Work

Scattered thoughts

By / November 5, 2010

Some days I stare at this white box on my screen and describing the day is hard. This is not because the day was full of exciting events, usually the opposite. My day was full of small busy things which completely filled my brain and left very little space for arranging thoughts into a pretty pattern. I had many thoughts today. My mind was much occupied while my hands and arms assembled 50 boxed sets and put them in packages. It was similarly occupied while I loaded those packages into our van and then unloaded them at the post office.

I thought much about several internet brouhahas which stirred up my circles of acquaintance. I though gratefully about the arrival of necessary miracles. I looked at the countries on the shipping forms and was amazed once again that people thousands of miles away will buy things from us. I thought about my kids, their needs and the things I need to keep track of on their behalf. I thought about Doctor Who. This last, primarily because I re-watched some episodes while packing boxes. Packing while watching was a little slower but much more enjoyable.

I intended to write when the work was all done, but my thoughts are scattered everywhere and I think I am too tired to collect them. Also, typing reminds me that my fingers are sore from building boxes. So I will do my project writing on a more collected day.

Performance Review

By / November 5, 2010

In the stress of packing Howard for his latest away-from-home convention, he and I had some cross-communication come to light. Unfortunately due to the packing stress it manifested in unpleasant ways. In some ways it was like accidentally elbowing someone in the gut when you really meant to vent frustration on an inanimate object instead. Everyone was sorry, but recovery still has to occur. As I sorted and settled things in my brain, I started thinking about all the roles I fill and wondering how I would evaluate my performance in them. I figured it was a useful mental exercise, and might even result in some enlightenment on my part.

I sat down and listed all the roles I fill. There were a lot of them. Then I pretended that I was my own boss and rated my performance in each role: Brilliant, Excellent, Good, Adequate, Poor, Bad, Abysmal. Occasionally I made notes like: Could be better at this if I spent more time on it. The most interesting realization I gained from the process was seeing that my personal enjoyment of a process did not directly correlate to how well I did at it. For example I feel like I’m an adequate-to-good layout designer, but a good-to-excellent shipping manager and given my choice I would hand off the shipping work to someone else while keeping the layout work. Other than that, the scores were about what I would expect. Which should not surprise me since I was giving them to myself.

New website and the frog of doom

By / October 16, 2010

Some part of my brain appears to believe that the success of Schlock Mercenary is somehow a fluke which is constantly teetering on the edge of disaster. When I poke this part of my brain and say “Really? After supporting us for four years?” It mutters at me and continues to sit there sullenly like a lumpish frog, ready to flood my mind with fearful thoughts whenever we come across a shift or a glitch. It is an odd quirk of belief that I am completely convinced that what Howard does is brilliant and amazing, but this frog piece of my brain continues to be fearful about money. I think the frog part of my brain must be best buds with the financial squirrel in my brain because the frog shuts up when the squirrel is fat and happy.

We swapped over to the new Schlock Mercenary site architecture today. The switch was long overdue. It was overdue last Fall when we decided to make it a priority. The old architecture had gotten to the point where our server guys had to wallop it with a virtual wrench on a regular basis. Unfortunately building the right architecture was a long learning process for both us and the fantastic development team we elected to work with. It took far longer than any of us wanted. A year later, today, we finally launched. The launch made today scattered. Howard and I monitored twitter, email, facebook, and blog comments for bug reports. There were bugs reported and bugs fixed. In the space between the reports and the fixes, the frog in my brain was quite loud. He has this neat trick of twisting the bottom out of my stomach so it feels as if I’m plummeting. I hate that part. We expected the bugs. We knew there would be things to fix. There always are with new systems. Yet my stomach kept reacting as if we were doomed. (Or rather DOOOMED, spoken with a deep resonant croak.)

