Water Lantern Festival

By / July 9, 2023

A single paper lantern is lovely with light reflected on water in the dark. But lovely turns to magic when there are hundreds of lanterns floating together on open water. It is what I hoped for when I bought two tickets to a local water lantern festival and I was not disappointed. This particular magic requires community. It requires an organizing force of people to say “come here at this time on this day, buy a ticket, we’ll supply the lanterns.” Then people have to flow into that framework willing to bring their hearts and write on their lanterns. At launch time hundreds set their small lights afloat and the water doubles the light, reflecting twice as much back to all of us on shore.

The scene is even more beautiful when you glimpse some of the lanterns. Each was specifically prepared by someone who hopes, or someone who grieves, or someone ready to let go. It is not just lights on the water, but expressions, thoughts, words, pictures, a part of the person who set it afloat. All completely unique, but glowing in common.

I spoke to no one while at the festival other than my companion that I brought with me. The organizers did try to get everyone to connect with each other. They built a framework of group activities, a “meet people” scavenger hunt, and packs of conversation cards. But I was content with my thoughts and my one person. It was a well run event, and I say that with life experience in running large events. They had clear instructions that meant nothing ever felt chaotic, not even at launch time when everyone went down to the water and people had to maneuver their way to launch around others who were busy taking their photos for social media. I too took photos, storing up the experience in pixels of light that will glow at me from screens and remind me of my experience.

The crowd was noisy and inconvenient. There was no solitude to be had. Part of me would have liked solitude. I would have liked to sit with the floating hopes and dreams without all the inconvenient humanity that set them on the water. But I can’t have one without the other. I can’t have hundreds of lanterns carrying wishes and fears unless I also have the people to launch them. People are messy, noisy, and often annoying, but there is beauty that simply can’t exist without them. Without us. Because those messy inconvenient people includes us. We create problems for others as much as they do to us. We can choose to move through the world graciously rather than demandingly, but we still get in each other’s way. There is beauty in that too.

I love that a core human impulse is to organize ourselves, to draw hundreds of people together into one spot where we can spend time drawing on paper and floating lights on water simply because it makes us happy to do so. It made me happy to be there.

Learning to Waste Materials and Time in the Service of Joy

By / July 3, 2023 / 2 Comments

When my children were small I filled my house with paper and crayons. The crayons outlasted the boxes they came in, so I ended up with a plastic bin full of loose (often broken) crayons. Construction paper and tape entered our house in bulk packs. There were even craft boxes deliberately full of interesting bits and bobs. These things existed in my house not because I looked forward to the results of my children’s crafty endeavors, but because making things was a source of joy to them and they learned from each thing that they made. Fine motor skills, cutting skills, learning to visualize 3d structures out of flat materials, all of these things helped my children to grow, to expand, to learn. I cheerfully tossed crayons and paper and tape and scissors onto the altar of that growth. The growth was the point. It was worth the expense. I’ll admit that I did at first go for the cheapest materials, so that the day my child discovered that crayon melting was creatively more interesting than drawing I was able to smile and hand them the bin of broken half crayons. (And also show them how to put down some wax paper so the melting didn’t stain the table.) But the stains were also part of the learning, both theirs and mine.

As the kids got older, the materials got more expensive. There were pastels and oil paints and construction sets and blocks of wood. Rented musical instruments came and went in my house. As did dance shoes and sports gear. Lessons were paid for and the end result was not gymnasts or equestrians, or musicians, or soccer stars, it was people who had learned from their curiosity and then moved on to something else.

I wonder why we as adults can’t grant ourselves the same grace to explore as I gave to my children. Somehow we get the idea that that the determining factor between “waste” and “well spent” is the result rather than the process. Partially this comes from the fact that we now have to pay our own bills and the creative materials must come from the same funds as food for our tables.  When resources feel scarce, we are wary how we spend them, making sure each resource is optimized and carefully used to purpose. But what if the purpose was “personal growth” instead of completed and useful object. I love the idea presented by twitter user @mykola  in this thread  about being curiosity motivated instead of completion motivated:

“Your projects are your way of asking the universe a question, and then digging and digging and digging until the universe answers. You are motivated by curiosity, and that is a blessed gift, not a source of shame. Your unfinished work is the testament to your growth. Those aren’t abandoned projects — those are the remaining scaffolds from the the space ships that they launched. It was never about finishing the thing.”

