One Cobble at a Time

Over on Twitter I put up an introductions thread. Then I realized it might be nice to put that here as well, so that people who happen to find this blog can seek me out in other places too.

I’m Sandra Tayler as my twitter bio (currently) states I am a writer of words, maker of books, and caretaker of many things. This introduction thread talks about my work and where you can find it.

I have a newsletter! One of the best ways to know what all my projects are is to subscribe to my newsletter. I send it out once per month. It contains a short letter of thoughts and progress updates on my projects: https://emailoctopus.com/lists/1978c760-f9d9-11ea-a3d0-06b4694bee2a/forms/subscribe

I write books! I’ve written picture books, short stories, RPG books, essay books, and I have lots more books I want to write. You can buy many of them here: https://shop.schlockmercenary.com/collections/by-sandra

I have a Patreon! This is a way for people to provide support if they enjoy the work that I do. https://www.patreon.com/SandraTayler

I co-own Hypernode Media! We are a small press specializing in works created by Howard and Sandra Tayler. You can find our books here: https://shop.schlockmercenary.com/

I collaborate! @howardtayler and I are a team who have been running our business together since we launched Schlock Mercenary in June 2000. Schlock Mercenary is our best known work and can be read for free at https://www.schlockmercenary.com/

I have a blog! I’ve been blogging since 2004, so there is a deep archive. I don’t have a particular topic or theme other than “I was thinking about this” or “I have a story to tell.” If you want blog entries mailed to you, there is a handy sign up form on the right hand side of the page. https://www.onecobble.com/

I consult! I’ve got a lot of experience running a creator-owned small business that uses crowdfunding. If you’d like to have me look at your business or crowdfunding plan, I love helping people succeed at their projects. https://www.sandratayler.com/index.php/consulting/

I teach! I don’t have a regular schedule for when or where I teach. Sometimes it is online. The best way to be alerted is to sign up for my newsletter or join my Patreon. If you have an event or group you’d like me to teach to, please contact me and we can make it happen. https://www.sandratayler.com/index.php/contact/

I community build! I actively run and build several Discord communities and communities via Zoom. If you are looking to connect with other creatives and need help doing that, you can contact me.  (Or sign up for my newsletter or Patreon.) https://www.sandratayler.com/index.php/contact/

I organize events! I’m part of the team that runs the Writing Excuses Retreats. http://writingexcusesretreat.com/

I organize events! I’m the Director of Operations for Teen Author Boot Camp, Tween Author Boot Camp, Lean into Literacy Professional Development Conference, Teen Poetry Society, and Teen Reader’s Choice Awards.  You can read more about all of those things here: https://www.teenauthorbootcamp.com/

I stared at the walls in my office today. For an hour. At least I think it was an hour. It might have been more. When I resurfaced from my thoughts, I had no idea what I’d been thinking about exactly. The thoughts swam past me like fish in a murky ocean, appearing and then vanishing. I know that only a few of them were about cleaning my office, a flock of tasks that really need to be done. More of them were about the books on my shelves because those were in my line of sight. Most of my books are familiar friends that I want to revisit. I’ve been doing poorly at making time for reading, so I feel sad that I probably won’t get around to reading them again for a long time. If ever. Yet I’m also content that they continue to sit on my shelves as tangible reminders of journeys I’ve taken and things I have learned. So much of my life work is centered around books, it is strange that reading somehow slipped out of my life. It is a piece I’d like to re-collect.

I watched a short video this week about the attention economy. I wish I could find it again, but it would require me to search twitter and I’d just end up down half a dozen rabbit holes. The person in the video was doing either an interview or a panel where he discussed how corporations will happily colonize every moment of my attention in order to acquire money. Sometimes I am the source of that money. Other times my attention is the commodity for sale. Either way, much of the internet is optimized to grab and hold attention. My attention. My time. My focus. That thought sits with me as my phone pings me with a weekly report on how many hours I spent on various apps. I did not ask my phone to give me this information, it drew my attention by making a noise. So many apps want to do the same. To reach into my life and pull my focus back to things that are online. I read the report and I don’t like what the numbers have to say. It was only a few posts ago when I was lamenting how I lack space in my life for emotional processing. This report gives me some clues as to where that processing time has vanished to.

