Work

Things done, but not the things I expected

By / March 10, 2011

I meant to spend this week catching up on business chores and making significant progress on work projects. Instead the week has been one of reconnecting to my local communities. Also I finally made good on the promise I made to myself that as soon as the weather was nice I would tend my garden. This year my spring bulbs will have a fighting chance to be lovely instead of struggling to survive beneath a mat of dead foliage.

Now if I can only find focused time to spend on the work projects…

Contemplating the next three days

By / February 16, 2011

Tomorrow morning I get to put on my professional clothes and go to LTUE. I’m excited to see friends and visit with other creative people. I’m looking forward to all of the panels in which I’ll get to participate. My brain is fairly bubbling with points I feel are important for the various panels. It is all good stuff that I am happy about.

However, there is also a voice in my brain which counts the cost. In order to go on Thursday, I had to arrange for one neighbor to pick up my kids from school and drop them at another neighbor’s house. My teenage daughter has been tasked with catching a ride home from a friend. I’ll need to plan an easy microwavable dinner for my teens to feed to my younger ones. I need to spend most of today on preparatory work both for the family needs and preparations for the sales table that Howard and I will run at the event.

On Friday I’m skipping LTUE because it is the day to discuss with my son’s counselor about scheduling his classes for next year. Except I may run down to LTUE just for lunch to visit, but I have to be back home in time to pick up kids from school. All day Friday I will have an awareness that people I love to be around are having fun while I’m not there.

Saturday I’ve arranged with a third neighbor to take my younger kids for most of the day. At dinner time they’ll come home and my teenagers will babysit for the rest of the evening. I expect to get at least two phone calls from kids which will interrupt conversations or dinner. Saturday night I will be happy and socially exhausted. I’ll want to be very introverted, but my kids will be ready to latch on to me and demand attention. The house will probably be messy. There will be crankiness. In the whole process I will have inconvenienced 8 people to cover things that I usually do.

For the next three days I will be split between family and business. I will swap between parent and professional. In some ways it is much easier when I hand off my kids and don’t see them at all for the duration of an event. Then I can pack away the home and family parts of myself. On the other hand it is really nice to have kids to hug each evening. They remind me that I have an importance and value which is completely separate from my professional successes and failures. I like coming home and having everything be normal.

Being split is getting easier. Each year the kids are older and thus less unsettled by me being absent. I can depend upon the older ones to help with the younger ones, who need much less helping than they used to. I know it is better, but it is still hard. For the next three days I will not be as good a parent as I could be because I’ll be conserving energy for LTUE. Since parenting is a primary focus most of the time, the lapse will not cause any long-term harm, but it definitely creates internal stress for me. Contemplating the stress, some small part of me whispers that it might be better to skip the symposium.

All I can do is evaluate events on a case-by-case basis. LTUE will be good. It always is.

Snippets

By / February 10, 2011 / 1 Comment

Last night our dinner table conversation was a discussion of exactly how Darth Vader eats. Howard was a proponent of the “food block inserted through chest plate” option while Gleek was a vehement supporter of the “opening face plate” party. The discussion broke down when Gleek declared that Darth Vader’s real name was bubbles and Howard said “Wait, did we just take a left turn into Gleekland?” No firm conclusions were reached except that the word “bubbles” is made out of giggles.

Kiki has been reading books about kidnapped and/or raped girls lately. She’s read Hidden in Plain Sight: The Story of Elizabeth Smart and The Lovely Bones. As I understand it, both of the books are ultimately optimistic and the really hard stuff in them is touched only very lightly. Now all she need to read is Not Without My Daughter in order to have a perfect trifecta of books that I am completely unable to read as a mother. They hit too close to my fears and would hurt too much.

Gleek has decided that combing the cat should be her daily household chore. Both the cat and I think this is a marvelous choice.

It turns out that 24 hours is a long time after the opening of the GenCon hotel block. I completely forgot to register on Tuesday at noon, and by late Wednesday Howard’s preferred hotel was full. We found another close by, but it still had me a bit panicked last night. I don’t know why GenCon is always surrounded with a cloud of terror for me, but I am perpetually afraid that I will make some mistake which irrevocably ruins the event for us.

Speaking of conventions, Howard’s April has changed from empty to full. He’ll be attending both Ad Astra in Toronto Canada and Penguicon in Michigan. Penguicon is especially notable because Howard will be there with Brandon, Dan, and Jordo of the Writing Excuses crew. They are going to have a great time.

XDM X-Treme Dungeon Mastery is now available in e-book versions via both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. That was last week’s project.

I meet with our tax accountant today. Hopefully he will not have very much homework for me.

