outlines only, without names or identifying details. She left us with a card and encouraged us to call her if we have any questions about state tax laws. Then she walked out the door less than 45 minutes after she walked in.

The whole experience was interesting and pleasant. It was nice to be reassured that we are, in fact, running our business correctly. However even if we’d been making mistakes, Jan would have been happy to help us sort them out. This is the auditors job: to make sure things are being done properly and, if they aren’t, assist in getting things corrected. An individual auditor may be grouchy, cross, or on a power trip; but their intended purpose is to help, not to punish. I don’t want to be audited, but I’m not afraid anymore. This audit did cost me a few hours of time, but on the whole the process was interesting and pleasant rather than otherwise.

Summer Afternoons

By / June 15, 2011

Summer afternoons exist outside of measurement by clocks. They commence sometime around lunch and continue to exist until dinner. The surest way for me to miss a scheduled appointment is to place it in the middle of a summer afternoon. I would feel bad about this, except somehow it is hard to dredge up a proper load of guilt and anxiety when the kids are out back running through the sprinklers while eating popsicles.

Unfortunately summer evenings are less timeless. Clocks tick and chime to remind me that it is now 9 pm and many of the things I intended to accomplish remain incomplete. In the evening, when the warm summer sun has vanished, I calculate and plan. I revise lists. I promise myself to work harder because the tasks really do need to get done. But since it is already 9 pm, it really is too late to get started. Bedtime is near and I should unwind for sleep. The lists are made and I’ll get right on them in the morning.

Summer morning defies alarm clocks. We are free from the relentless march of school schedules and I find myself sleeping until I am done. Being rested is good, but when I finally get moving on the day I have a mere two or three hours before I find myself once again in the midst of a summer afternoon. So I slide through days or a week, attempting to be focused and not quite managing it. At the moment this is fine. I’m in a business lull which was extended because we delayed the opening of pre-orders by two weeks. I have to trust that the necessary energy and drive will be available when I need it again. For now, I need to hand out another round of popsicles and spend some time outdoors.

Emperor Pius Dei Arrives at Our Door

By / June 9, 2011 / 2 Comments

I woke this morning to a head full of stress. We’d been told that the advance copies of Emperor Pius Dei would ship out yesterday, but I’d gotten no shipment notifications. Even if the package shipped out today, I did not think it could arrive before we were due to open pre-orders on Monday morning. While we can open pre-orders before the advance copies arrive, we really don’t like to. I like being able to hold the book in my hands and know that we have something which is of salable quality. Holding the book in my hands quiets all those voices in my head which gleefully list all the ways It Could All Go Wrong. Howard and I discussed the situation and decided that we would open pre-orders anyway, particularly since we’d already announced that we would.

Then the doorbell rang and a lovely Fed Ex lady handed me a box. It was full of these:

We have our advance copies and my panic can now subside.

The arrival of advance copies and impending opening of pre-orders shifts my life into a different gear. I’m pulling out rusty skills and putting them to use creating product pages and stress testing the system. I’ve done this 10 times. I know how it goes, so the jitters I feel are not a surprise. I’d gladly skip them if I could, but the opening of pre-orders is when all my zen about our finances vanishes. Either we’ll sell enough books to continue paying our bills through the end of the year, or we’ll be scrambling to restructure our lives around a massive financial hole. Book printing and mortgage bills need to be paid whether or not the Schlock fans decide to spend money. They have never failed us yet. I know I should trust in them because they are awesome people. And yet I can’t help feeling that each book purchase is a gift to us and I can’t make myself expect gifts.

I did have a nice moment when I lined up all the books to take product photos. We’re offering an “Emperor’s Bundle” which includes all seven Schlock books at a discounted price. I looked at all the books arrayed on the table and knew that those books would not exist without me. I have worked and sacrificed to make them exist. Howard has worked and sacrificed. For a minute as I looked at them on the table, they were their own reward. Then I photographed them so that they could go out into the wilds of the internet and hopefully return with friends bearing gifts of money.

