Work

My List of Things

By / April 21, 2011

This is my list of things to do between now and Wednesday. The results of these things will generate an entirely new list of things for the second half of the week. Well, new except for those things which I did not complete before Wednesday and which did not go away on their own. In theory I will be updating as I go, in practice I’ll stop when I get distracted and forget:

Accounting I cheated and got a head start here. Finished on Saturday.
Update four websites
EPD layout -place margin art and bonus story
EPD Reprint margin art pages for Howard Done. Monday afternoon
EPD create pipe boxes for footnotes Done Mon 12:50 pm. I learned to work smart. Yay!
EPD enter copy edits Done Thurs noon
EPD cover comic and quotes Partially done Thurs
Contact Unspecified cool person about a future book intro Done Thurs morn
Contact another unspecified cool person about a different book intro. Done Thurs morn
Complete my book revision not going to happen this week. Again. Sigh.
Email triage Done Mon Morning
Visit new elementary school with kids Done Monday afternoon. They are pleased with the look of the new playground.
Go to Meeting with Gleek about gifted program Done Tues evening
Decide for certain whether to accept placement in gifted program Done Wed morning
Decide whether I’m going to also move my youngest child to the new school or if I’m going to put up with 4 kids being in 4 different schools. Done. youngest is moving too. (I hope. I’ve applied anyway.)
Preliminary layout for four more schlock books
Make dessert for an event I can’t attend because I’m double booked Oops. Skipped this one.
Do reading for Writer’s Group Done Wed morning
Attend Writer’s Group Done Wed evening
_____
Added Monday Morning:
Buy 10 ISBN Numbers I can’t believe we ran out. 10 books in print right now. On to the next 10.
_____
Tues:
Watch Dancing With The Stars. Done I feel quite guilty about accomplishing this with so many important things pending. I was hiding from all the stressful important things.
_____
Added Thursday:
Mailing Done Thurs Morning
Email triage Done
Work on book revision
EPD image edits Done Thurs afternoon

Farewell Vacation, Hello Deadlines

By / April 15, 2011 / 2 Comments

“I need a deadline. Tell me the absolute last date on which we can send files to the printer and have books in time for GenCon.” Howard said.

I turned away from him and stared out the van window. The red rocks of Arches had vanished behind us. The rocks I could see were just redish-brown, though the cliff formations were every bit as stunning. Vacation was over and it was time to assess the work ahead. The problem was that I don’t like to impose deadlines on my husband. The business manager in me loves them. She wants to schedule every minute detail so that it is all predictable. The family planner loves the idea of working at a steady pace and letting the projects find their own natural completion date.

“April 30th.” I said.
Howard’s face shifts as if he has been gut-punched. It only lasts a second, but I see the expression. I knew I’d see it. I never want to be a source of stress in Howard’s life, but we work together. It is my job to hand him tasks, even when they may be stressful.
“We have to get all the art and proofing done in two weeks?” Howard’s voice has an edge to it.
“Oh no.” I wave my hands a little, as if that could wipe away some of his stress. “That’s the end of your work. The proofing can come after.”
“Give me the final deadline.”
I look down at my shoe, calculating days in my head. Somewhere during this conversation, I’d pulled my legs up onto the seat with me, half cross legged. I was aware that it was an effort to feel safer, less stressed. It didn’t really work. I still had to give out a deadline. I knew the deadline, spoken aloud, would catapult us into several weeks of work-very-fast. I knew that ease would vanish in our scramble to get the book done. I wished that, just once, we could reach the final stages of book preparation with time to spare. We meant to do that this time, but Howard had the winter of unending sickness.
“May 12.”
The words were spoken. I could not take them back. Truthfully, my speaking them aloud changed nothing about the realities of printing production and convention dates. The deadline was already there. I’d been watching it the whole time. All that changed was that Howard could see it too.

The scenery kept rolling by outside the window. Howard and I hammered out a plan to get the work done. Then we talked through the months beyond the deadline, hoping to be able to arrange things better for the months to come. I am not looking forward to the stress of the next two weeks. On the other side, there are good things. Far off in October we’ve even penciled in another family trip. There is just a lot to do between now and then.

The Price of Family Vacation

By / April 14, 2011 / 2 Comments

There is an unsettled feel to the beginning of a vacation. We walked in the door of the condo and two kids went pelting up the stairs to shout exclamations about the bedrooms. The other two paced around the downstairs as if measuring the bounds of the kitchen and sitting area. I didn’t sit still either. I followed the exclamations, traveling up stairs and down, finding places for our suitcases, assessing risks, and making up new rules on the spot.
“No climbing the railing of the balcony.”
“Don’t jump from bed to bed.”
“Bar stools are not for spinning in circles.”
“This space is only borrowed, we need to not damage it.”