I am tired so often lately. Worn out by all of my administrative work with its endless round of small decisions and crafted emails. In between tasks I seek a small break, so I noodle on my phone trying to rest my brain and re-set so that I can face the next set of tasks. There is a flaw in this. My noodling gives my mind more things to process and track. My little game requires me to remember which in-game goals I was reaching for. Social media is full of new thoughts to think and world news that often creates stress. I am discovering (again) that five quick breaks to noodle do not equal an hour of brain wandering while staring at the walls of my office. I can feel the difference between these things when I resurface.

The challenge is that sometimes I need to spend my attention on internet things. I have learned so much from reading twitter threads. My thoughts are broader and my understanding deeper from reading the thoughts of others who take time to open up their experiences so that I can glimpse inside a life different from mine. I’ve had my focus drawn to causes that matter, things that I deliberately choose to support. Many of these asks for attention are good, even if they sometimes disrupt my peace and comfort. In seeking to reconcile the benefit and the strain of the attention economy, I think about a conversation I had with a friend this week. She described the difference between diving into media to engage with it and diving into media to hide from something else. This is such a smart distinction. The media may even be the exact same, it is just my internal approach that changes. My approach is what determines whether I resurface depleted or rejuvenated.

So I have to be self aware enough to decide how best to spend my little breaks. Do I need to engage with something new in order to give myself thoughts to think. Or is my head full of unprocessed thoughts already and I just need to sit quietly with them while they sort themselves? Lately I think I need to be better about befriending boredom. Letting my mind be quiet. Seeing all those asks for my attention and saying “no, you can’t have my attention today.” One way I’m trying to do this is to pick up a book instead of the internet when I’m having a little brain break. It is a very fragmented way to read a book, but if I wait for uninterrupted hours to read I’ll never get through the stack of books I purchased but haven’t yet read, let alone revisiting those books on my shelf that I’d like to re-experience.

The job description is deceptively simple: Cut back the wisteria. Yet it has been a project that has occupied many hours because I’m clipping and detangling, packing whatever will fit into my green waste bin each week. I’m doing this by hand rather than using a buzz saw. My way is less efficient, but more therapeutic. Years ago I planted wisteria because I watched a film called Enchanted April where four women went on vacation in a villa that was grown over with beautiful blooming wisteria plants. The plants did not cooperatively spread across the wall. They kept flopping over, and entwining, ending up more like clumpy bushes than graceful vines. Where they did climb, it was to take over and smother other plants, such as the nearby pine trees. Also they were fairly stubborn about blooming, only sending out a few blooms each spring. I loved the blooms, but over the years I’ve grown tired of rescuing my trees from the wisteria’s clutches.

I’m thinking about that long ago decision as I peel back the top layers of growing vines to reveal the dead and rotted mass of vines underneath. (Wisteria is even a bully to itself, killing off its own under layer of vines, leaving them to decay in the darkness underneath the green leaves.) I’m thinking about how sometimes things grow in unexpected ways, colonizing spaces they were never meant to occupy. I’m thinking about how far away we can end up from our original intention, and that sometimes we have to do the work to untangle and cut out the rot.

That last paragraph was entirely too vague for anyone who can’t see all the parallels I’m building in my head. As I clip and crunch and pull vines I think about some relationships where I did harm to another person. (Still vague, sorry. Not my story to tell on the internet.) Usually it wasn’t active or deliberate harm, but I had power that I did not recognize or use, and the result was harm. I never intended to hurt someone, just like I never intended for the wisteria to go this wild. But I was busy, and not paying attention, and suddenly my pine tree was half covered with a carpet of vines. I pull the vines down, but even with the vines gone there is a bare spot where pine branches died. Neglect on the part of the gardener resulted in the dead branches. I can’t undo that. But I can recognize that wisteria is a bully and I either need to commit to tending and controlling it regularly, or I need to remove it and plant something that will be a better member of my little garden community.

