Work

Re-organizing My Office, Again.

By / March 31, 2014

When we remodeled my office a couple of years ago, it was my intention to create a space that was both lovely and functional. It worked, mostly. But then we acquired a warehouse and the room which used to be my storage and shipping room became Kiki’s home-visiting-from-college bedroom. In the shift, a whole category of items became homeless, namely art to be sold and the small stash of inventory which we keep at the house. These things drifted for months, stacked on various flat surfaces in my office. Today I finally gave up and installed a utility shelf in my office. It is not at all lovely, but it returns all of the flat surfaces to being functional. In exchange for one ugly corner, the rest of the space can be lovely again. Perhaps I’ll hang a curtain to hide it.

The truth is that, after seven or eight stable years, the living spaces in our house are going to be fluctuating quite a bit in the years that are to come. Kiki will be home for the summer, but after that none of us is certain. This year there is no money to finish the storage room, but next year may be a different story. Two and a half years from now Link will likely depart the house for college. I’m going to be reconfiguring spaces every six months or so for the next several years. I’m okay with that, particularly if it means I only have to stare at these utility shelves for six months.

It may even be a shorter time than that. It is possible that when I finally spend twenty hours doing organization over at the warehouse, I’ll figure out that it makes more sense for the art and matting supplies to take up residence over there. In which case, the shelves and most of their contents will get moved.

Our family and business continue to evolve. It only makes sense that our spaces should too.

Re-Considering the Covers of the Cobble Stones Books

By / March 21, 2014 / 2 Comments

I’ve been increasingly aware over the last year that there is something lacking in the covers of my Cobble Stones books. I was pleased with the covers when I made them, but even then I thought they could probably be better. I didn’t know how to make them better using the skills I already possessed. I couldn’t even see why they were wrong, I just had a vague sense that they could be better somehow. I called it good enough and put the covers on the books. Then they didn’t sell. Not only that, but I watched during conventions when all the other covers on the table got perused or picked up and examined. The Cobble Stones covers did not. Ever. The only time those books sold was when someone who reads this blog came to the table specifically looking for them, or when people listened to me read out loud from one of them.

I’ve spent some time trying to figure out what to do differently, particularly as I’m contemplating releasing a new book in the series this year. I’m going to need another cover and I didn’t want to replicate the mistakes I made with the first two. So I did what I should have done before designing covers. I went out and found several books that are very like mine in tone and content. Then I stared hard at the covers. I found they all were mostly plain with a single image and then text. In comparison the cover of Cobble Stones 2011 is busy and confusing.

I chose to photograph photographs because that was within my skill set. I chose images that had actually featured on the blog, because that seemed appropriate to me. I thought that having lots of images reflected the episodic nature of the book’s contents. I tried to make sure the images had an implied journey. Up close you can see all those things. From more than two feet away, or at thumbnail size, the book just looks…brown with something jumbly going on.

In contrast, Kennison’s book grabbed me from across the room. The blue drew me in and the title captured me. In fact, that is how I found Kennison’s book. A teacher had it on her desk during a parent teacher conference. I kept sneaking glances at the cover and scribbled down the title at a moment when the teacher thought I was taking notes on my student.
Here is another stark comparison.

For the Cobble Stones 2012 book I was in a tearing hurry. It is even less cohesive than the first Cobble Stones cover. With the first cover I refined it multiple times and engaged the help of a friend with an artistic eye. We shot all sorts of arrangements and selected the best one. For the second cover, I did it all myself in the space of an afternoon. It shows. None of the images match to any of the essays that are inside it. All they share in common is the fact that they appeared on this blog during 2012. I suppose that is fine for a sampler book, but the cover image is supposed to be an advertisement for the contents, not an extension of them.

The cover for My Grandfather’s Blessings demonstrates to me the importance of a good subtitle. In creative non-fiction, memoir, and essay books the title catches the reader, the subtitle elaborates and sells the book. I need better titles than: Cobble Stones with a year appended. I need to make clear that these are books in the Cobble Stones series, but each book should have its own title and subtitle. I suspect the first two will always retain the titles they currently have. I intended them as samplers, and they’ve served that purpose. Incidentally this will also solve a problem I’ve had when packing and shipping orders. The titles of the books are so similar that I have to pay special attention to which book was ordered. In fact I put the words “snow” and “sand” into the item description just to help me differentiate. This is manageable with two books, but could get very problematic with more.