New Things I am Learning

By / June 8, 2011 / 2 Comments

1. How to research and query agents. I’m starting by asking my friends about their agents, once I’ve dried up that source of information I’ll resort to the internet.

2. How to set up our online store for a pre-order. This is one of those things which I expected to learn once, but instead I have to re-learn every time I do it. The software keeps updating and changing in between pre-orders. Also our needs shift and change from book to book. On the list of things to research for the store: how to set it up to deliver electronic only files and if it can track orders based upon how a customer arrived at the site. (It would be useful to be able to figure out if a tweet or a blog post is more effective in driving sales.)

3. Graphic design. I have text books sitting on my desk and gathering dust. I fully intend to study them and get better at this job I’ve been doing for four years now. I want to know how to purposefully create rather than just muddling through.

4. How to manage four kids at home all day and still get my work done. Again, it seems I should know how to do this, but the kids change from one year to the next making hard things easy and introducing new hard things. Also the summers have different demands, different camps, different scheduled items. Last year there were swim lessons, this year I haven’t scheduled any. This year there will be a summer drama camp if I can ever get in touch with the teacher long enough to get the kids registered. Generally I get it figured out just in time for everything to shift around again.

5. Marketing. There are always marketing things to learn. If I learn and apply marketing skills then (in theory) we will have more money. More money means less immediate stress. I like being less stressed, but I still don’t like marketing.

6. Freelance non-fiction writing. I’m just on the front edge of this, beginning by emailing some people I know who do it. I have enough writing skill that I could be earning money this way. But before I can earn money I have to figure out how to find people who are willing to pay for my words. Then I have to figure out what kinds of words I am willing to sell. Ideally I’d be able to sell some of my essays with only minor revision. Getting paid is not the only aspect of this which interests me. I like being able to say things which are useful to others.

7. How to make over a dress. I already know a lot of sewing, but a make-over project is inherently dictated by what already exists. I have to figure out each step as I go. I’m also doing researches on acquiring discounted materials.

8. How to pick up and start writing a new project after completing a large project. This one is harder than I would have thought.

It would be so lovely to be able to focus on learning one new thing and be really excited by it. That is not my life. I’m not sure that luxury comes to very many people in this world. At least most of these things do not have fear attached. I like it when I can learn without being driven by terror of failure.

Introducing Myself

By / May 29, 2011 / 3 Comments

I’m still working on figuring out how best to introduce myself to new people here. The focus of who I am shifts depending upon the social circumstances of the introduction. So far I’ve been introduced as a fiction writer, a blogger, Howard’s wife, the manager of Schlock Mercenary, one of Mary’s alpha readers, and as Mary’s guest. It has been a fascinating opportunity to watch how I am treated based on the framing of the introduction. Unfortunately the usefulness of the experiment is somewhat foiled by the excellence of the people to whom I’ve been introduced. I’ve been uniformly spoken to with respect and interest. The shape of the respect and the follow-up questions is different, but if the conversation lasts for any length of time the other aspects of who I am also get touched on.

The one major role in my life that has not been my primary introductory lead-in is being a parent. Again, that gets mentioned but often much later. Once again I’m having the experience where I mention the quantity of my children and people are a bit startled. I’m still sorting the experiences and trying to rehearse so that I can introduce myself comfortably. The process is surprisingly similar to writing an elevator pitch for a book. I now have two sentence introductions for my blog, my Schlock Mercenary work, and my book. Having the pitches is really useful so that I don’t have those deer-in-the-headlights moments when someone says “And you are? What do you do?”

This convention is perfect for playing with the introductory options and pitches, because I’m not actually trying to pitch anything. I have no goals to forward, no people I need to seek out in order to advance my career. I am able to just meet cool people rather than seeking out people because I am hoping for something from them. It is a very pleasant way to attend a convention.

And now, to breakfast.