The kids settled more quickly than I did. They contented themselves with running across the wide lawn beyond our back patio, dabbling in the little stream, and swinging vigorously on the chair swing which hung from a high branch on a very large tree. I stood at the back door to watch them. We found this location and reserved it, trusting pictures and reviews on the internet to be true. It was as advertised and the first stressful question of the trip was answered. So many more remained. Where would we eat dinner? Would everyone behave at the restaurant? Would this vacation provide moments of laughter and family bonding, or would we be embroiled in a two day festival of squabble? A cry of dismay and pain from the swing seemed to indicate the latter.

I dashed down the gentle hill to help Patch wipe his knee, just tears no lasting injury. Kiki declared that she missed our cat and wanted to be home. Link announced his boredom. Howard was grouchy and hungry. Then the restaurant was further away than we expected and packed to the seams. I carried the tension of it all in my jaw and back, frequently forcing myself to relax both.

In a turnabout, the service at the diner was incredibly good. Patch declared that it was the best meal he’d ever eaten. Kiki and Howard threw jokes back and forth. Then Patch made us all all laugh by choosing to eat fresh cut lemons instead of ice cream for dessert. He’d taste, shiver, grin, and then do it again. A walk around the condo grounds led us to a park with hammocks, a stream, and a pond. The pond had several large frogs. Good things had begun to emerge from among the unsettled questions.

This is the way of vacations on the first day. I could not know yet whether I had pulled us all out of our lives to build bonds or damage them. Either is possible. I knew when I put the trip on the calendar that parts of it would be hard. I knew that there would be tears and frustrations. These are the price which must be paid in order to earn the memories. The tears and homesickness, the moments of despair over work sitting idle at home, the hours of laying awake late at night to count the various costs of the trip. These are the price.

Then morning dawns with the smell of husband-cooked bacon. The sky is a brilliant blue over red rock formations. Kiki follows her siblings with a camera as they hunt for frogs at the edge of the pond. Patch eats lemons. All of my kids look in awe at the wonders of weathered stone stretching in arches across the blue sky above. Patch declares that he wants to come back every spring break and all the kids murmur assent. My camera is filled with pictures of my children being unconsciously beautiful or deliberately silly. I stare up at the towering rocks with the wind chill in my face, knowing life is good. We discover upon returning to the condo that it is familiar instead of strange. These are the prizes and they are wonderous.

I will never be sorry for this vacation, despite the scrambling I did last week to prepare for it and the scrambling I’ll do next week to make up for the missed work time. The prize is worth the price.

Visualizing My Schedule as it Flows

By / April 12, 2011 / 2 Comments

We are now six and a half years into our adventures in creative self-employment. The first eighteen months were all about scrambling to find ways to bring in more money and to spend less. The two years after that were all about growing the business and figuring out how things work. We succeed at business growth until we spent a year and a half so insanely busy that we had to learn how to turn down opportunities. The past 18 months have been one long effort to balance work and life in ways that allow both to prosper.

At each stage I had to re-conceptualize how I managed my life and the lives of our family. Last year I struck upon thinking of our schedule as a fluid river with a few fixed points rather than trying in December to plan the following April, May, June. Things always change in between and if I picture them already set, I have to re-set them. If they flow, then changes in the fixed points alter the flow without me having to panic. Conventions and appearances are fixed business points. Book creation and releases are fluid. Kid concerts and school schedules are fixed. Family outings and housework are fluid.

Most of the big fixed points for this year were placed on the calendar last Fall. One of the most important ones was a family vacation. I put it on Spring Break and I made reservations for a place we could go. I expected to arrive stressed and worried about work. I particularly expected it after the addition of a convention right before it and right after it. I’m not stressed. I can see how things will flow. It is all going to be fine. I’m looking forward to our departure.

Social Media and Me

By / April 9, 2011

A couple of years ago my extended family and I all discovered facebook more-or-less simultaneously. For me it was a natural extension of my online existence. I’d already had a blog for years. For most of them it was a somewhat scary adventure into the wilds of the internet. I quickly found ways to be comfortable and was updating my facebook status regularly.

Then I got an email from my sister. “Are you doing okay?” she asked “You seem stressed.” Well, I was stressed. I was also pretty happy with my life. The trouble was that all my complaints were facebook sized and all my happy things were blog sized. My sister didn’t read my blog, so she got a rather narrow slice of what my life was really like and I looked rather unhappy.