A scaffold is not wasted, even if it is completely abandoned, but also perhaps we can reclaim the resource of empty space in our homes and brains by dismantling the scaffolds for parts, discarding and letting go of the pieces which can’t be salvaged or that we don’t want to take time to salvage. Even if we hold onto the scaffolds because maybe we’ll finish them later, we can certainly let go of the guilt around them. Because carrying guilt is a use of brain energy that is far more wasteful than any use of materials could possibly be.

Some projects are cathedrals meant to stand as a beautiful monument for many to admire. Other projects are sand castles where the result is inherently ephemeral and the point is the creation rather than the result.

Pulling this back to the very idea of waste, the dictionary definition of that word says “waste: use or expend carelessly, extravagantly, or to no purpose”.  When we use materials or time or money for something that we enjoy, that is not a careless expense, though it may be extravagant. Joy often is extravagant, but it is definitely not “to no purpose.” Joy is purpose enough. Personal growth is reason enough. Just because we’ve become adults and exited formal schooling doesn’t mean we should stagnate our growth. Exactly the opposite. Be the sort of parent for yourself that buys piles of crayons and paper merely because you want to grow. Feel free to make a creative project out of sourcing materials in ways that don’t strain your budget nor make you worry about the environmental costs of your creative work.

Always remember that growth requires taking up more space and more resources than you did before. It is a good thing. Materials used in the service of your growth are not wasted. Enjoyment and growth are sufficient outcomes. Your growth is reason enough to spend resources on. Your enjoyment is reason enough.

The topic for this post was chosen by my Reader and Creative Community level supporters of my Patreon. If you have a topic you’d like to see me cover, becoming a supporter allows you to participate in the choosing of my next topic. Thank you for reading!

Casting Lights Forward

By / June 29, 2023

Yesterday I had a long conversation with a friend for his podcast (airing in August) during which we discussed partnership and care work. Since his partner is coming up on some heavy medical treatments, there was a moment where I reminded him to plan ahead to take care of himself as well. Fortunately he already has a plan for that in place, but in our discussion we talk about how, if you know that you have to walk through a dark dark patch, you should throw some lights forward on the path. Things that you can look forward to and aim for. Even if life takes a left turn before you get to the light, aiming for it still gives purpose and focus to your travels.

I’m thinking about this as we’re in the last few weeks of prep before Gen Con. Having that event to plan for has given focus and structure to our entire year in ways that are really beneficial. But I’ve also been doing the same thing for myself on a much smaller scale. I’ve discovered small, local (usually free) events that I can attend and look forward to for a few days or a week. I’ve been meaning to write each of these up in detail, but life keeps slipping by me.

One of them was a local African Heritage Festival in the courtyard area of our local mall. There were vendors, performances, and food. I got the chance to bruise my hands while participating in the joy of a drum circle. (I need better drumming techniques.)

I also took myself to a new art museum in my town. It is hosted by Utah Valley University and resides inside a mansion that was donated and renovated for the purpose. The current exhibit is a deliberate celebration of multiculturalism.

And sometimes I simply go out into my garden to discover the small beauties that exist there, like this thirty year old fence that has managed to grow lichen.

Next week I get to see friends during the Writing Excuses Recording sessions. Soon after that I’ve found a local Water Lantern Festival that I have tickets for. Then Gen Con looms large.

I’m not currently in a truly dark patch, but even in a life that is good, there is value in bright lights to aim and plan for. I’m going to try to retain the practice even as the seasons change.

Quietly Working on Many Things

By / June 23, 2023
Decorative image of pen and paper

Each day is carefully considered and full of things, I am so absorbed with each one that I fail to notice how many of them have passed since I wrote here. One of the troubles is that I am writing in so many other places as well as here. Like this Patreon post about Wasting Time and Materials in Service of Joy. (Free to read even for non-patrons.) Or the multiple Kickstarter updates for A Little Immortality. Or the emails to manufacturers telling them there are quality control issues with what they sent us. Or emails to friends. Then there are the social media posts, and the text messages, and the Newsletters. On top of that I have been doing a concerted push to complete my Structuring Life to Support Creativity Resource Book. (So close!) It feels like I am spilling words into the world all day every day.

Then I come here and discover it has been nearly a month without posting, and that feels like a failure, or some sort of neglect. I begin to wonder if I am spread too thin. If I should consolidate my words into fewer places, make them easier to find. Or perhaps put the same words into more places at the risk of being repetitious to the people who may follow along in more than one way. One of the necessary tasks of my life right now is “get more lines into the water.” If opportunities are fish, then the more fishing lines I have in the water, the more likely it is I will land some. If I didn’t need some of my words to help generate income, I would apportion them differently.