Taking a Spin in the Hugo Happy Fun Anxiety Barrel

By / April 28, 2011 / 6 Comments

In a recent blog post, John Scalzi described being nominated for a Hugo award as taking a ride in the Happy Fun Anxiety Barrel. I read that and I laughed out loud because it is so true. I am in an odd place in relation to the Hugo awards. I am not the one nominated. It is not my work out there for scrutiny. Except that it is. What ever happens to Howard also happens to me. If he gets on an emotional roller coaster, I am along for the ride by default. This is one of the things about loving someone that is by turns wonderful and hard. Also it really is my work. I spend as many hours on Schlock Mercenary as Howard does. Mine is supportive work rather than creation, but I still care deeply about it.

This is the third time we’ve been nominated for a Hugo. This is our third year in a row we get to ride in the barrel. We knew about this nomination two weeks before it was announced publicly. For two weeks we felt light, happy, honored. It was particularly fun that we got to share the joy with several close friends who were co-nominated with Howard for Writing Excuses. Then the full nominee list went public. My first look at the list was a quick scan for familiar names. There were many, and I rejoiced. Then I focused on the two categories where Howard is nominated. My stomach just about sank to my shoes. There was no way we could win. Ever. Not against those amazing people. And I was sad, because I feel like Howard’s work is worthy of a rocket ship trophy. I know the fact that he made the list means that lots of people agree with me. I know I should be able to bask in the glow of nomination, but I remember. I remember what the award ceremony was like these past two years and I can’t deny that I care about winning. It would be so nice if I didn’t. I try very hard not to care, which is something of a paradox really. I try to train my brain by chanting “It’s an honor just to be nominated.” It is a good mantra, because it is true.

It is the quavering between possibilities which causes the trouble. If I could abandon hope completely, then the glow of nomination would be plenty. At the moment of seeing the list, hope is quenched. But then from some dark corner of my brain a small thought sneaks onto the stage. “maybe this year it is our turn.” It is a strange little thought which assumes that the concept of “turns” has any application to the Hugo awards. It doesn’t. The Hugo award is a gift given by the voting fans of the World Science Fiction Convention. They may bestow it where ever they wish regardless of who has had it before. Knowledge of this leads to the neurotic post-Hugo-loss funk. Coming home and going back to work can be very hard if one spends too much time thinking about how one was not worthy enough. It is a patently ridiculous set of thoughts. The nomination itself is evidence that others found the work worthy. And yet these self doubting thoughts are even more difficult to eradicate than the sly hopeful thoughts in advance of the award ceremony. It is as if the award ceremony transforms the hopeful thoughts directly into self-doubt. Knowing this, I try to stomp out all hope. Yet hope persists and I find myself made anxious by every hopeful thought I detect. The only defense I have against the anxiety is to not care. Which brings me back to trying very hard not to care. Round and round I go in the barrel.

Sometimes I spin in a different direction as well. I genuinely like many of the people with whom we share a category. I love and admire their work. I want to be delighted and happy for them when they win. I had that once. When Phil and Kadja Foglio won in 2009, I honestly felt nothing but delight and relief. The worms of self-doubt came later, after we returned home. Unfortunately my mental landscape regarding the Hugos has become more self aware since then. Other emotions will be present as well as delight. Then there is the horrible/hopeful possibility that we might win. This would obviously make us very happy, but it would also mean that these other people whose work I admire have to suffer through the transformation of hope into self doubt. I don’t want that for them any more than I want it for us. Yet I wouldn’t wish any of us off the nominee list. Because being nominated is truly an honor and a joy. It is a validation of all the hours of hard work. I want to have that. I want these people I like and admire to have that. I am also very aware that I have other friends who would give up much to be on this ride. Many of them do work which is more worthy than ours, I must not be ungrateful for the gift of this trip.