In a strange way, cutting through the wisteria tangle is a bit like time travel. I’ve found two frisbees from Howard’s frisbee golf set, some mostly decayed plastic bags, the remnants of the sand box which used to occupy that entire section of yard, and the rocks that we unearthed while planting trees and I tossed into a pile. The wall is becoming increasingly bare, ready for new planting. I’m remembering the choices we made long ago about all of those things. I don’t think I regret any of the choices, not even the wisteria. But I am different, the weather is different, my garden is different, so the choices about what to plant for the future are also different. I can do better.

“There is a difference between claiming a calm space and defending it from encroachment vs happening upon an open space where you can rest.” I said these words to a friend this morning as part of a conversation about how my week was going. Now the words are sitting in my brain, because I long for an open space, free from urgency. I (kind of) have that scheduled for Saturday, but today is Wednesday and this week has already had a lot in it.

In the past I’ve given advice to others (and to myself) about building a life you’re happy to dwell inside rather than one you need to escape from. I’m sitting with that advice today and wondering if I’m a hypocrite as I feel harried by tasks without pause. Tasks I want to run away from. I find myself wishing I could shoehorn some bonus time into the middle of my week that I would just use for watching lots of brainless television. Or sleeping. It was just last night that Howard mentioned a task and I answered “I’d better write that down in my Book of Too Many Things.” He laughed and thought the name was appropriate. I laughed too. And wrote the thing down. I might actually write that title on the cover of my current journal / To Do book. Then I’ll laugh/cry at the truth of it any time I look at the cover.

The fact that I want to laugh/cry over my lists tells me that I need to find a way to be joyful while doing the things instead of weary.

So I remember other advice that I gave out while teaching Creativity in All Things. Often our challenge isn’t with the tasks of our lives. It is with the grief or emotional processing that accompanies those tasks. This is my problem right now. Not that I’ve taken on too many things, but that the incessant stream of urgent tasks has left me with very little space to process the emotional loads of those tasks. Some of the the emotional loads have been fairly epic in scope. Some of the griefs are persistent and pervasive. I’m storing them in my mind, tucked as far out of the way as they can be, while I try to work in the space that is left over. Struggling to accomplish things in tight quarters creates additional frustration, which I also pack up and stow, tucking it in between and around the other bundles. Except most of the room is taken and I’ve reached the point where sometimes things come loose and land on my head when I’m trying to focus. Emotional clean up in the middle of my work space is kind of a daily occurrence this week.

On Saturday I need to sit down with myself and list out my griefs. Name them. Describe them without judgement. Let them be as petty, or unfair, or deep, or wide as they are when I pull them out of storage. It is likely to be messy work. Organizing always creates additional mess before it can create order. When I’ve looked at all the bundles, then I decide on action items for each grief. Who can I talk to about the experience of having your life partner become disabled? What actions can I take to set right a hurt I helped cause? When can I sit and feel sad about an experience I wanted to have, but which the time for has passed? Those action items get space on my upcoming To Do lists. My one defended emotional processing space will spawn a dozen more, which I’ll also have to defend. I may feel more busy for a while rather than less. But this is the heart of self care. Claiming space to tend to yourself.

Experience has taught me that if I claim and defend spaces for deliberate emotional processing, the result is that my mind and life begin to feel less embattled. Slowly the stowed emotions become integrated, which is when I begin to discover those surprise open spaces in which I can just be calm and happy.

The morning light is soft and quiet as I step outside for my walk. The walk I resent having to take, but which has become necessary to manage a medical condition that is currently incipient, and which I can prevent by getting more exercise. So I walk. For a few minutes I feel alone with the world even though surrounded by my neighbor’s houses.

I pull out my phone to make a note of the feeling. Perhaps I’ll write a blog post when I get home. It has been a long while since my last one. I write memos sometimes when I’m out in the world and have a thought I don’t want to lose. My phone is new in my hand. Only two days old. I didn’t particularly want a new phone, but my old one died dramatically between one finger flick and the next while I was scrolling and reading. It froze and went black never to wake again. With modern phones there are many ways to transfer data from an old phone to a new one. Few of them work when the old phone won’t turn on. So I spent time discovering what things I had backed up in places I could still access and what things were gone. Phone settings retrievable. Photos in the cloud. Contacts…the only back up was at least a decade old. So I spent hours finding phone lists and manually entering numbers, emailing friends and asking them to text me their names, deleting contacts which are no longer relevant but which were now sitting on my phone.