I set out to fix the imbalance. I decided that I would deliberately use facebook as a place for small happy things. That worked pretty well, and life felt a little more balanced. Enter twitter, with it’s immediacy and propensity for clever conversations. My family stayed firmly entrenched in facebook. They were comfortable. I linked my twitter feed to my facebook feed so I could post in a single place. My family was confused. The dialect of twitter is different from that of facebook. They didn’t get half of what I was saying. I unlinked the feeds so that I could participate in the communities differently. (Actually a technological glitch unlinked them for me, but I decided it was best to leave them that way.)

Then came the day when I wanted to rant about my broken lawnmower. I was furious, unreasonably so. I wrote a blog entry, which I didn’t post because I knew it made me look unreasonable. I composed a facebook note, which I deleted for the same reason. I did not tweet it either. I was trying to not annoy people with my whining on the internet. The feelings pounded around inside my head until I finally went to a writer’s forum to which I belong and posted in the “venting” thread. The whole point of the thread is to provide a place for people to be grouchy or upset over random life things. Within an hour, two people had posted sympathetic responses. I felt validated, and my angry feelings dissipated almost entirely. I was able to move along in finding rational solutions.

Only later did I think that, maybe, I should have given my family the opportunity to share in my lawnmower frustrations. Keeping facebook cheerful is over all a good thing, but if it is unremittingly cheerful, then it is just as false as when it was the repository of all things whiny. Somehow, I need to find a balance between letting people share in both the downs and ups, without being all-whiny or all-chipper. This social media thing is not so easy as it looks even when one manages to avoid the major faux pas. (so far. fingers crossed. Do not want the internet to fall on my head ever.)

When my life was crazy

By / March 26, 2011

Yesterday I sat at the kitchen table, black binder in front of me. It was a simple three-ring binder filled with printed pages and opened about halfway through. The pages to the left were covered in scribbled notes, stars, and arrows. Pages to the right were pristine, as yet untouched by my editing pen. This was my essay book, my work in progress. I called it Stepping Stones whenever I didn’t just call it My Book. Working with pen and paper was kind of old school, but I found that it better engaged the editing portions of my brain. I had just reached the portion of the story where it was time for me to tell about undertaking the XDM book project.

Four pages were unclipped from the binder. They represented four attempts to wrap events around story. Four times I had made different arrangements of words to tell what happened. They all lacked a connecting thread, the heart of the story which explained why all the events matter. I got up and walked away from the table yet again, hoping that a different location would help me find that thread.

Working on the XDM X-Treme Dungeon Mastery project was crazy. It really was. The quantity of work was impossible for the allotted time. The opportunity cost was horrendous, thought we didn’t know all of that until after the project was complete. For all the craziness of it, doing the project was exactly the right thing to do. Because it was right, we did the impossible. It was not the only factor to that crazy impossible spring. We were also in the midst of the Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance printing process and book release. We ordered slipcases to make boxed sets at the same time. Then we counted books and realized that the time had come for us to reprint Under New Management. To add even more craziness we also remodeled Howard’s office, did major book shipping events, and ran a booth at GenCon for the first time. All of that within 5 months.

I found the thread when I remembered the night when I lay curled in my bed all but broken. Putting a book together in only five weeks with no prior experience in textual layout was a real trial by fire. I came out changed, stronger. My emotional trial and triumph was the thread which linked all the facts. I scribbled notes until all the pieces were outlined. I would have to type them in detail later, but I’d caught the essence of what I intended to say.

I flipped the binder closed and got up from the table to go stand at the sink where warm air from a heating vent would blow across my feet. I could hear my younger two kids upstairs playing with a friend. My teenagers were downstairs, thoroughly involved with their screens. I could see my planner sitting on the counter, open to today’s list of tasks. Most of them were already checked off. My life as it currently stands is quite busy. My days are full, and I am frequently reluctant to list my things because I always get the same reactions of disbelief and/or admiration. Also frequently, I feel overwhelmed by my things. It is good for me to remember that what I deal with today is as nothing in comparison to the spring of 2009 when we did XDM. I have survived far worse, I can handle what is in front of me.

Partitioning my days

By / March 25, 2011

I’ve made a discovery. It is the same discovery I’ve made at least three times in the past four years, which does dampen my excitement a bit. However, I will still apply it in my life. Again. Perhaps this time it will stick.
I am going to start better partitioning my time.

Two days ago I wrote about child induced task limbo. After the fact, I recognize that the limbo was only half caused by the expectation of interruption. It was also created by the fact that all of my days have turned into a mish-mash of everything. I constantly task swap between business, household, and parenting. This leaves no time which feels free for relaxation. It was also not leaving time for anything but the barest bones blog writing. And then there were the household things which were forever incomplete because no time was set aside for them.

