If all your bills were paid for the next year, how would you spend your time differently today?

I was feeling unsettled and dissatisfied with my days even though they were full of tasks accomplished, So I assigned myself to answer the question above. It is a thought experiment that I included as an optional activity in Structuring Life to Support Creativity. What resulted was a rambling lament about the gardening projects that have been left undone for years, followed by a detailed accounting of my current financial picture explaining why my income generating work got, and should continue to get, precedence. When my words wound down to an end, I put them away, not feeling much better.

As I continued in my day, I remembered similar thought experiments I’ve run over the last several months. These thought explorations functioned as a lifeline while I was over-scheduled and over-stressed. I was running fast and the only pause I could give myself was to imagine that, when things calmed down, I would have time to garden. Here I am. Things have calmed down. And I’d just written paragraphs telling myself that I couldn’t garden yet. No wonder I didn’t feel any better.

This unsatisfactory conclusion rolled around in my mind and in its rattling it knocked loose several prior realizations which now turn out to be exactly what I need.

Realization 1:

The sadness and discouragement I feel isn’t just about digging in the dirt and nurturing plants. Yes I want to do those things, but “garden” is an action word about tending and growing. I want to grow me as much as I want to grow plants. I want more things in my life that are designed to help me grow, and experience, and enjoy. Most of these things are not directly connected to income or long-term stability. I want to visit museums. I want to write a short story collection I’m not sure how to market. I want to read and study. I want to sew and craft. And, yes, I want to dig in the dirt to plant vegetables which I haven’t done in almost ten years. I’ve been too busy for growing vegetables.

Realization 2:

Several months ago I had a small epiphany and recognized that the life I want is not one that is paired with financial security. I can be a wise steward of all my resources, but that doesn’t change the variable nature of a creative income, nor the fact that I live in a country that ties healthcare to employment by a company large enough to help pay for healthcare. Instead of a slow and steady building of long-term security via regular paychecks, my life runs project-to-project through seasons of abundance and scarcity. BUT in exchange for this uncertainty, I get to make books. I feel profound joy when I hold a book in my hands that would not exist without my work. I get to have moments where I can see that my words and thoughts make a difference in the lives of others. I get to share ideas, and jokes, and projects with other people. I could choose differently, but I keep dodging  “need to get a day job” because this is the life I want. Even if it carries with it a measure of financial uncertainty.

Realization 3:

“Make your days match your dreams” are words I have said both in my book and in many presentations. Our futures are created by our choices today. If my long-term dreams are not at all reflected in actions today, they always remain far away and long term. The day-to-day is frequently filled with obligations like bill paying work or health concerns which prevent me from living my dream life, but if I know what the dream is, then I can put tiny slivers of it into today. Over time those slivers can accumulate and bring me closer to the dream.

Combining all of the realizations:

If I want to have a garden (whether of vegetables or personal growth), I need to make time for building that garden. Yes, even when there is paying work I could be doing instead. I am never going to reach a place where I can stop worrying about all the other work of my life and just relax into my dream projects. So I stole small pieces of day for digging the garden I want, out of the weed pile that I have.

As I dig I’m learning—again because I’ve learned this before and forgotten it—that when I spend time outdoors with the physical work of plants, my internal landscape settles and quiets. My thoughts slow down and I breathe differently. The sound of wind shushing through the leaves of trees calms some deep animal part of my brain. I smash clumps of dirt to sift out the roots of grasses and bindweed that I don’t want growing in my new raised vegetable bed. I have the beds already, two of them, purchased last Christmas in the hope that I would garden again someday.

Bit by bit I prepare the ground for the garden to come. Clump by clump and shush by shush, I calm and feel peace. When I return to my other work, that calm comes with me. Everything about the world, and my tasks, and my finances feels less dire. I’m learning, again, that when I spend time with the work that fills my soul, there is more of me available to do the work that pays my bills. An hour spent gardening, learning, growing, means an hour less “productive” work, but when there is more of me, more work fits into the time available. It is a beautiful exchange.  