All of this weighs in my mind as the new phone sits lightly in my hand while I walk. The familiar memo button is gone. My memos are gone. All of those thoughts I captured so that I would not lose them, are now lost. Perhaps they weren’t important, perhaps I should trust that the important ones will come back around to me at a different time and place. Yet when I discover that a new version of my memo app has the ability to retrieve my old memos from a cloud I hadn’t realized they were saved to, I am relieved. My thoughts are safely in my pocket again. I add a new memo to the stack and keep walking.

I have reached the corner of the busy street. My walk is no longer quiet and solitary. Cars drive past. A helicopter chops over head. A young family is walking on the sidewalk opposite mine, taking a skipping child to school. It is the same elementary school I used to take my children to. In fact, my entire walking path is that familiar route I used to walk twice daily during the years when saving on gas expense was critical to our finances. My life is so different now. I’d forgotten how small a child can be while still being old enough to attend school. My days are not bounded by drop offs and pick ups. Yet I walk this same loop with different purpose, and I walk here in the familiar because I am choosing not to spend gas to drive and walk somewhere more scenic. Repetition and variation in my own existence.

I pull out my phone and catch those thoughts too. Typing while I walk, I feel vaguely guilty for not being more present in the moment. For allowing a screen to draw my eyes away from the slight seasonal variations in my neighbor’s yards. The thoughts I’m capturing aren’t truly important. They’re musings. I could just as easily let them go. But the musings are more pleasant than the alternative, which is to let my mind churn on the To Do items of the day. The biggest of which is making a final decision on which of the people I interviewed I’m going to offer employment. There are rejection notices in my future, for people I would like to get to know better and be friends with. I wish I had the resources to hire everyone. To give opportunity and funding to all of the amazing people. Instead there are decisions. So perhaps noting musings on my phone is not so bad a focus while I’m walking.

When my loop is complete and I re-enter my cul de sac, it is no longer quiet. My neighbors are on the move. Cars coming and going as their lives run in parallel to mine. Inside my house I kick off my walking shoes and pick up my book of lists. Time to do all the things.

After a week of near constant urgency, I’ve finally landed in an open space. It is the open space that all of my urgent preparations were designed to create. I spent most of last week preparing to leave for this conference trip, worrying that some last minute Covid disaster would prevent my going, and also trying to set things up for a smooth return. Then when I got to Houston, all my days were occupied with the organizational tasks of helping shepherd nearly two hundred people from a hotel onto buses then onto a cruise ship where we immediately had to run an orientation session and multiple classes. It was all joyful, but busy.

Today is the first day in a port. No classes are planned. I didn’t book any excursions. It is just me with hours available. I just cleared the small admin tasks that chase after me via email. I finally have a moment to pause and decide exactly what I want to spend time on next. And I get to do it while looking at this view:

The next three days are as empty as this one. I’m interested to see what emerges in the space.

I’m going on a trip later this week and I am packing for it now. Other people who are also going on this trip were making jokes about packing along books that they never read while on the trip. I do this too, and I have in the past felt bad about it. As if I somehow failed at a trip goal by failing to read the book I brought with me. This time I’m seeing it differently. I’m packing along these books and water color paints as possibilities for how I might spend time while I’m away from my usual pursuits. I won’t know until I get there whether these possibilities will speak to me during the trip. If I spend my time entirely differently, nothing was harmed by bringing along these possibilities.

I will do the same thing with clothes, make up, and jewelry. Each thing I pack is an opportunity to explore who I am when I’m removed from my usual context. The Sandra of vacation who has different paths for her days than the one who walks the familiar patterns of being at home. I will get to dwell in aspects of myself that are usually tucked away. I’m looking forward to that.