The frog doesn’t always have his say. My life is filled with troubles and reverses that don’t trigger the croak of doom. The key difference is whether I know how to fix the problem. If I do, the the problem is merely a task. If I don’t, then “doom” croaks the frog. The frog was on a hair trigger all day because website coding is deep in the territory of things that I don’t know how to fix. Fortunately none of today’s problems were mine to solve. All I had to do was muffle the frog and wait for Howard and the development team to do their jobs. There are still things to fix, but they are mostly minor and cosmetic. The comic is there, the blog is there, the archive is there, and they are all updating. This is good. Even better is having this big shift behind us instead of ahead. Now in need to find that virtual wrench and go wallop an imaginary frog.

Time to get to work

By / October 15, 2010

Sometimes people approach Howard and I to ask our advice on starting up and running a small business. Our responses vary depending upon the particulars of the person asking, but we always caution them to pick a failure point. This is a defined set of circumstances under which it is time to give up and do something else. No one wants to contemplate failure when they are the shiny, exciting end of a new business venture, but without a defined failure point a failing business can sink the person or family as well. We know too many small business owners who completely bankrupted themselves and their friends trying to keep a business alive through force of will. A thriving business is always work, but it should not be a constant scramble.

That last point had me worried earlier this week. Very often lately it feels like our business has been full of scrambling. So Howard and I sat down and had an overdue conversation about the current state of the business with a specific emphasis on what we will do if sales decline from where we are. Obviously we hope for the reverse, but the conversation was very important to have. It also gave us a chance to throw all our business fears into a communal pile rather than each of us keeping a separate stash. That too was distinctly unpleasant and it took us a couple of days to shake it off. The thing is, all evidence suggests that our business is thriving despite currently being in something of an ebb. This is happy, but we are aware of the fragility of what we have built. Right now we have a little organism. We’d like to have an ecosystem with multiple organisms. We want there to be the comic, but also Howard wants to write prose novels. I want to write books. We want to spread out our sources of income so that we do not have to panic at the thought of losing one.

What this means on a day to day basis is a careful rescheduling of our time. We need to retain the hobbies and leisure which bring us joy, but trade in all the mindless time-killing activities. We’ll trade the latter for work which will hopefully bring new organisms into our financial ecosystem. This means it is time for writing and revision to fit back into my days. Now I just need to figure out how.

Scheduling next year

By / September 29, 2010

About two weeks ago Howard and I took a good look at all the events scheduled for the next 18 months and realized that 2011 is full. When I say “full” I do not mean that we have things scheduled for every week or every month. Some months are entirely empty. However the empty months are either preceded or followed by a decidedly not-empty month. For the sake of our sanity we declared that no big events, such as conventions) could be added.

Our resolve is already being challenged. New opportunities have begun to pop up and we are sorely tempted to add them to the schedule. So I stare at the calendar again to see if the new thing can fit. Next year’s calendar has fixed points like conventions we have already committed to, or the family vacation which has a definite date. The calendar also has probable fixed points, which are events we want to do, but have not actually committed to yet. What is not on the calendar are book releases. I know that next year will contain two within the first 6 months, but I do not know exactly where they will fall. This is another reason to keep those empty spaces.

So I stand in front of the calendar and I discuss with Howard. I list the concerns. Howard lists the advantages. We talk about how the new event will affect all the currently scheduled events. We discuss similar events in the past and what would be required to do this one the same or better. It is our little prognostication ritual by which we attempt to peer into the future and decide what is best for us, for the business, for our family. The decisions are not easy.

A Working Anniversary

By / September 20, 2010

Some days are not so much about the effectiveness. Instead they are about having half a dozen conversations via email which would have gone much faster on the phone, but did not actually involve the phone because I was trying to stay focused on work. The work which never actually got done because I kept being distracted by other work. It was a day about taking care of lots of random tasks which needed doing, but which somehow never quite made it onto the To Do list.