For the print editions of the first two books, I’m stuck with these covers for awhile. I have over a hundred copies of each book and it doesn’t make sense to spend money re-printing them when they still haven’t broken even. I’ll continue to sell them at conventions and use them for promotional purposes. The next Cobble Stones book will be different. I may try to do a more thematic arrangement of essays. I’ll definitely see if I can work with a cover designer who has the necessary skills to produce the right cover.

Of course the other reason the Cobble Stones books haven’t sold is because I’ve put so very little energy into marketing them. People can’t buy books if they don’t know the books exist. With both books, I kicked them out into the world with very little support because there were so many other things going on at the time. I hope I can do better for future books.

By the way, I highly recommend The Gift of an Ordinary Day by Katrina Kennison and My Grandfather’s Blessings by Naomi Remen. They are both excellent.

Strength of Wild Horses Advance Copies

By / March 20, 2014

With all the other things going on, I forgot to share the joyous news that I’ve received my advance copies of Strength of Wild Horses. They are beautiful. They match the original Hold on to Your Horses books in all the ways that I hoped they would. I am really excited for the rest of the books to arrive so that I can send them out into the world. Naturally the Kickstarter backers have already had a chance to read the book. I sent them all a PDF, as I promised. I really like fulfilling promises. So happy.

Recalibrating the Finances

By / July 24, 2014

I’ve been co-managing a business for more than twelve years now. Since the business continues to support our family, evidence suggests that I have at least a minimal level of competence at the tasks that I must do. However I’m constantly aware that there are huge gaps in my knowledge, because I learn things as they become necessary instead of having a comprehensive knowledge. This means that sometimes I’m doing things the hard way. Once I had a successful way to get something done, I never stopped to wonder if there could be a better one. As one my goals for this year, I’ll be trying to redress this. I’ll be learning how to make reports and graphs so that more of our business decisions can be data driven rather than instinct driven. We have pretty good instincts, but those instincts will only get better if they’re fed data.

Along with trying to make our business flow more quantifiable, I’m also re-vamping our family finances. Last year we took on some significant additional expenses (college tuition, ongoing mental health care for family members, lessons) and we changed the way that we handle paychecks. Last year we had a large monetary influx that helped us cover all of that. We won’t have a comparable influx this year, so it is time to recalibrate our monthly budget. We don’t want to accidentally run ourselves further into debt instead of slowly digging ourselves out.

Both of these projects required me to spend most of my Saturday deep into accounting. I dug into historical records to create profit and loss sheets for each book. I sorted through papers to make sure I had everything in order. I sat down and re-learned the budgeting system in Quicken so that I can be checking our status every week, month, and quarter. I’ve assigned myself additional work for each accounting day, but I’ve turned it into routine work instead of stressful work, which is important. Stressful work gets avoided, routine work gets done.

Part of this recalibration is shifting our spending habits downward a bit. We don’t have to go into crisis mode, but I do need to dust off some of my frugal living habits and make sure that we’re using our resources wisely. This means I need to be paying attention on a smaller scale than I have been for the past while. I need to be pausing before buying. Sometimes I’ll buy anyway, but that pause is important because it allows us to prioritize. To use a metaphor, we don’t want to spend all our money on popcorn and not be able to afford movie tickets. At the end of all the mucking around with numbers, I feel better. I have a clearer picture of where we are financially and where we need to be headed. Now I need to go make dinner instead of waiting until the last minute and then buying one.

A Day for an Inventory of Creative Projects in Process

By / March 13, 2014

This morning my email informed me that the advance copies for Strength of Wild Horses should arrive at my door tomorrow. Opening that package will let me know if the books are everything that I want them to be. I’ve been through this with fourteen different books, but I still get nervous when I know the package is coming.