Here is the place where my garden will be. I just have to dig.

My February defies summary. Best I can do is to say that it was seriously overbooked with worthwhile things. Each of these events and tasks is worthy of a leisurely unpacking via descriptive blogging. I would love to tell all the stories of LTUE, and of Storycon, and of how prepping for the Locus fundraiser jumped in levels of difficulty because of software updates. I didn’t have time in February, and I’m still playing catch up now that I’m already a week into March. This weekend is the first time I’ve had time to do any thinking that wasn’t directly in service to getting things done. I finally have time to begin addressing tasks and memories that aren’t immediately urgent.

In unpacking my February, I could treat it like a storage chest where I pull out the most recent thoughts first, unpacking as I go. I could also reach back to the beginning of the February calendar and recall everything in chronological order. I’ve decided to do neither of those things (for now). I don’t want to describe the details and shape of how I was busy all through the month, largely in service to other people’s priorities. (I spent ninety hours on Storycon, fifty hours on Locus, and forty hours on LTUE, those hours combine to be more hours than a full time job). Instead I want to reach into the middle and pull the quiet threads that are connected to mine.

I held Story Time each Tuesday at 10am. I kept that space for myself and others even on the weeks when I could feel how my ability to think was thick with fatigue. In the hour before Story Time I would go to my shelves and contemplate stories and poetry so I could choose what to share. Then I would launch the meeting and remember that my whole existence was not all about logistics and administration. For two hours a week I preserved a space where I could be a writer and work in service of my own projects. This is a triumph. Through what was probably the most tightly scheduled month of my year (and hopefully the most tightly scheduled month I’ll experience for a long time to come) I remembered to pause. Pause is one of the priorities I set for myself this year and I’m pleased I managed to thread it through my life. I’m looking forward to this thread being thicker in the months to come.

Another thread that saved my emotional stability during the month was Connecting. Each Story Time gave me a chance to listen to other creatives talk about their challenges and to be listened to about mine. I got to teach at both LTUE and Storycon. Dozens of quiet conversations with dozens of people where we mourned or rejoiced with each other. Many of these conversations came to me as a result of people buying or reading my book. That too was a joy. Structuring Life to Support Creativity is helping people and drawing to me the sorts of conversations I love having. I look forward to building on what this book has to offer. I’m going to get to write more material for my Patreon. I have plans for my next project. Because of how many people chose to pick up my book, I feel hope that I can continue to create. In the months to come I get to build on some of the things I did this month.

I am so glad for all the work I did in February. I’ve learned skills in communication and organization. I’m looking forward to refocusing my efforts closer to home in the months to come.

I am in a month of outflow. Time, attention, decisions, energy all pour from me in service of contracts I chose. I have to remember that it was a choice when I wash up empty in the evenings, when I wake up wondering what resources I have to offer the day. I am so fortunate to be drained by things I chose rather than by burdens that landed on me.

This does not stop the outflow from being terrifying. I feel the strain of it and know that this pace will drain me dry if continued for too long. Already I am reaching for emergency resources to keep things going. But I can see the end from here.

In one week I teach at a conference. (LTUE) This will be exhausting and replenishing. To be present at the event I will have to ignore all other urgencies. Sometimes it is nice to narrow my focus to Here and Now. I will get to teach, to breathe out and contribute. I rarely get to know exactly how teaching impacts the world, but on occasion I’ve been told how something I said was taken in by a person who transformed themselves as a result. The transformation is theirs, but I got to participate in a small way, and that is a wonder. It is work worthy of an expenditure of energy.

In two weeks I will focus on my computer, preparing for another in-person conference and preparing for an online fundraiser. I will organize, and write, and build spreadsheets. I will carry an administrative load of small decisions. I will try to find moments to remember why all of the admin is worthwhile, what it connects to, the purpose it serves. When I cling tight to the purpose, it reminds me that I am glad to spend the effort.