Among the things I did not get done was being contemplative about the fact that today is the sixth anniversary of the day that Howard cleaned out his office at Novell and became a cartoonist full-time. But I suppose my distraction is actually in keeping with our tradition of working through anniversaries rather than celebrating by the spending of money on gifts or food. Our first wedding anniversary was spent painting a house. Our last few wedding anniversaries have been spent on the road working conventions. Although if I were really trying to honor this particular anniversary by working really hard it would be nice if I had something concrete to point to rather than a pile of random stuff, most of which is more finished than yesterday, but is not yet complete.

Howard’s trip to Australia

By / August 21, 2010

Howard’s trip to Australia has led me through exciting new lands of forms and paperwork as I figured out how to send books via a customs broker, buy an international plane ticket, make reservations at a hotel on another continent, file for a visa, find the tax forms to report earnings to both the Australian government and the US government, open a banking account in Melbourne, arrange for volunteers to help at the booth, and assorted other odds and ends. Truthfully, each thing has been fairly simple in itself. I’ve been helped by intelligent and competent people who know what they are doing and a pleasant about explaining the process to me. So I approach a task with trepidation and discover that it is nothing much to worry about. (Well, except for the worry that I’ve done something wrong which will lead to massive stress and failure mid-trip.) It is the aggregation of these tasks which makes me feel like I’ve been fighting my way through a maze of electronic forms and paperwork.

We’re close to done, which is good since Howard boards a plane one week from today. I’ll be happy if none of the pieces I put into place fails. We have confirmed arrival of the books in Australia, but they’ve yet to arrive at the booth and we don’t know how they weathered the shipping. We have confirmed reservations both airline and hotel, but Howard has not actually checked in yet. Many things could go wrong, but I know that they are unlikely to do so. So I just continue along, double checking, arranging, planning. Hopefully all will be well.

Convention wrap up

By / August 8, 2010

The convention is over. The boxes are packed and hauled away for shipping and storage. Nothing went wrong. There were no disasters. I can feel myself unwinding, relaxing. This whole event has been a very stressful one for me. It was filled with things I knew I could do, but had never actually done. Most of them were small things, like calling for a cab. But small things add up and filled the weekend with variables rather than certainties. I spent most of the event riding an emotional sine wave with oscillations between overwhelmed and okay. I tried to keep all of it suppressed so that my oscillations did not affect those around me, but they’re smart people and they could tell I was stressed.

More than anything else this event taught me that large events require a crew. We had an amazing booth crew. Problems were solved without me even knowing that they existed. They had things so well in hand that I was able to be away from the booth more than I was present at it. That capability was critical because I had to shepherd Kiki and Link through the show, keep track of them, and make sure that they were safe. This was made easier by the third cell phone we acquired several weeks ago. Kiki and Link are fairly self sufficient and were very good about following instructions. Even so, there were several times when I felt like I’d lost track of them or was not doing as much as I could to maximize their convention experiences. This was where my second crew came in, the one I hadn’t even considered as a crew, but who turned out to be invaluable in reducing my stress and helping me make sure the parenting portion of this event was a success.

Friends drove down from Michigan specifically to visit Howard and I. They hauled me out to lunch and listened to me ramble about my stresses. I mentioned how I wanted Link to have a chance to explore some games that were not electronic. They then introduced me to one of their friends who is here demoing board games. Together we collected Link and hauled him, despite his protests, to a board game room where he proceeded to have fun for hours. The whole process was one of those moments where I am filled with gratitude at not being alone in the tasks that are in front of me.

These same friends then continued to hang with Howard and I through dinner and late into the evening. It was so good to have familiar people near me. We wandered the convention looking at the spectacle and talking. We wandered by the place where giant structures were created out of cards then knocked down by a siege of small change. Then the change was collected to donate to charity. It is only one example of the activities at the convention. Everywhere we looked adults were expending energy and creativity on play activities. I love this about science fiction/fantasy/gaming conventions. Grown ups get to play. I’m very glad my kids got to witness it. At the end of an evening wandering with good friends I was calm and happy for the first time in the entire convention. I was sad to say goodbye, but they had to go home.