Patch has been reading through our family photo books at bedtime because he “wants to look into his past.” Last night he reproached me for a pair of photos I took of him as a baby. In the photos he’d grabbed an open yogurt container and accidentally dumped yogurt on his feet. Instead of instantly helping him clean up, I took two pictures of yogurt covered baby. 7 year old Patch thought this was nigh villainous of me. I hugged him and assured him that I helped him clean up the moment I put down the camera.

Last night Kiki and I had a long and rambling talk about boys, relationships, life plans, and a host of other things. During the course of the conversation we determined that she is completely normal, which was something of a relief for her to learn. Apparently that “all teenagers think they are weird” thing is not a myth. Also the “teenagers never listen to their parents” thing is a myth, at least for Kiki. I hope that she and I continue to have many conversations about many things through the years.

After being sick over the weekend, Link is read to pick up his health and fitness schedule again. I’m pleased to see that the time off did not break his motivation.

LTUE begins one week from today. I need to clear away some space in my brain so that I can contemplate the topics of the four panels I will be on. Not much preparation is needed for most of them. I just need to dust off my thoughts so that they’re a ready resource. The one for which I do need to prepare is the session on financial management. I’m the moderator and I want to make that hour as packed with information as I possibly can.

I’m at about 50% on my project revision. I’d hoped to have it done by now, but since I am continuing to make progress instead of stalling completely, I plan to just keep going. Eventually I’ll work my way to the end.

And now it is time to head out on my errands for the day.

Fear, competence, and being grown-up

By / January 25, 2011

When I first saw the letter inside its envelope, I thought it was junk mail. I almost didn’t open it. When I read the letter, I had a sick, sinking feeling in my stomach and a flash of fear that our business would be destroyed by a lawsuit. Reason quickly won out and I was able to much more rationally see that the request from Covey that we stop using their trademarked phrase in the comic was a request with which we could easily comply. We made our decision and are happy with the result. The decision we made isn’t what I want to discuss here. You see, this is not the first time that I’ve received a piece of news and been instantly terrified that our business is going to fall apart. It isn’t the fifth or tenth or twentieth time either. I can’t tell what the number on this event is, because it happens so often. I’ve come to regard that momentary sick sensation as a normal part of running our own business. I suspect that it is also a result of our usual strategy of diving in and learning as we go.

I spent quite a long time feeling like a fraud. I used to be afraid that I’d mishandled the accounting and the IRS would swoop in to take away everything. I feared that the authors, artists, and business partners would see through our facade of competence. I worried that teachers or other parents would see clearly all my failings as a parent. I feared each of these things a lot, but over the years they didn’t happen and the fears faded. I started to believe that we might actually have some of the competence that we presented to the world.

I know lots of adults who say that they don’t feel like grown-ups. I feel that too sometimes. There are days when I look around and wonder how on earth I ended up with four kids, a business, and a house. Most of the time I am very comfortable with my grown-up status. I consistently see myself getting necessary things done even though I don’t want to do them. In our house this functions as the definition of a grown-up. I wish I could confer upon others the feeling of being grown up. But then I remember the quote from Bujold which paraphrases to: “Being grown-up is not a prize they give you for being a good child. It is something you have to take for yourself.”

So I wonder, how I can take my self-awarded grown-up status and my growing belief in my own competence and apply it so that I don’t have to go through those moments of believing that everything is going to fall apart because I am faced with a single adverse event. The losing my stomach feeling of roller coasters is not something I enjoy encountering in my kitchen during the middle of my work day.

A task oriented day

By / January 5, 2011

I did not deal with shipping issues today. Instead I tackled financial reports. I had monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports to file with two federal departments and two state departments. There were also royalty reports to authors and artists. I was pleasantly surprised when these tasks were all accomplished within the space of a single work day without me once having a desire to smack something. Two days and much smacking is what I consider normal for this process, so I was glad.

Less pleasantly, Gleek has been running a bit wild at home. She is pushing limits hard, and definitely punching some of my buttons. My preferred parenting methods involve empathy and reason, unfortunately she just uses those as a springboard. Instead I have to get strict. I don’t like it, but it seems to reassure Gleek. At least once she stops being furiously mad (usually within an hour) she is calmer, happier, and ready to behave better. She’s like the cow who has to push against the electric fence four or five times to make sure that it really will zap her every time. If it does, then she stays clear of the fence, content with the space provided. I don’t like being strict or using my mean voice. It feels very contrary to the spirit of calmness and happiness that I’m attempting to cultivate in my life.

I’m still reviewing my five things. They still help me feel calm and centered. Removing the fear and emotional imbalance has allowed me to see that one source of frustration is that I have more important tasks than I have hours to do them. As soon as we’re sure we can afford it I want to hire an assistant to help me manage the daily shipping and administrative tasks for our business. It would be nice if that occurred this year. Right now the back of my brain is full of small details and tasks I need to not forget. I want that space so it can be simmering words and plots.