At lunch, Howard and I met with Tracy and Laura Hickman to talk about XPC (Xtreme Player Codex), which is the follow up book to XDM (Xtreme Dungeon Mastery). Howard and Tracy will be meeting again next week for a massive brainstorming and outlining session. I’m excited to see the results of that. This fall I will get to do the editing and layout for the book. We hope to release it next spring. So a new project is underway.

This afternoon I picked up a color test print of LOTA. This is for the final pass where I scan once again for errors that I’ve missed. I found some. Tomorrow I’ll find more. Then I’ll fix all of them. Then I’ll upload it and tell the printer “Go.” Two months from now it will be advance copies from LOTA that will arrive and make me nervous.

Also this afternoon I sent postcards and note cards off to print. These are backer rewards from the Strength of Wild Horses Kickstarter. Tomorrow Kiki will help me stretch the canvas prints so that they are ready to go. That only leaves the bookplates. Mid-April is when I need to have everything in hand so that I can mail books to backers. Then I will have fulfilled the promises I made.

This evening Howard and I sat down to watch Stripped, a documentary about cartoonists and cartooning. Howard is in it multiple times, which makes me quite happy. It is a brilliant work of documentary film making and made me glad that we participate in this amazing tradition. I highly recommend picking it up on iTunes and watching it. You can pre-order now. It releases on April 1, 2014.

Somewhere in the middle of the other things, I put together book binders for Massively Parallel and The House in the Hollow. MP is the next Schlock book and it exists in a binder because there are white spaces for Howard to fill. HITH you’ve never heard of before, because before yesterday I didn’t have a name for it. This is my novel in progress, which currently has a word count just over twenty thousand. I’m quite pleased that the name for it showed up, because I was pretty stumped. HITH gets a binder because I need to be able to glance at earlier chapters, scribble revision notes in the margins, and keep track of where I’m at. I’m used to paper as part of my editorial processes, so this seems like it will work for me.

As soon as I complete a few of the projects listed above, I’ve got lots of projects lined up to take the available space. The challenge coin PDF is of first importance. It represents an unfulfilled promise. There are family photo books, my printed copy of this blog for 2013, and then the 2013 Cobble Stones book. I want all of them done by July.

I’m glad that my life has so many creative projects in it. They bring me joy.

Finding Happiness in the Muddle

By / March 12, 2014 / 2 Comments

In my head there are four versions of today. There is the day when I got out of bed early and focused on book design and layout work with only brief breaks for meals. There is the gardening day where I spent all my hours outside rescuing my flower beds from the dead masses of last year’s weeds. There is the day where I cleaned all of the things, setting our entire house into order. There is the day where I relish the fact that my kids are out of school and we go do something fun. There is a hidden fifth version where I run off to visit Antelope Island or hide and write all day long.

The day that I had was an unfortunate mish mash of parts of all four days. (Sadly that fifth day remained illusory.) Because it was a mish mashed day I arrive at the end of it feeling like I did not use my hours well, which is not my preferred feeling at the end of a Monday. The truth is that I always have four days worth of stuff that would be useful to do in each day. I can only thin out the tasks by eliminating things which truly matter to me, so mostly I just bounce from one thing to another trying to make sure that each thing gets some attention during the week. It sort of works. Except when it doesn’t.

Lately I’ve been making a conscious effort to acknowledge the importance of the things I am getting done rather than only seeing what they cost me. For example, there is a writing retreat that I would love to attend later this year. At the moment it looks like I will not be going. This makes me sad. I could focus on that sadness and make a huge list of all the events I have to miss for lack of child care. But the reason I miss them is because ensuring proper supervision for my kids is more important to me than any event. I am not willing to settle for less, so I have made a choice. When I feel trapped by my life, it is often because there is something more important that I’m not willing to give up.