Going to church this morning completely changed my emotional landscape in regard to the convention. The kids and I walked into the church building and it was like we had taken a single step that transported us home. The feel of the place and the format of the meeting was completely familiar. My brain was too full for me to pay focused attention to the speakers, it was the place I needed. I finally had sufficient clarity of thought to see a disconnect in my own thinking which has been creating emotional dissonance.

When deciding what events and challenges fit into our lives, I evaluate them for business usefulness and family strain. These are important measures in decision making. I have been neglecting a critical third evaluation measure. After I do all my logical, logistical, and emotional evaluation, I need to step back from all that I’ve previously considered. I need to pray and try to feel whether the thing I am considering is right or wrong for our business and family. I did this today. I sat in church and prayed about our attendance at GenCon both this year and next. Both feel right. Having that confirmation separate from business considerations was amazing. All my conflicted feelings about the amount of effort and expense vanished. With them went my worries about the strains on our family and about working on Sunday. I felt peace and was thus able to be happy about the convention as a whole. After church I returned to the booth and it was fun. Having the quiet confirmation gives me a big stick with which I can beat back the voices of doubt. Because doubt always sneaks in the back door and tries to make me second-guess my stressful decisions.

This convention has been full of amazing things about which I’ll be telling stories for years to come. The stressful aspects will fade away. Next year will be easier because fewer things will be new. We won’t have as many set up costs. I can truly and honestly say that this has been a good show and I finish it feeling both happy and grateful to have been here.

GenCon Setup

By / August 4, 2010

The exhibit hall is huge, but the space is far from empty. Crews were already working to set up multi-story displays, racks of shelves, and bigger-than-live statues. It is a sort of organized chaos made of boxes, cool gaming stuff, and large pallets of gear weaving through obstructed aisles via dollies and forklifts. The hall was also roastingly hot. We would have been sweating even without the physical exertion of shifting boxes of merchandise. Link was ready to melt. But we all kept hydrated and toughed out the heat. The air conditioners finally had lowered the temperatures in the hall about three hours after we began work.

This booth at GenCon is only possible because of Tracy Hickman’s crew of Kokomo Irregulars. They’ve been helping Tracy with GenCon events for years. This year they received multiple shipments of freight, hauled all the stuff from storage to the convention, schlepped it all in, and then helped us organize the booth. In addition, I was in regular email contact with them which was invaluable in helping me think through how the booth would be run. Our debt of gratitude runs deep and looks to get deeper before the event is over.

When we arrived at the convention center this morning, it was mostly empty. By 3 pm crowds were beginning to congregate around the registration booths. A group in pirate garb sang Acapella tunes. Everywhere I looked I saw people who obviously belonged to the geek tribe. It felt home-like. The show is coming together and it is going to be a sight to behold.

Church and Conventions

By / July 25, 2010

Our business includes attendance at conventions which tend to take place over an entire weekend. We attend a church which reveres the Sabbath day and includes a command to keep it holy. I sometimes feel conflicted by the coexistence of these two facts. I do my best to find a middle ground where I do not forget the Sabbath even when I make business decisions which result in me having to work on it.

In a week I’ll be packing up my two oldest kids and taking them to GenCon. This will be their first opportunity to see how we work a major convention. It will also be their first chance to see how we handle Sundays when we are at conventions. It occurred to me that our church has congregations all over the world. The internet tells me that one of them is meeting at 9 am Sunday morning a mere 1.5 miles from the convention center. That is a walkable distance if it is also a safely walkable route. By Sunday it might be a welcome relief for the kids and I to escape the convention and spend an hour or two at church. Howard would not be able to go. He can’t abandon the booth for long enough. But the kids and I could. And it would probably be a good experience for all of us to be able to attend church outside of Utah. My kids have grown up in the religious majority, they would benefit from seeing a different perspective.

Interesting how I expend more effort on something I felt I ought to be doing anyway, merely because my children will benefit as well.