My black binder full of my book is sitting and waiting to be edited. It has been waiting for more than a month. I feel it is important. Howard feels like it is important. But urgent things keep jumping in and taking up my time. Tomorrow I’ve put an appointment on the calendar. My binder and I are going to the library where we will spend two hours away from every distraction. Hopefully that will work.

How Postal Services Ate My Day

By / January 4, 2011

My plan for today was to tackle the first of the year accounting. Then late last night I got an email from a customer who pointed out that some shipping options had vanished from our store. All that remained were the very most expensive choices. I’m already indebted to our customers for supporting us, it is not okay with me that postal services eat up their money for no good reason. This discovery was made at 10:30 pm. I made a couple of stabs at solving it, but I was too tired to find my problem solving brain. It became the first thing to tackle in the morning.

Except the first thing every morning is to get kids off to school. I can’t do any business tasks until they are out of the house or they wouldn’t get off to school at all. Half the time this is accomplished by 8 am, which still qualifies as “first thing”. This morning was one of the other half, the mornings where Kiki starts an hour later than the other kids. I frequently have time to get started on business tasks in between the two drop-offs because Kiki is self sufficient. She wasn’t this morning. And Howard needed some things done urgently. And I ran to staples because it made sense, since I was out anyway, to pick up the tax forms that I would need for my accounting. What with one thing and another I arrived at 10 am, which no longer counts as “first thing.”

The problem with the store started because the US Postal Service raised their rates. This is fine. They have every right to increase the price of their services, particularly when I know that they are not very profitable. I like USPS. I want them to stick around. Unfortunately somehow the rate change broke their automated system which is queried by our store. The store software responded by making all the shipping methods for which it could not find data, vanish. The nice folks at Volusion (our store software provider) already had a fix for the issue and I had it in place within minutes of calling customer service. So Yay! Everything works again.

Only there is a third provider in our shipping process. I use Stamps.com to print out our labels and postage from data that I export from Volusion. Stamps.com was also affected by the postal rate increase. I had to download an update before that program would run. I did and then it crashed. I could print international postage just fine, but domestic postage crashed the program every time. I fired off an email to customer support and then took all the logical steps: restart computer. Re-install program. Restart computer again. None of it worked.

I resorted to printing labels on the USPS website, which works great if you have a single label, but is tedious when I need to import addresses and print many labels. At this point I had successfully turned all of the orders into packages, which solved the immediate trouble. However I still had a long-term issue to solve. I ship things every day. I did not want to use the clunky USPS form every day. And it was time to go fetch the children. Which completely fractured my ability to concentrate and problem solve.

During the next 3 hours I looked into Endicia, which is a competitor of Stamps.com. Endicia would introduce some features I like, but also would create some new hurdles. I pondered whether the problem was an inherent instability in my old computer system. There are some errors which chirp at me occasionally and photoshop crashes with frustrating regularity. I thought longingly of just buying a new computer, expensive though that solution would be. In the end I just walked away from the whole problem in a grump.

Thirty minutes ago I got an email from Stamps.com customer support. My problem is a known issue and they’ll happily talk me through a fix over the phone. During regular business hours. Tomorrow. On one hand, I’m relieved because my shipping system is still viable. On the other hand I’m frustrated because this problem is going to spill over into tomorrow. The gripping hand is that I lost a whole day because other people made mistakes and broke my system.

I want my day back.

Pondering next year’s calendar

By / December 30, 2010

The calendar lay across half of my kitchen table. Around it were multi-colored pens, my planner, a schedule from the school, and last year’s calendar laid partially across the top. The time for my annual switching of the wall calendar had arrived. All the various notes and plans made for 2011 were dutifully recorded in the color of the family member to which they applied. I stood back and surveyed next year laid out before me. It didn’t look too bad, but there were big events not on the calendar because the dates for them are not yet fixed. Howard and I had a long conversation about this just after Christmas. We mentally juggled book production and release schedules against the fixed commitments on the calendar. Some side projects were approved while many were tossed in the “not this year” file. The resulting plan for next year is busy, but hopefully only crazy in a few spots.

My fingers traced across the calendar as I mentally marked our tentative press and shipping dates for the two books we plan to produce next year. My hand hovered over June and July which look empty on the calendar, but which I know will be full of preparations for GenCon and WorldCon as well as book production. I thought back to a piece from I book I’ve read recently. It talked of an old Jewish man who never made any kind of appointment or plan without speaking the words “God Willing.” For the man this was not a fatalistic prediction that the plan would fail, but rather an acknowledgment that no mortal being is in full control of his life. Many things may happen between now and next week to make a dinner date impossible, he speaks the words so that he will not be angry or frustrated if some other event intervenes.