So I’m making new rules for myself. Or rather, I dug out my old rules and realized I should still be following them.

From getting up in the morning until dropping the kids off to school my time belongs to the kids and the house. I am not allowed to get on a computer nor to check the internet using my phone.

From dropping the kids at school until noon or 1 pm, my time belongs to the business. This is when I will do accounting, email, shipping, book layout, etc.

From noon or 1 pm until picking up the kids from school is my writing time and/or relaxation time. It is the space in the day reserved for my things.

From picking up kids from school until dinner I am primarily taking care of kids and house. However there is likely to be some business and/or writing mixed in if the kids are occupied. It is not focused project time and I am not allowed to bury myself in my office for hours. Gardening is a good thing to put here.

Dinner to kid bedtime belongs to the Children.

Kid bedtime to my bedtime I can do final rounds of internet checking, writing, reading, etc.

It feels like a good and sensible schedule. I suspect it will be less than a week before I’m blurring the lines again. I’ll probably have a good reason, like the last rush to get EPD off to the printer. All it takes is for a kid to get sick to land parenting stuff in my business hours. Then it feels fair that business spill into family hours because Stuff Must Get Done. In short order I expect it all to be mish-moshed together again, but it is a lovely schedule and I shall endeavor to make it real.

Email and Me

By / March 24, 2011 / 1 Comment

The email box lurks
red flags pointed at my eyes
Click. I am elsewhere.

I have a mixed relationship with email these days. I love it and it exhausts me. The problem is not spam. Google is quite good at filtering out the complete garbage. Most of the emails I actually see are ones full of useful and/or interesting things. The problem is that there are so many emails and the polite thing to do is to answer all of them. Which I really want to do. I want to give every single email a full, complete, considered answer. This is why so many of them sit in my mailbox for weeks on end. I keep trying to find a space to craft the right answer. Alternately, the emails sit because they have tasks attached. The email to say “here is your contract” is quite simple to write, but it requires me to first have created a contract, which is quite complex and thinky. “I’d love to do lunch” is easy to say, but then requires me to consult our schedules to see when such an event could actually happen. So the emails sit. They sit because they matter to me and I want to get them right. Of course they also generate waves of guilt. The more messages I have waiting the more guilt I feel. I don’t like to have people waiting on me. Logically I know these people are not sitting at their mailboxes feeling disappointed that I have not replied yet, but it feels that way.

My email box has filters. Messages are automatically shunted into folders based on where they came from. This system became critically necessary as Facebook, Twitter, and my blog all email me to tell me things. Usually they are happy things “Someone followed you!” “You have a comment!” Other times they are annoying things “Did you know that this friend of yours is also friends with this other friend of yours and they played the same game today?” Facebook is a little bit like that kid who doesn’t have a full deck of social clues, but who is dying for attention. And yet sometimes Facebook tells me things I need to know. “Book signing next week for that cool person you like!” Quarantining each message source lets me address them when I’m ready to instead of constantly being bombarded in my inbox. It helps.

I also filter according to roles. All of the Schlock mail goes through me first and it has its own folder. I answer the basic stuff and pass along to Howard the happy stuff and the complicated stuff. Conventions also get their own folder. This is particularly critical when I’m helping coordinate multiple convention appearances simultaneously. It is rather embarrassing to email the wrong guest liaison with a question that doesn’t apply. Right now I’m helping coordinate eight different convention appearances, six of which will take place between now and August. Tags and folders help me keep it all straight. Then of course, there are the emails relating to book printing. In order to answer emails about book printing I have to think like an accountant and scheduler. In order to answer convention emails I have to think like a scheduler and talent wrangler. In order to answer the Schlock emails I have to think like a business manager, a customer support rep, and an archival expert. Switching gears makes my head spin a bit.

The system I’ve got works more or less. Every so often I have to add new filters or create new tags/folders. When the box fills up and threatens to overwhelm me with guilt, I somehow muster the energy to plow through dozens of different emails in a single morning. This morning needs to be that morning, which is naturally why I just spent thirty minutes writing a post about answering email instead. Avoidance and I are familiar friends though we don’t like to admit it. Time to go answer email.

Tangled

By / March 20, 2011 / 1 Comment

The week just past felt tired and tangled. I can’t say precisely why it was so. Perhaps it had so much potential energy. Many events were poised to collapse into various forms of emotional crisis. People were on the edge of sick. The meeting with the school counselor might have been difficult. Business emails had the potential to create friction or unpleasantness. Then, of course, was the creeping sense of failure at all the things I feel I ought to be doing, but don’t have time to actually accomplish.