After weeks of being too busy to pay any attention to my garden spaces, this morning I did a tour of my outdoor plants to re-orient myself to the state of things and to the work that I want to get done. I’ve mostly ignored anything garden-y for two months. This means I’ve failed to deadhead and weed during the time when conditions are ideal for rampant weed growth. I always get garden neglectful in July and August. Some of it is the heat limiting how many hours per day I can be outdoors, but also the run up to Gen Con and recovery from it always seems to occupy July and August. I usually find myself feeling like a gardening failure in late August and early September. I have to remind myself that July and August show me which plants can thrive in my garden conditions without constant care.

The first stop on the garden tour is the daisies that were so lovely a couple months back. They are less lovely now. If I cut them back as soon as they finish blooming (late June), they sometimes put on a second show in September. Not going to get a second show of daisies this year. Instead I spent all of July thinking “I should really take some time to cut those back.” Then I didn’t do it.

So I spent a couple of hours this morning chopping back all of the daisies and most of the lavender plants. I dropped the chopped lavender into a spot behind my house where I would be delighted if some of the seed too root. Now the flower bed looks less overgrown, but still messy.

I also pulled out an assortment of four foot tall spiny weeds. Some of the weeds have pretty flowers up close.

Too bad they grow 5 feet tall with itchy spines and are invasive. They’re also unlikely to be native and I’d like to shift my landscaping toward Utah native plantings as much as I can. In fact while we were on our cross country road trip, I paid close attention to what sorts of plants grew wild along the road sides. I’ve purchased some seeds for Utah native plants that I’m going to attempt to get planted in the fall. I may also go for a hike up the canyon just to see what sorts of things grow there. I would like to have green things that thrive without constant attention.

Speaking of things that don’t thrive without constant care, this is my lawn after one summer of not paying a company to throw chemicals all over it at regular intervals.

Lawns may be easy in other areas of the world, here they are expensive in money, labor, water, and chemicals. Mine was additionally stressed this year because I was trying to cut back on water usage. I knew that the lawn would deteriorate once I stopped paying $600 per year on lawn services, but having it happen so quickly only drives home the fact that Utah is just not good lawn country. We need better solutions.

Lawn behind my house has suffered as well. One guess which area used to be shaded by the walnut tree we had to remove last fall.

Keeping my trees alive and healthy is a high priority. The shade makes a world of difference in the experience of my garden spaces. In an effort to try to encourage clover to overgrow the lawn, I scattered clover seed in June. So far I have one clover plant.

I’ll buy more seed and try again in the fall when cooler, wetter weather might give the seeds a better chance at sprouting. For a brief moment I thought about maybe letting bindweed grow across my lawn spaces.

It is incredibly drought hardy, stays green in August, makes pretty white flowers, and would be soft to walk on. Then I remember that bindweed is a foreign invasive plant that will do its best to kill every other plant that exists anywhere near it. And probably succeed.

Speaking of plants where I don’t want them, this is not a good place for a trio of mimosa trees. Got to pull those out.

This is also not a good place for a mimosa tree.

In fact, I’ve been meaning to get that mimosa tree away from the grill for a couple of years now, and I keep doing other things instead. These volunteer trees are merely following the example of their parent tree, who was itself a volunteer that I decided to replant and nurture in a spot where I wanted it. Now it is gorgeous.

Every single one of those flowers will put out a seed pod with 5-10 seeds in it. Those pods scatter themselves everywhere across my yard. Which is why the garden bed project I was working on is now completely covered with mimosa seedlings. All of which want to be thirty foot tall trees.

After taking this photo I pulled out most of these seedlings because I have other plans for that garden bed. The light rain turned into real rain, so I stopped gardening for the day after that. Gardening is mostly brown and weedy right now. But tending garden is often about problems, drought, and weeds.

At least I was able to fill up my green waste bin. Ideally I do enough gardening each week to completely fill it. In reality it sat empty for more than a month because I wasn’t gardening at all.

I’ll end this garden tour with the one thing that is currently blooming, this trumpet vine.