Mary Robinette Kowal once wrote a marvelous post about auditions and rejections. In that post she said:

Granted, every person is different, but for the most part the mentality going into an audition is that it doesn’t matter. I mean, you want it. You want it badly sometimes, but there’s this mental adjustment you have to do in order to survive the audition process…I’m a normally rational person, around auditions I get very skittish and superstitious about jinxing things by talking about it. As I said, my brain is not rational about this. There’s this whole variety of things that I have to do to convince myself that the results of the audition don’t matter when, of course, they do… Just don’t wish me luck for an audition. It will make me think about landing the part. It will make me hope. I can’t afford that.

The emotional arcs and mental hi-jinks that Mary describes are spot on for my Hugo mind state. The primary difference is that the polite wishing of luck is actually positive for me. I can say thank you and move onward knowing that this person counts in the score of people who believe the work is worthy. I tuck the kind thoughts into my pocket and use them later to deflect the inevitable barrage of self doubt. What is really hard is when friends or fans give detailed and logical reasons for why Schlock Mercenary or Writing Excuses ought to win. Also hard is any sort of analysis which explains why the other nominees have an advantage. I know these analyses are part of the fun for Hugo voters. They love to get in and argue for their favorites. They love to crunch numbers and talk probabilities. I don’t want to spoil the fun, but I don’t want to see it. Faced with an analysis of our Hugo categories, I want to shout the Han Solo line “Never tell me the odds!” These sorts of analysis feed and multiply the hopeful thoughts. Too many hopeful thoughts accumulated together can make me believe that we are somehow entitled. I don’t want to be that person. Howard does not want to be that person. And neither of us want to be swamped by despair when all those hopeful thoughts are transformed into self doubt.

Mostly we’re trying to think about other things between now and August. Fortunately we have many things planned. We have plenty of things to focus on besides our ride in the Happy Fun Anxiety Barrel.

Addendum: It is worth noting that the emotional trip triggered by Hugo nomination has many similarities to trips triggered by the usual submission and rejection process for writing of all kinds.

Full Stop

By / April 27, 2011 / 2 Comments

It was 11:30 yesterday morning when I clicked the final button to upload Emperor Pius Dei to the printer’s FTP site. My computer threw up a progress bar which told me it would take 23 hours to complete. A full day of uploading time, and nothing more for me to do but wait. I had dozens of other projects waiting on me. I had plenty of things to do. Instead I stopped.

Stopping was not a conscious choice on my part. At first I jittered about trying to get things done, but it was all scattered and fractured. The deadline fear which kept me moving at top speed for the past week had vanished. The only thing I could do was watch an extremely slow progress bar. I actually did that for awhile. Or rather my eyes watched the bar, my brain went larking through fields of thought without bringing a thing back. When I attempted to gather thoughts, they slid away from me and vanished.

Usually when I achieve that level of mental burn out, I give up and watch television episodes for awhile. Except my preferred method is streaming through Netflix, which uses the same internet connection through which I was trying to upload. I ended up buying a very fluffy book for my kindle instead. It was the literary equivalent of a sugar wafer cookie, filled with sweetness, sameness, artificial flavors, and prone to give me a headache if I get too much. I switched over to Enchanted April, which I discovered free in the kindle store. It is a story about women in gray and rainy Britain who escape for a month to a castle with warm breezes and wisteria in bloom. While there they discover things about themselves which they can take home to make their lives happier. The thought of lounging in a chair near blooming wisteria sounds lovely to me. It sounded lovely two decades ago when I first saw the movie based upon the book. That lovely thought led me to plant wisteria along my back wall. It has not bloomed yet this year. The weather has been too cold. When it does bloom, I need to remember to lounge next to it in a chair. Then I could close my eyes and pretend I’m in a castle. I’ve barely started the book, but I look forward to the escape it represents.

This morning my computer tells me that the upload will take another two hours. Fortunately my brain is in better gear today. It began composing a blog post. Or rather it began throwing ideas at me. This is the topic, and this should go in, also this, and this, and that. So now that the kids are off at school I need to sit down and assemble the loose notes into a coherent train of thought. Perhaps by the time I’m done the upload will also be done. Then Howard and I will go out for a celebratory lunch date.