I’ve been granted this lovely space, summer of 2023, where I get to have the life I want, where my time is focused on my house and my projects. I’m not currently employed for a company that I don’t own. That may need to change in the fall depending on the outcome of the next Schlock book crowdfunding. On top of that, we’ve employed my son as our warehouse manager which means my time is not being completely absorbed in shipping tasks. No one in my household is in crisis. So in this wide open space, it is time for me to be expansive. To lay groundwork for a foundation that has capacity to hold up work that I may have to create in more constrained circumstances. This means writing more words in more places. Building up my Patreon, cultivating my mailing list, accepting teaching opportunities, scheduling interviews. If I do enough of all of them, perhaps I’ll net enough income generation so that my long-term future doesn’t contain “Sandra goes to find employment.”

Not that seeking employment is a failure of any kind. I did it last year to my great benefit. I can do it again as needed to push forward on my priorities. But seeking a job isn’t what I want to have happen next. I want to get to have long days where I alternate writing and reading. I want to putter in my garden and try to picture the plants I want to put in the ground this fall if I can afford them. I want to think up fun Schlock merchandise and make it real. I know what I want, I don’t know what I get to have in the long term. So I’m doing my best to dwell in a grateful space rather than an anxious one. I get to have this span of time with a lot of writing in it. That is a gift. The financial results of this time have yet to play out. Trying to imagine all of the possible futures is an exercise in creative anxiety which only siphons energy away from other creative things I could be doing instead. So when I discover myself in an anxiety tangent, I do my best to bring myself back here, to gratitude. I get to have this lovely summer where we’ve had beautiful weather and I get to finish a book that feels timely and important. Then I get to take that book through several rounds of revision and bring it forth into the world. It is going to be real, and I’m looking forward to that bit.

While I’m making that happen, things might be a bit quieter here on the blog, but even when I have gone quiet, I haven’t gone far. Just imagine me puttering away in the corner of the room, keeping you company, but so absorbed in my own project that I forget to speak. Until I do, and suddenly we’re all a little startled to realize we aren’t alone here after all.

Building Context

By / May 29, 2023

I am reading Me (Moth) by Amber McBride which is a novel written in poetry. This is the third or fourth poem novel I’ve read recently and I’ve discovered I love the form. It strips away so much noise from the emotional content of the book. But a novel in poetry requires an accumulation of layers of meaning. I reached a few lines on page 80 that struck me:

“Steps in new directions are hard to take
& it is hard to be sure if Sani is the moon
or just a dumb light bulb”

Me (Moth) by Amber McBride, pg 80

Looking at those words, you may wonder what in them was powerful. I’ve pulled that quote out of the book and dumped it here for you to read. In doing so I have ripped it free of the context which gave those words impact for me. Through eighty pages of reading I learned how my protagonists’ name is Moth. How she is in the process of cocooning after a soul-deep injury. How she meets a boy name Sani who is as injured as she is. And now she wonders if them traveling together is a path toward healing or just endless and deadly circling of the moth and the porch light. Context gives the words their power.

I think about this when I scroll through social media and see endless thoughts and snippets ripped from their contexts for easy sharing. One descriptor for this experience is Context Collapse. The tricky part is that sometimes snippeting works. Sometimes it is incredibly useful to share a pull quote or a meme to spread an idea or to share sorrows and joys. There are twitter threads and social media graphics specifically designed to carry their context with them packed tight.

But even the best-packed meme still arrives in a head different from the one that created it and the one that shared it. The new mind and heart carry their own context built out of a lifetime of experiences, fears, and joys. A context that is built and informed not only by their own life, but also by what appears before and after the snippeted meme in the feed. The new person reacts based on the context they carry in ways that are baffling or feel very tangential to the conversation that the snippet was intended to spark. Even people who are in fundamental agreement on problems and solutions can end up arguing because we’re having multiple conversations instead of a singular one. A cloud of possible conversations sparked by the same snippeted meme, shaped by individual contexts.

We all end up shouting at contextual ghosts that we’ve made up in our own heads. If we are not careful to actually build context with the person we’re attempting to converse with, we can end up holed up in defensive bunkers, terrified of the straw men we built for ourselves.

Pausing to build context is the key. It is taking those lines I pulled from Amber McBride’s book and asking me why they mattered to me, what impact they had. Not just finding out the context that the book provides, but also what are the resonances in my own life that make them ring like a bell for me. Even after all of that, you still may not see why those lines matter, maybe they fall flat for you instead of ringing, but at least we will have had a shared conversation. And likely will know more about each other than we did before. Building shared context is how we connect, how we learn to love, how we heal.