In Three weeks I will hold a space that I have organized and planned. A convention hall will be set up according to a map that I made. People will flow into the building to set up small shops in the spaces I assigned to them. I will walk among them providing information and solutions. Inside the space I organize and hold, hundreds of people will feel joy and frustration, will buy and sell, will share the love of stories. And then it will all be dismantled to vanish away. In the emptiness after, I will know that this was an exhaustion I chose for a good purpose.

In four weeks I will launch an online fundraiser and tend it for four weeks more. Bringing in support and resources that will sustain a small group of dedicated staffers who reach and read and support and publish. Every month they create a magazine. Their effort flow and expense flow is constant. My effort on their fundraiser creates a much needed inflow for them. It is work worth doing.

After four weeks, I only have one ongoing contract instead of three. I will be able to return to my own words and projects.

I need to remember that the work of after is different, but also an outflow, which is why I’m spending words today reconnecting each effort to its purpose, remembering why I chose this. When I do that there is an inflow attached to the expenditure. In a month like this one it is clear to me that I cannot wait until “after” to rest. I have to claim rest daily. I have to remember the Why of the work regularly. I need to spend effort now to make sure I have rest later.

Onward into the breach.

If you are going to be at LTUE, please make sure to find me and say hello!

Wednesday February 11

8-11am. Structuring Life Around Your Writing, an LTUE Masterclass.

Thursday February 12

9am PANEL in Cedar We do it this way: Ritual, Habit, and the Logic of Culture

12pm PANEL in Canyon Health: Physical, Mental and Relational

2pm Kaffeklatch in Boardroom. Come chat with Sandra in a small group setting.

Friday February 13

9am PANEL in Bryce Merchandizing

7pm Mass signing in the Zion Ballroom. Open to the public!

Saturday February 14

10am PRESENTATION in Amphitheater The Motivation Problem: how to get started and redirect when you’re off track

I wanted to follow my New Year’s Bird tradition (2024 & 2025), so I watched for birds this morning. But it was raining and all the birds were in hiding. I heard some chirping and the Merlin app told me it was House Finches, but I wasn’t certain whether to count them. My back garden was birdless. When I got to noon and still had not seen a bird, I took myself for a neighborhood walk.

I need to remember how lovely it is to walk in a calm rain with an umbrella overhead. The sounds of the world are shushed by the falling water and my thoughts quiet as well. I was halfway through my planned path when I saw a collared dove hunkered down in a tree.

(Not my picture. This one is by Tisha Mukherjee and used via a creative commons share alike license. My dove was puffed up like a ball and huddled next to a tree branch against the wet.)

Doves represent Hope, Peace, Love, and Renewal. That is a lot of meaning for a small, common bird to carry. But once I saw them I knew that’s my bird for the year. I would like peace and renewal, and I too have a lot to carry. So quietly, and in community (because doves are always in pairs or groups) I will travel forward through 2026.

Each year on Christmas eve we gather as a family around a candlelit nativity scene. We have envelopes, one per person, that contain pages where we each write and reflect on the year past and the year to come. This tradition has remained treasured despite a divergence of religious belief. When I opened and looked at my writing from last year, I found that I’d only written one and a half sentences. My partial sentence was “I hope I get to…”  I think I intended to come back and finish the thought, but I must have been swept up in hosting my kids and grandchild.

This year I didn’t even try to write during the event. I was too distracted with getting extra papers and helping distract the toddler and with taking pictures. I was present in the moment, hosting rather than contemplating. It was the correct and joyful choice.

I took time on Christmas morning to open my envelope and have my moment of reflection. This coming year will be more of what last night was. I’m going to do a lot of joyful hosting, prepping, managing, and logistical planning. It is good work. Work I want to do, but if I don’t plan in advance to give myself time to pause,  I won’t have any pauses. I will burn myself out on joyful work. I’ve had Christmases like that in the past, where I run myself ragged and to tears creating an experience for others while completely neglecting my own.