We’re on the final sprint toward book completion. Howard finished writing the bonus story for Emperor Pius Dei. I ran test prints for cover colors. I also pounded through the layout to make sure that the images were properly cropped and placed. After spending months in limbo, we’re dashing toward finishing the project. This is good since we’re up against a hard deadline. In April there will be no time to spare. Howard will be hard pressed just to keep up with the buffer while attending multiple conventions. I like the sense of motion. It is much better than limbo.

In the midst of the emotional potential energy and the Schlock book forward momentum, some piece of my brain decided that I urgently needed to complete the layout for my 2010 One Cobble book. Each year I take all my blog entries and dump them into a pdf file so Lulu can print it into a book. This year I decided not to use the done-in-an-hour method of years past. I used my book layout tools to make something pretty. It took 16 hours of work, 8 of which I did last week. My back and shoulders are gnarled little knots from all the focused computer mousing time. I got it done. The file is submitted and I expect the book to arrive next week. It felt really good to complete a project over which I had total control of all aspects.

So many pieces of my life are dependent upon the work and reactions of others. This is a necessary and important part of life, yet sometimes instead of feeling supported by my web of communities, I feel tangled in them. I want the Schlock book done, but must wait for our colorist to finish with files. I want to settle my kids’ schedules for the next school year, but have to wait for school personnel and appointments. Sometimes the urge to just cut myself free is strong. I want to hide.

On Friday night I had a scheduled social event. My feelings about going were mixed. I missed the friends I had not seen in over a month. I also knew that my kids were not in particularly settled emotional states. Kiki was in the midst of her oil painting project. It was going well, but still had the potential to go poorly. Link had been grouchy all week. Patch was sick, Gleek full of energy, and Howard had a prior commitment. The obvious and responsible choice was to stay at home. I was needed to provide stability and calmness. Also I thought I needed introverted time so that I could untangle my thoughts and emotions. But then Kiki and Link told me I should go. I went and discovered that sometimes, even for an introvert, a social event can be invigorating. Some friends fill me up instead of draining me. When I left the house I’d been dreading Saturday. By the time I came home, I was looking forward to it.

The answer to my tangle was not to cut myself free, it was to find kindred spirits who were part of my web. It was my own struggling causing the tangles. I was part of a web, not caught in a snare. I had a similar experience on Saturday. I still need more days where I have nothing scheduled, but so many of the things I’m scheduled for are wonderful things. Now if I could just get the Schlock book and my revision done I think I might be so light of heart I would float down the street.

When Disaster Strikes Far Away

By / March 11, 2011

Half way around the world people’s lives have been permanently altered. My life is normal except for extra chatter on twitter, facebook, and news sites. My heart goes out to the Japanese people, but my hands are too far away to help them. The temptation is to glue myself to my computer, watching every update as it rolls in. I did this on September 11, 2001. I did it for Katrina. I’ve since learned how unhelpful such behavior is to anyone. It is important for me to be generally informed, but up-to-the minute updates only create urgency and stress in my mind and body. Images of disaster cause a physiological reaction, my body prepares to respond to imminent danger. There is no danger for me. The danger is half a world away. I am left in a hyper-reactive state during which my brain retains information more fully. By hyper-focusing on disaster news, I can create in myself a traumatized state. I can trigger the same in my children if they follow my lead. I think the world has a sufficient load of trauma today. No need for me to add to it unnecessarily.

Two days ago Kiki was host to a Japanese exchange student. This girl went with Kiki to every class. They talked, laughed, exchanged email addresses, and discovered that they share the exact same birthday. The exchange student was due to return home to Tokyo tomorrow, she will now be staying in the US for another week as she waits for the chaos to calm down at home. Her family and friends were in the middle of the mess. Kiki’s Japanese class spent most of their class time today watching video and talking about the earthquake and tsunami. Then, of course, they talked about how Utah is located on a large fault which is geologically overdue for a big quake. Kiki was a bit shaky and scared when I picked her up from school. My calmness reassured her instead of adding to her stress.

I spent some time today looking up the current status of other disaster zones. Christchurch, New Zealand has just begun to repair. Haiti still needs help. New Orleans is still far from where it was before Katrina. But in all these places new stories emerge, stories of strength and overcoming adversity. It is easy to forget in the deluge of stunning video that there are places which have been through as bad or worse and have begun to recover. So I scan the news lightly every couple of hours. I make donations to disaster relief organizations who have the hands, experience, and personnel to deal with the emergency. Then I take my hands and find something to do in my own neighborhood which will add to the good things in the world.