I apply this knowledge to my task list. I try to see the value in the things I get done rather than the long list of things that I did not. It still wears at me. I don’t always succeed. Particularly when I see an urgent task and note that the due date was a month ago. I never get around to priority number five because I’m constantly handling the things that rotate through priorities one through four. I’ve stopped believing that I’m going to catch up, because this constant stream of things is my life right now. And it is a good life. I choose it in the moments long ago when I chose to have four children and then to support Howard in being a cartoonist. I chose it when I decided to start a blog and to self publish picture books. I chose it when we kickstarted projects. Granted, at the moments of choosing I didn’t really understand how these things would converge all at once to give us some really busy years. There are also other things that add to the stress of my life that I did not choose, but had to deal with nonetheless. I would really love to have a few winters without major illness. That would be nice. We have ongoing mental health issues with several family members. I don’t get to choose all the things.

But of the things I did choose, I could un-choose some of them. The un-choosing would have far-reaching consequences, most of which would make my life more difficult and far more miserable. So I muddle along and try to find happiness in the muddle, because when my life is less busy (and I will have less busy times eventually) I do not think that happiness will just be sitting in the midst of the empty hours waiting for me to collect it. I will only find happiness in empty hours if I brought it with me. This means I must learn to live in happiness now, while my life is busy.

It is not easy, particularly at the end of a mish mash day, but I shall continue to try.

The Messy Desk of Many Projects in Process

By / March 5, 2014

This was my desk about halfway through this morning.

My desk is not usually this buried in piles of stuff, (that would drive me insane) but yesterday I was in the middle of copy edits for LOTA which spread out everywhere. The arrangements of those papers would allow me to pick up where I left off. Then this morning we ordered some lapel pins, which poked the financial section of my brain and I could tell I was going to fret over the bill for those pins until I opened up the accounting and proved to my brain that yes, we really do have the money and this is a good idea. So you can see me mid-accounting on top of being mid-copy edits. You can also see a stack of Strength of Wild Horses art, a manila folder full of postage and invoices ready to be shipped from the warehouse, a returned package, the black binder with the rough cut of Massively Parallel, and lots of other reminder notes. I took this photo at the maximum messy point of the day. Within an hour all the financial stuff was cleared off. Within two, I’d taken care of the shipping things. The copy edits are still using most of the desk landscape because I’ll tackle them tomorrow.

Despite the messy desk, things are going very well. I don’t know if we’ve caught up after being sick, but I’m not really trying to keep score anymore. Mostly I’m just trying to make sure that each day contains the right mix of work, parenting, house stuff, writing time, and relaxing time. It’s been pretty effective the last couple of weeks, so I’ll continue.

One Thing After Another

By / February 27, 2014

This morning I tweeted something that Link said to me in the car on the way to school:

16yo: “A lot of stuff happened yesterday. That’s probably why I was tired.”
Me too, son, me too.

Link is doing a marvelous job of taking back control of his life. He’s making lists and working hard to complete assignments. He really does have lots of things going on and less time to relax than he used to have. I’m working hard to let that be his process even though there is part of my brain that is desperate to take it over and run things more efficiently.

Howard had a bad brain chemistry day yesterday, which meant that he spent several hours miserable. He’s so much better than he used to be at recognizing the onset of depression and taking management steps. Sometimes it still gets bad anyway. For the most part he handled it on his own, but I was support crew, supplier of hugs, and manager of household things which could not wait. Naturally this reminded me of the post I’ve been meaning to write about being the spouse of a depressed person. I started writing it today and realized that it is actually three posts. Through it all, we breathe prayers of thanks that Howard cycles quickly out of depression. The deeps rarely last more than a day and the downs are usually gone in mere days.

Patch had cello lessons in the morning which is a happy thing. Gleek had her SEOP meeting in the middle of the day, where we met with a counselor and selected her classes for next year. There were twenty packages to mail. Gleek had an orthodontist appointment. Howard had a doctor’s appointment. Sam’s club gave Howard grief about refilling his anti-depressant prescription. I also had to finish putting the last pieces of marginalia into LOTA so that we could do a color test print.

All of those things, and I’d decided to try going to a writer’s group at 9pm. I was excited about it. I need social things in my life. I really enjoyed reading the submissions and was looking forward to talking about them.