Poised on the Brink of Printing

By / April 26, 2011 / 2 Comments

I am currently exporting all the pages from Emperor Pius Dei (EPD) out of InDesign and into a PDF. This process will take 20 minutes during which I can not be working on editing. I’m snatching the break like a drowning swimmer grabs a life preserver. I know that in a very short while I will be out of the water, but I’m still holding tight.

This morning my desk had a printed copy of EPD which was sporting a forest of paper tabs. Each marked something for me to fix. It was the fourth time I’d faced a forest of tabs. Set 1 was from our copy editor. Sets 2 & 3 I generated for myself by paging through carefully until my eyes could no longer focus. Set 4 was provided when good friends, family really, came over for a proofing party. They gleefully marked anything they could see which might have been the slightest bit wrong. Which is exactly what I told them to do. They were my spotters-of-wrong-things. I paid them in pizza.

I stared at the multitude of tabs this morning and nearly cried. My brain and eyes are so tired of this book. I went to work anyway and soon discovered that the majority of the tabs indicated things which only took me seconds to fix. They were all the kind of thing that the average reader is unlikely to ever notice, but which I would feel bad if I left. In under an hour I mowed the forest flat. It was much easier than the previous sets of fixes.

Next I export to PDF (waiting on it now.) Then I page through the PDF on a last error check. Then I export and upload to our printer’s FTP site. At that point I am done until the first proofs come back for approval. If you had asked me 10 days ago, I would not have believed we would be shipping files this week. I expected mid-May and it had me panicked about getting books before the Summer conventions. If you had asked me last Thursday I would have said “maybe by April 30th.” Howard worked amazingly fast. 40 margin art pieces in five days. The test printing, two rounds of it, took a single day instead of three. (Yay Alphagraphics). My work all went faster than my previous estimates told me to expect. I half expect the FTP process to be miserable to make up for all the good fortune.

Hugo Award Nomination

By / April 24, 2011 / 2 Comments

This was written two weeks ago, but I could not post it until after Hugo Nominations were publicly announced:

Through the joys of caller ID, I knew it was Howard calling before I picked up the phone.
“Hi hon. How is Canada?” I asked, cheerful to hear from him while he’s off at a convention and I am home with the kids. He was out in the world, giving presentations and promoting the comic which pays our bills.
“Canada is good. Email is better.” He answered. I could hear the smile in his voice and I knew what was coming next before he said the words. “Schlock Mercenary Massively Parallel was nominated for a Hugo.”
I smiled through my sigh of relief. The comic has been nominated for this Science Fiction award for the past two years, but it came in last place both times. Howard had all but convinced himself that he wouldn’t even make the ballot this year. The fact that he did, that we did, is a boost. One that apparently doesn’t get old.
“Yay!” I said into the phone. It doesn’t say enough, but Howard knows what I mean.
“Know what else? Writing Excuses made the ballot too, best related work.”
My smile inched into a grin. We’d been hoping for this. The wording on the best related category had changed so that podcasts were eligible. I could think of nothing more worthy than the weekly podcast Howard did with Brandon Sanderson and Dan Wells.
“Oh wonderful!” I said. It was just as inadequate as yay, but words really can’t express the rush of good feeling I was trying to send to my husband so far away from me. It seems we’re always sharing the Hugo nominations over the phone. The second weekend in April is popular for events which involve Howard.
I thought ahead to August and the award ceremony which would be held at the World Science Fiction Convention in Reno. During the nomination period I’d silently told myself that if Howard made the ballot, I would get a new dress. He’d made the ballot twice. I’d stick to one dress, but my feet fairly danced with joy. I would have friends with which to share the emotional crucible of award nomination. Instead of feeling slightly misplaced at the pre-Hugo party, I would have good friends to stand with. If the nomination ended with an award, we could rejoice together. If not, group commiseration was built-in.
But all that was in the future. Standing in the kitchen, pushing the phone to my ear, and grinning, I could only feel the joy and honor to be nominated. It meant that out there in the world of Science Fiction, people liked Howard’s work enough to put his comic on the ballot. That truly matters, because we love this genre and we love the people in it. The fact that they love Schlock is heartwarming.
“The hard part,” Howard continued “Is being here at a science fiction convention, with people who would love to rejoice, and not being able to tell them yet.”
“So call Brandon and Dan. You can all be glad together.”
We talked of other things for awhile before he had to go, both of us smiling more than the conversational topics called for. Then we hung up and my feet did another cheerful little dance as I walked over to return the phone to its charger. In two more days he would return home and we could celebrate together.