Years ago when we first bought the house, my neighbor asked me if the vine was ours, I said no, it wasn’t growing on our side. We discovered that the vine had somehow sprouted in the gap between the two sides of a double-sided fence we shared. It has been thriving there for 20 years now with no attention from any people. I find that deeply encouraging. Despite the climate change which requires my landscaping to change, if I can find the right plants, they will thrive and my garden will still be beautiful.

Also, Lurk says hello.

I spent some time today writing up my August newsletter. (You can read the letter here. You can sign up for future newsletters here.) As part of that email I have a section where I list my projects in progress and try to summarize what I’ve done on them in the past month. I try to keep the summaries short and focused. But I’m discovering that one of the projects wants more space for my thoughts on it to expand, and that is my project of Community Building. It has only been the past six-ish months that I’ve listed Community Building as one of my projects at all. I’ve been building community for far longer than that, but I finally recognized it as a creative project rather than just a life thing. I began giving it space in my list of creative projects, which in turn has helped me value and make time for the work I put into communities.

Part of what helped me recognize community building as one of my creative projects was reading The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker. That book has done much to shape how I approach community work and event planning. Add to that the organizational work that I’ve done with Writing Excuses for both of the retreats we’re running this year. The amount of learning I do about being a good host while attending those staff meetings is significant. I also spent nine months being the streaming coordinator for my church congregation. And I picked up a job as director of operations for a non-profit that runs literacy events for teens and tweens. All of this meant that I had a new set of eyes with which I viewed Gen Con and the symposium attached to it. I now move through the world with an eye toward event planning and community building, which was not how I saw things before the pandemic. That was an interesting shift.

Because of that shift, I made time to visit with a friend who was also at Gen Con, the kind of friend who lists “community builder” right on his web page. I took him out to dinner because I wanted as much information as I could get about how I can serve underprivileged and marginalized teenagers without screwing up. The conversation was varied and I came home with lots of things to consider. More than that, I came home with a sense of him as community builder. He would talk about the Saturday mornings he spends with “the elders” in his neighborhood. He casually mentions the arts center he participates in. He split his time between Gen Con and at least three other arts, church, and city based events. He’s on a first name basis with the mayor and other power players in his city. I got this sense of overlapping and intertwined community that fills up his life. I wanted several more hours to ask him questions and unpack what each of these connections are and how he builds a life where he is so thoroughly enmeshed but not trapped or entangled. Because mostly I manage my multitude of communities (family, church, writer, city, etc) by keeping them separated and not necessarily bring my whole self to any of them. But perhaps there is a more integrated way of living. And perhaps I am making them all a little bit poorer by not serving as a connector to foster cooperative efforts. I have a lot to think about with this, particularly related to safety issues and what level of connective service I can maintain without burning myself out.

I do think that my shift into administrative work has the potential to make me feel disconnected from the community purposes that the administration is supposed to serve. This is one of the reasons I look forward to actually being on the Writing Excuses retreat in a few weeks. Because suddenly the work isn’t about answering email and checking on tickets and ordering supplies. Instead it is faces and people, it is connection and time. That was one of the things that attending Gen Con gave back to me, a realization that while writing and drawing the Schlock Mercenary comic ended two years ago, that project is still out in the world making a difference in people’s lives. That ongoing work we do to support it and bring it to new people is still adding good to the world, not just us trying to leverage old material for income.

So I bring all of those thoughts with me to the online community building work that I do. It is a different kind of effort to build community in text based, asynchronous mediums. And different again in zoom based meetings. Yet these mediums can answer needs which aren’t answered in other ways. Today I ran the full church stream for the first time in months and I felt joy in being the connecting piece which allowed a dozen people to gather and participate even though they could not attend in person. Next week I’ll hand that job back to the person whose assignment it now is. But I’ll remember as I reach out on Discord, or writing this blog, or sending my newsletter, or scheduling my Creative Check-Ins that community can use many different mediums and connection takes many forms.

Building connections between people, helping people see each other and love each other, is how we begin to solve many of the problems of the world. It is a work that is worth doing and worth learning how to do well. I still have so much learning to do.