But context building takes time and patience. It takes using social media tools against their built-in purposes. It requires us to add our own context to the things we share instead of just sharing them. It takes all of us learning to hold space for each other.

Addendum: You should definitely read some of Amber McBride’s work. It is beautiful. If you want, feel free to use my affiliate link to pick up a copy of Me (Moth).

Shifting Employments

By / May 28, 2023

A year ago this week I learned of a job at Writers Cubed Inc where I would be the Director of Operations helping run conferences and other events for teenage writers and support teen and child literacy. I applied and got the job. This week I am winding down the last pieces of my employment with them. It isn’t the outcome anyone wanted. They wanted to build me into their structure for years to come and I liked being a core structural element in making events happen. Unfortunately finding funding for non-profits is complex and often difficult. They’re experiencing a funding gap and they can’t afford to pay a Director of Operations for the next year or more. So I’ve been carefully closing up files, finishing off email chains, and logging out of programs. I’ve also been observing the emotions of job loss as I go through them, even while part of me is glad to have my time less constrained. My work for them went on hold more than a month ago, and I haven’t been any less busy.

This often seems to be the case. As if tasks are just waiting in the wings to flow into any available space. We got our copies of A Little Immortality delivered from the printer and that has moved us into Shipping Season with its attendant raft of tasks. Every shipping season is a little bit different. This one is the first time we’ve had books delivered from our local printer, it is the first time orders will be waiting on the arrival of coins instead of books, it is the first time my son is being trained in all the shipping tasks with an eye to him fully taking over the job the next time around. All of this occupies my time while I’m contemplating how my life will be shaped when my schedule is no longer bent around working 10-15 hours per week for someone else. While I’m also contemplating how I can fill the income gap that not having an additional paycheck will cause. I can see my way through August. Between now and then I need to figure out additional steps.

One of the things I am doing is plowing through drafting books, so that I can get feedback on books, so that I can move closer to getting more books on the table. Working an outside job on top of the work for my own business taught me stamina in a new way, I’m using that stamina and habit-of-work to make words happen. Then once I have feedback, I’ll have a better feel for whether anything I have written is viable as something that can be published. I’ll have a feel for how much more work there is to do. Perhaps when the first rush of shipping slows down I will be able to get some videos posted to Patreon. Perhaps after I’m done drafting entire books I can turn my attention back to shorter fiction. Or perhaps when I reach August it will become apparent that I need to be looking for another job.

Usually this sort of uncertainty makes me anxious. I suppose I am a little, but I’m also feeling fairly calm, like this is a good path, that I have good plans, and that between now and September further paths will become more clear to me.

Growing for the Future

By / May 21, 2023

My clover is growing. It is now recognizable and visible from a distance.

Of course the weeds are also growing, since the conditions which allow my clover to thrive are also beneficial for a number of weedy plants. However as the clover establishes, I should have fewer weeds to pull.

Seeing the brown patch fill in with green is very hopeful. Later this week I will pay a sprinkler company to fix several sprinkler problems and that will hopefully help me keep things green.

Fixing the sprinklers is part of a much more involved process that I’m undertaking in several areas of my life where I’m expending resources now in ways that will let me conserve my resources of time and energy better in the future. The past several months I’ve been training my 20yo to take over the tasks of warehouse management and store fulfillment. This week I’ll be training him on Kickstarter fulfillment as we start sending out the first shipments of Schlock Mercenary A Little Immortality. I can see a future where I’m no longer handling fulfillment and am able to focus my energy on making new things. I see a future where this brown patch is green.

Visiting My Bookshelves

By / May 10, 2023 / 1 Comment

In this quieter space with fewer appointments on my schedule and fewer admin tasks for me to track, I have been doing some organization and clearing out. This is how I ended up standing in front of my bookshelves. One of my bookshelves. I have shelves in multiple locations which serve different portions of my library collection. This time I stood in front of the shelf which is mostly full of children’s books from my own childhood and from when my kids were young. I accidentally stood there for half an hour, reading spines, occasionally pulling out a book to leaf through. I was remembering, not just the story contained in the book’s pages, but also the story of how the book came to be mine, the story of why the book mattered to me, the story of who I shared that book with. These physical objects contain so much more than what is printed on their pages.

Books have shaped so much of who I am. They continue to do so both in what I’m reading and what I’m creating. I could write my life history simply by going to my bookshelves and telling the stories of me and each of the books on the shelf. I don’t think everyone stores and processes their lives in this way. Howard does to some extent. He has shelves of his own. One of my sons definitely stores memory in objects, but his objects are more likely to be video game cartridges. My other kids, less so. Books matter to me deeply, which is why making them is a large part of my life’s work.