Congratulations to all of the Nominees!

The End Stages of Editing

By / April 23, 2011 / 2 Comments

The last stages of book production always fry my brain. I page through the entire book staring at only the comic frames to make sure that none of them are cropped funny. Some of them are. I mark them. I page through the book looking closely at all of the footnote frames to make sure everything is aligned correctly. Some of them aren’t. I mark them. I page through the book and compare each strip with the online archive to make sure that none are missed, duplicated, or out of order. If any are, I mark them. Then I page through the entire book making all the corrections I’ve marked in the digital file. I print out a clean version without marks and repeat the process. There are also copy edits and Howard edits to enter. All of it requires tightly focused attention and leaves my brain too exhausted for much else.

Despite the fact that my brain is fried by book editing, life goes on. It continues to be full of little stories and thoughts. My blogging brain is well trained to collect these and hold them for future use. Unfortunately editing makes my brain so tired that I don’t get around to wrapping words around the ideas, nor to I manage to file the ideas so they’re not interfering with other things I need my brain to do. It all jostles about together and I feel quite cluttered. So here are the things my brain has collected in the last few days in no particular order.

***

Link and Patch had an argument in which Link said something that hurt Patch’s feelings. It was not deliberate. Link was trying to find words which would let him play video games with just his friend. There were tears and I required Link to apologize. Link told me he didn’t want to because Patch would hurt his feelings. In the course of reasoning with Link, I described apologizing in a way that I want to remember. I said that an apology is a gift. You give it to someone with no expectation of return. You can’t thrust it upon them and require them to accept, nor is it a time to argue over fault, nor explain your position. You offer the apology because you owe it. If the other person forgives, that is also a gift. It is a separate gift from the apology. Sometimes the other person is not ready to forgive. If that happens, even if the other person is mean or hurtful in answer to the gift of apology, it is your responsibility to just walk away. Anything else makes resolution farther away rather than closer. If you are not ready to give an apology as a gift, then it is not yet time to speak. It is entirely possible to separate out pieces of a conflict and apologize for only a small part. This gift often opens the path to further communication. An apology can be as simple as “I did not mean to hurt your feelings. I’m sorry.”

***

Kiki had a reality check about the difficulty involved in becoming a full-time freelance artist. The whole thought of supporting herself on her own work was quite daunting. She talked with me about it, and I think I made it a little better. She talked with Howard about it and walked away feeling like she could conquer. Then she had further inspiration and feels strongly that no matter how hard this path may be, it is the right one for her right now. I love seeing the calm confidence and resolve she is carrying around this week.

***

On Tuesday I became a parent who pulls her kids out of the local school to put them into a different one. Gleek’s space in the new school is assured. Patch’s is not yet, but is probable. I have mixed feelings about doing this. I used to feel strongly that it was important to keep my kids in the neighborhood school and to spend time volunteering there. Somehow I’ve arrived at a very different place. My feelings are less mixed now that the decisions are actually made rather than pending. I hope it all goes well.

***

The tulip festival at Thanksgiving Point Gardens has been extended by a week because of the cool wet weather. I may not miss it after all. If I can get the book shipped off by Wednesday, as I hope, then I am claiming Thursday as mine. I will see flowers.