Then at 8:15 Gleek tried to jump a curb on her scooter and missed. She tumbled across the pavement and was in too much pain to get up until after I was brought from the house. By 8:30 we decided that an X-ray was called for, so I took her to the emergency room. It was not broken. No casts for us, just medical bills and a missed writer’s group.

Today has not been quite so one-thing-after-another as yesterday was, but there were still moments where I felt like I was running to catch up with my life. Calm happiness and good perspective are hard to maintain on days like these. I think I’m allowed to be tired and feel a bit worn. But when I feel my brain headed for the running monologue of woe, I turn aside instead. I can see how this week is better than last week. I can see how we’re beginning to catch up on the things that fell behind. Life is good, even when it is an exhausting one-thing-after-another day.

Adding Something to an Already Full Book (and Life)

By / February 26, 2014 / 1 Comment

I’ve been working on Schlock books this week. Longshoreman of the Apocalypse will be heading to print in about a week. I’ve also been working on Massively Parallel, which will be the biggest Schlock book we have ever made. The page count is 256 pages in the preliminary layout. It was really important to lock down the page count so that Howard could have a firm number of pages to plan for the bonus story. It is a sad day when Howard has written a ten page bonus story and the book only has seven blank pages. It hasn’t happened to us yet, but I’ve been afraid of it often enough that I started working layout early and nailing down the basic layout before telling Howard to start writing.

I knew that MP was going to be big when I started working. In fact both Howard and I were afraid that it was going to be much bigger. We worried about spine strength and whether we ought to split the story into two books. So my driving focus as I began to put strips into place was “waste no space.” In most Schlock books I’m very careful not to split up a multi-row strip across pages, even if I have to add white space to do it. For MP, I broke that rule some. I still tried, particularly in dramatic story moments, but I leaned toward taking less space. Then there we were with 256 pages and nineteen of them were awaiting a bonus story. Then I talked to Howard about my process. He agreed to the necessity of splitting multi-row strips across pages, but asked that I go back through and make sure I wasn’t splitting them across page turns. I knew that I had and we certainly had enough spare pages to re-shuffle. But how many pages would it take? Every page added meant a white space created for which Howard would have to draw margin art.

I was surprised then when the very first added page had a cascading effect through the following thirty pages. I shifted strips around, placing for dramatic effect and to keep multiple rows together. At the end of thirty pages, I was staring at a blank page. I had just majorly improved the book and not reduced the number of pages available for bonus story. I went through the whole book that way, optimizing for story instead of space preservation, and I ended with a 256 page book that had 13 pages available for bonus story.

It is counter-intuitive, but there are times when adding a thing does not result in less for all the other things. In January we added cello lessons for Patch and horseback riding lessons for Gleek. These things combine to use up at least four hours of my time per week. As packed as my schedule gets, it does not seem I can spare those hours. Yet these things slipped right into our lives without even a ripple. If anything, I’ve seen a reduction of stress and an increase in productivity. That was unexpected. I’m thinking about this because there is a writers group that I’m considering adding to my life. Logically it is going to use up some time that could be spent on other things, but I hope it is going to do that magic trick where it just enters my life without diminishing the time and energy that I have available for all of my other things.

Intense Work Day

By / February 25, 2014

Yesterday staying focused on the positive took lots of conscious effort. Today, not so much. Perhaps that is because today was a project focused day where I tuned out everything except what was right in front of me. The noise turns off when I’m hyper-focused on a project. This was the first hyper focused day I’ve had in a long time and I re-surfaced with lots of work done. There was also a long list of things that I did not do today. I’ll look at that list tomorrow because I’m worn out this evening and would rather dwell in a feeling of accomplishment than of failure. I guess maybe that is the hard part, learning to be glad without qualifying it or tempering it. The other hard part is staring at the chocolate brownies on my kitchen counter and not eating them because I’ve finally realized that chocolate is like jet fuel for my anxiety. And, at least today, I want to not be anxious more than I want to eat chocolate. The scales may tip the other way on a different day.

After all-day layout, Gleek’s horseback riding lessons, Patch’s cub scout dinner, and all the other things. I’m tired now. Early bedtimes for all.