The Hope of Clover

By / April 27, 2023

Last summer a large section of our lawn died. A combination of heat, drought, misaligned sprinklers, and inattention (my personal resources were over-tapped) turned it from thriving green plants into a crispy yellow dirt patch. Every time I went outside I felt the weight of failure as I considered the results of my poor stewardship. Months later, I still feel that failure. It it is an indictment of my gardening, and somehow also a commentary about the world at large. As if the ecological disaster of the drought were playing out small scale in my yard. I can grant myself compassion and grace over the situation. I really didn’t have any attention to spare, but that doesn’t change the dirt patch.

I’ve found myself in a season with a few more resources to spare. Not a lot. I can’t pay a landscape designer to come in and reconfigure my entire yard to be more drought friendly and correct all my sprinkler placements. But I can take tiny corrective steps. So, I bought clover seeds and scattered them. Thousands of tiny seeds in a vast swathe of dirt, each seed carrying the hope of green abundance later. Green clover will thrive better in dry circumstances. A clover lawn will be better for local insect life as well. Clover moves me closer to a garden that will feed my soul with greenness in the height of scorching summer while also moving all of my landscaping closer to plantings that require less effort and less water to keep alive.

Today my patch of dirt has thousands of tiny sprouts.

They’re pretty much invisible from more than a foot away, but they are there. Tiny specks of hope that I can recover from failure. In fact, perhaps, the existence of this failure has laid groundwork for something which may be much better for the long run. If I can kill a lawn, grieve over dirt, scatter seeds, and then grow clover; what else can I recover from?

I crouch down to admire my tiny, tiny plants and feel hope for what comes next.

One of the Good Ones

By / March 30, 2023 / 2 Comments

@IsabelKaplan posted the following plea on Twitter:

Plz send heartwarming stories of straight male partners supporting your creative endeavors. Hungry for a story that isn’t “I achieved unprecedented professional success and my relationship was never the same.”

I responded on Twitter, but it is hard to fit all the thoughts into the space that Twitter supplies, so in more expanded form:

Howard and I will hit 30 years married in August. We’ve had a recent dynamic shift where I’m stepping up, writing more things, taking work that makes me less available at home. As I started taking on these roles, stepping into a primary wage earner space, I kept waiting for the push back and quiet resentment. Howard always said “Go do the thing.” He’s always said “go do the thing” yet somehow I still found myself pausing and checking with each step. Is this move okay? How does it change our dynamic? Am I making Howard feel bad about his disability when I run fast all day long? Especially since I know that “run fast all day long” is Howard’s preferred mode for living? So I paused and gave space for complex feelings that never showed up to fill the space that I left open. It turns out that Howard means “go do the thing” with his whole self.

I described this on Twitter and got a couple of responses essentially saying “you got one of the good ones.” Yes I did, but I think that statement actually downplays what is happening here. Because Howard isn’t possessed of some innate goodness that people either have or they don’t. Howard chooses who he is on a daily basis. He’s been choosing for decades. We’ve been building communication and choices together. I actually think that younger iterations of us would have had to wrestle with exactly the emotion and resentment I kept pausing for. Younger Howard would have had a pile of feelings to work through about me stepping into spotlight. Current Howard is practiced and adept at managing his own feelings without making them someone else’s job. He’s learned a lot of emotional intelligence and excellent partnership skills through the years. The fact that our current dynamic shift is without friction, speaks to who we have chosen to become and the relationship we’ve built in all the years prior.

Howard definitely gets credit here, because he chose a growth path for himself which deliberately gives his partner as much space to grow as she needs and wants. To his credit, that is always who he has wanted to be. He said as much thirty years ago when we were dating. He told me that he could see I was in the process of growing and becoming, and he never wanted to interfere with that. I believed him. I married him. We sometimes both failed at the shared project of giving me space to grow. I often kept myself small because of unstated cultural expectations about what my role should be, because my own anxieties tell me I’m only allowed to take up space if it won’t inconvenience other people. Learning to be inconvenient has been part of my growth path. Joyfully, every time I allow myself to take up space, I discover that my best beloved (both Howard and my kids) are quite willing to scootch over and let me be big.

I wish that everyone’s life was full of people who are willing to make space for them to grow as big as they can. The good news is that this is learned behavior. You, and any partner you currently have, can choose to become this way if you’re willing to put in the work to let go of ego, root out anxieties, and learn communication skills.