In some ways that is the story of my December as I haven’t done many of the year-end contemplative activities that help me ground myself for the coming year. I still need to create my collected book of blog and journal entries. I need to examine the priorities I set for myself last January and think through what priorities I want to use as guides in the year to come. I know that one of them needs to be “remember to pause.”

So I’m going to try to use this next week, the space between Christmas and New Year’s Day, as a pause. I will prepare for the New Year Launch event I’m hosting on January 2. I will stop and feel and think so that I can know what priorities are needed for my 2026.

The leaves are mostly gone from most of my trees. The red maple still has half its load to drop, but the blanket across the lawn is already thick and I need to rake it before the rain comes and flattens everything into a sodden lawn-killling mass. So I gear up and rake leaves into a giant pile. When the kids were younger they would jump in these piles. One year my son created raked leaf art by using different colors from different trees to outline pictures on the lawn. This year it is just me, the pull of the leaves against the rake and the shuffling, hushed sound of the leaves against each other. I don’t mind being alone with the leaves and the cool air. Not this year.

This years leaves have gorgeous colors. They don’t always. Some years the frost hits early and the leaves are brown before they hit the ground. This year shades of yellow, gold, orange, and red toss among the brown. I keep seeing leaves that are so beautiful I consider collecting them and attempting to preserve their color. Instead I take a few pictures and let them continue their cycle of usefulness rather than encasing them with chemistry. The beauty of leaves does not end when they fall from the tree. This pile will enrich the spot in my yard that I hope to turn into a garden. I carry the plan of that garden in my head. I have for years. Perhaps next year it will actually happen.

Sometimes I experience fall as a season of impending doom, because I know that the darkness of winter is coming. This year I’m finding joy in the harvest and the fall colors. I’m even relishing the melancholy feeling of watching the green fade away as plants preserve their energy for the winter. I think about life cycles and how retraction is part of the process of living. I think about how the leaves must fall in order to allow the tree to survive until spring. I don’t like some of these thoughts because they connect me to some of the griefs I carry, friends with terminal diagnoses, my aging parents, health challenges, all the hard things that no one wants to sign up for, but which come to us all eventually. The hard things are easier to carry when I can find beauty and necessity in them. I can’t always. Sometimes hard is just hard.

But not today. Today the fallen leaves are gorgeous and I have enough strength to get them moved from lawn to pile. I even take a moment to shuffle into the pile and lay down for a moment, feeling the prickle of the leaves as I stare up at the sky. It is wide and blue, full of bright contrast for the leaves that remain on the tree above me. Today there is beauty.

Yesterday I planted seeds. Literal ones in dirt that I turned over with a shovel. Hours of digging turned a weedy patch of grass

Into a patch of dirt

It doesn’t look like much. The edges are ragged. The stump in the middle is oddly shaped. (The stump was the reason the patch couldn’t be mowed.) It is just dirt.

But I sprinkled that dirt with seeds. The seeds don’t look like much either. They’re just specks that vanish the moment I sprinkle them. Yet those specks have the potential to grow into flowering plants. Digging the earth and scattering the seeds is an act of faith in the future. A gift to my future self. She will get to enjoy flowers while now I just get to feel tired and dirty. And accomplished. I’ve been intending this garden ever since we built our pandemic patio and had to chop down our dying walnut tree. Five years I’ve carried this idea in my head. Now it is begun.

This garden has more work ahead of it. Future me will need to create defined edges and set it up so that the garden bed and surrounding lawn are kept separate. Over the next several months I’ll get to see which of the seeds actually sprout and where my scattering left bare patches. I may need to thin out some plants where seeds clumped together. But I did the groundwork today which makes future work possible.