I press my hand flat against the calendar. I have planned next year. It is a good plan. I have built in more flexibility in the months. I have place space for happiness to dwell in each day. I intend to hold this schedule loosely and not panic when it inevitably has to shift or change. God willing, this is how 2011 will be. If it turns out differently, and it almost certainly will, then I will try to trust that there is a bigger plan with pieces that I can not see.

The calendar now hangs on my wall. I’m ready to proceed.

Reorganizing my office, my computer, and my brain

By / December 28, 2010

After a 5 day holiday hiatus, I have resumed my office reorganization project. This time I’m tackling digital files. I need to make space on my primary drive so that I can be working on two Schlock books in parallel. (An amusing coincidence: one of the books will be titled Massively Parallel.) My computer is out of date and needs replacing. This is item number one on the list of Things to Do Once We’ve Opened Pre-orders and Have a Buffer of Money Again. Until then, I shuffle files, burn data to disk, and make dual back-ups on external drives.

On it surface this data shuffling does not seem to do anything to forward my office reorganization, but this reorganization is not only about optimizing my physical space. Even more important than making the things I need easy to find is the mental process of looking at exactly how I work. My work processes have grown in response to necessity, usually in the urgency of the moment. After that I was a bit afraid to mess with a system that was working in the middle of a crisis. (Something always felt like a crisis) Now I am questioning if some of the way I work is helping to create a feeling of crisis where none needs to exist. This is similar to the mental adjustment I’m attempting to make in how I worry about/ trust in my children.

It is time to reorganize, re prioritize, and re-evaluate. I know what my goals are, they haven’t changed any, but my mode of travel needs to improve a lot. The physical organization let me see that mental organization was necessary. The mental organization is helping me see how the physical organization can work even better. In the end I don’t know that I will reach any of my goals more quickly. That’s not the point. The point is to be less tired and more happy as I travel.

Office Cleaning Continues

By / December 16, 2010

I sorted through 15 years worth of filed papers today. I ended up with five boxes of paper that could just be pitched and a huge stack of paper which needed to be shredded before it could be pitched. It turns out that 10 years worth of bank statements fills four garbage bags when shredded. Part of my brain rebelled at the wanton destruction of data that the shredding represented. An analysis of all those papers would tell worlds about our life and habits during that era. The rebellious thoughts were squelched by remembering that during all of those years I have been entering all that data into Quicken. I have it all in digital form where it can rapidly be turned into reports. There is no reason to keep storing the paper.

Disposing of garbage paper was only part of the benefit of this project. I unearthed many hidden treasures and have now organized them so that I can find them again as needed. Memorabilia is all filed together as are health documents and contracts. I also have a big stack of file folders which are available for reuse. A piece of my brain is happy knowing that I’ve collected fragments of writing and family stories together. Someday I’ll put together a book out of it all. Not this year though. I need to finish cleaning my office and then use the space to continue working on all the other lingering projects in my life.

Starting in the corners

By / December 15, 2010

My front room is a mess. It has been a mess since some time before Thanksgiving. I don’t like it when my living spaces are a mess, and I’ve been sorely tempted to clean it up by shoving stuff elsewhere. I don’t because that is what I’ve been doing ever since school started and at this point “elsewhere” is full. Last week I finally had space in my brain to try to figure out how to clean up the front room. In order to do it, I had to start in my office. This makes sense when you realized that “elsewhere” is usually in the middle of my office. This continues until my office is impassible. Which it was.

So I began to clean my office. Unfortunately many of the things in the middle of my office had been stuffed there because they simply did not have other places to belong. All the stowing spaces in my office and storage room are full. Half of what they are filled with is the wrong stuff. Things I use regularly reside in piles and under other things while things I no longer need sit neatly on easily accessible shelves. Reorganization is in order. So yesterday I began. I am going through my office shelf by shelf and evaluating everything. I’m putting things where they will be readily useful. This is not going to be a quick process. I expect it to take weeks.

Yesterday I finally accepted that my office needs to be an office instead of also doubling as a guest room. I set up a permanent shrink wrapping and paper cutting desk. Now there is not room for me to put an inflatable bed in here for guests. I am sad, because I like being a good hostess and giving guests their own space, but this makes much more sense on a daily basis.

Today I began going through the four drawer file cabinet. All the drawers are stuffed full and I intend to look at almost every paper in there. I already have two garbage bags full of shredded out-dated documents. The world will not suffer for me shredding old utility bills. I keep the tax related stuff back 7 years, but I’ve saved so much garbage paper. It wasn’t garbage when I stowed it carefully away, but it is now. Soon I’ll be able to re-think the organization in those cabinet drawers. I’m hoping to be able to stow writing notes in the newly created spaces.

Onward I will head to the cubby holes and shelves. Then into the storage room. I will haul garbage bags out. I will have a stack of things to give away or donate. In the end I will have space and the supplies I need ready to be used. It is going to be good to have an office that I am able to vacuum.