There are other areas of my life where I am metaphorically doing groundwork and scattering seeds for the future. I live in a brain that is constantly watchful for conditions and trends. I read headlines and spin ten possible futures fully rendered with alarm klaxons and lists for how I should prepare. But all of that is reactive, as if I have no guiding hand in what the future will bring. And, true, my ability to control large scale events is small-to-nothing. I can’t roll back climate change, or restore a just-bulldozed historical treasure, or fix uncountable inhumane treatments of people, but I am not completely powerless. I can lay small, local groundwork for a future I want to have instead of just trying to survive what comes at me.

In eight months my patch of dirt may be gloriously abloom, or it may be a mess of re-growing grass and dirt. But the work I did means that flowers are possible when they weren’t possible before. A small patch of flowers doesn’t fix the world, but it might mean everything to a bee. It makes something better and more beautiful. Something is better than nothing.

The memory of grapes stabbed me with anxiety this morning. Considering the round squishiness of grapes, stabbing isn’t something that comes naturally to them. Unfortunately anxiety is expert at stabbing with adrenaline spikes, which is what happened this morning. Anxiety stabbed before I was even fully awake and all at once I remembered that there are still grapes on my vines, that I’ve been intending to turn them into juice, that I’ve been too busy, that all of my days are tetrised together with tasks, that grapes are not the only tasks I’ve failed to accomplish this week. Then anxiety helpfully supplied a list of all my failures and how those failures will inevitably lead to my doom.

Anxiety is no respecter of sleep, nor of the fact that on Sunday mornings I deliberately delay my alarm to allow the morning to be slower.

I am (Fortunately? Unfortunately?) very familiar with this sort of anxiety stab, and so instead of hopping on board with the anxiety, I counter with grounding in today. None of those terrible outcomes have happened yet. I’m fine today. Thank you for that list, I can use it when I’m prioritizing tasks for the week. (Sometimes things become priorities for anxiety prevention as well as because of deadline urgency.) Remember today’s plan. Stick to the plan, including the scheduled time when I consider tomorrow’s plan. Breathe to try to calm the adrenaline out of my physical form. Then get up and go do something else, because laying in bed is also laying still in the stew of anxiety.

Today’s plan already included grapes. That’s why they were on my mind and why I had already photographed them. I will not allow anxiety’s attempted hijack ruin my day.

The first completion was Gen Con in August. That was a huge and complex project that lived in my brain for nine months. The completion of Gen Con was followed by the completion of Worldcon, Writing Excuses Recording, and sending Structuring Life to Support Creativity off to print. Each thing concluded gave me space to complete something else, rather like a debt consolidation plan where paying off one debt frees up funds to pay off the next debt faster.

One lingering project that I finally concluded last week was my collected book of blog and journal entries for 2024. While putting the finishing touches on it, I re-discovered the priorities I set myself at the beginning of 2025. I’d forgotten them.

• Entrench
• Grow
• Complete

I say I forgot them because I had forgotten those specific words and I never used them to bring myself back to task, but as I’m looking at the past three fourths of a year, those words are completely accurate to how I spent my time. Especially “complete.” 2025 has been a year of completion. And I’m not done yet. I’ve completed so many things this year and I can feel the acceleration in completion.

• This week I’ll complete the shipping for Mandatory Failure
• The week after I’ll complete the warehouse reorganization.
• By December I’ll be delivering Structuring Life to Support Creativity in all formats.

With the acceleration, I discover that I don’t want to fill up the space in my life with grand new projects. I want quite projects and a sustainable creative life. I have begun an effort to build up my Patreon, but that doesn’t feel grand and new, it feels like continuing an effort I’ve long delayed. I am deliberately choosing deliverables that help me create the life I want to be living rather than projects that represent a big stretch for me.

Completion opens up space. In that space I get to choose what comes next. I am trying to choose my “next” based on hope instead of fear. I am also making sure I pause long enough to enjoy this moment in my life when I am happily working and completing things instead of being buried in an avalanche of urgent responsibility. I hope I get to just quietly continue. At least through the end of the year.