Month: January 2013

Painting the Front Room

By / January 11, 2013

January is a cold month with far too little daylight, so I try to fill it with fun projects. That way I blink and it is over.

This is our front room. It hasn’t been painted since before we moved into the house. We’ve found it fascinating that the dirt accumulates differently depending upon whether there is a stud behind the sheetrock or just an insulation filled space. At this point you can clearly see a complete grid of where all the studs are in the wall. It feels rather like a jail.

So I bought paint. It is called Castle Stone, but the castle in question must be a sand castle because I would call the color Sand. Over the past week I’ve been shoving things around and prepping for paint. Today I painted the first section.

It still needs a second coat and the rest of the room needs to match. We’ve also discovered another hazard of making home improvements. Now the kitchen looks even worse than it did before. I don’t think I can stop painting when the front room is done. But for today I can feel accomplished while the paint dries.

Not Quite the end of a Very Long Week

By / January 10, 2013

There is an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 6 called Life Serial. In it the villains place a device on Buffy which messes with time. She’s walking into class then blinks and class is over. She takes a few steps toward her next class and then she’s missed that one too. My whole day has felt like that. I look up from my computer and realize that 90 minutes have passed and I still haven’t done the thing I sat down to do. In my case I don’t have a device or villains to blame, just lack of sleep. It feels weak to claim that. I’ve managed on less. I used to do it on a regular basis when my kids were still waking me up in the middle of the night every single night. Of course Patch did wake me up this week because he was sick. And then I never napped to make up for it, because this was the first work week of a new year, the first full week back at school, the last week of the term for my two teenagers, and so many things were more pressing than sleep. Which landed me in today when my brain just stopped functioning properly.

The printer ran out of toner. This is a normal complication in a work day. Except in the holiday rush I forgot to place an order for toner cartridges. I had to go to an office supply store. Thus instead of spending five minutes printing postage, putting out packages for the mailman, and taking a nap; I drove to the store and back, returned to see the mail truck driving away from my house, printed the postage, drove the packages down to the post office, and then got back just in time to begin the after school pick ups. With extra trips out to conference with Link’s English teacher because the term ends tomorrow and there is last minute work to do tonight. The whole package thing wouldn’t have been today’s problem at all if I’d had my act together any time in the last four days when I knew those packages had to be sent before today. But the last four days had their own urgencies, their own lists of things which must be done today to prevent future crisis.

My whole week has been like that Google app Martin Van Buren commercial. The one where the kid shows up to breakfast saying “It is dress like a president day. I’m supposed to be Martin Van Buren.” So the mom slaps together an amazing costume in ten minutes. I have rescued and salvaged so many things this week. Little things which never had a chance to turn into big things. Little things which probably I should not have rescued, but I was in super-rescue mode and didn’t pause to think whether the little thing needed my time and attention. I could have let a lot more slide. I could have rearranged sleep higher on the priority list. Instead I find myself at the end of Thursday, wishing it was Friday, knowing I had a super productive week, but feeling like I failed.

At least today I’m thinking about dinner before it is already 6 pm. That’s a first for this week.

School Projects

By / January 10, 2013

The teacher assigns a project to my child who then explains it to me. The communication chain seems simple, particularly when it is also facilitated by a note directly from the teacher to parents. I am very grateful for those notes, because projects tend to transform inside my children’s heads. Patch is supposed to research and present on traditional clothing for one of the Utah Native American tribes. The teacher pictures him using class time to make clothing out of butcher paper. Patch pictures me making two buckskin dresses, three pairs of leggings, several loincloths, six pairs of moccasins, a vest, and a top hat. Beaded. When I express reluctance to do all of this sewing, Patch’s eyes get wide with panic because his assignment will be wrong. Talking with the teacher clears everything up and Patch begins to happily plan and cut butcher paper clothes.

Gleek tells me intensely that she has to pick a science fair project that will make the world a better place. It has to be meaningful and helpful. I know that the point is to learn and practice scientific method, so we settle on and experiment to test the effect of fertilizer on algal growth in pond water. It is an experiment that has been done a bazillion times before, which is fine. We don’t need to change the whole world with one project. We just need to change one child by helping her learn. That in turn will help change the world eventually.

I both love and hate school projects, but most of the reasons I dislike them are due to translation errors as the instructions pass through the brains of my kids.

Orem Writes

By / January 9, 2013

The Orem Public Library is running a series for writers during the month of January. They’ve even made a handy flier for you to peruse.

See my name there on January 30 for the blogging panel? I do and it makes me really happy. You don’t want to miss any of the other evenings either. It is a great line up and it starts tomorrow.

Courageous Link

By / January 9, 2013

Imagine that you have a child with sensory issues. These issues aren’t really an elephant in the room, they’re more like the coffee table you always have to sidestep in order to cross the room. Yes it is an obstacle, but you get so used to stepping around it that you hardly notice anymore. Link is that child. I used to have to cut his fingernails while he slept because attempting it when he was awake was either a two-adults-pin-the-child-down ordeal or a multi-hour long negotiation. Haircuts were similarly traumatic to the point that he spent most of his early childhood in various stages of buzz cut to completely shaggy because then we only had to have a confrontation about it very six months or so. I was so very grateful when Link took charge of his own fingernails. The arguments vanished and I stopped thinking about sensory things as an issue at all. It stopped affecting my daily life because Link was managing for himself. That let me forget that Link still deals with this stuff every day.

Now imagine this child with sensory issues gets an infected ingrown toenail. To prevent catastrophic infection, a minor surgical procedure is necessary. Link is now 15 and outweighs me. There is no way I could hold him down anymore. Fortunately I did not have to. We sat together and talked, noticing how it is one thing to logically agree that yes this needs to be done, but a different thing completely to sit still while someone sticks a needle into your toe. Link was marvelous. He was anxious, nervous, and jumpy, but he held still when it mattered. The procedure also demonstrated that he has super powered nerves in his toes or perhaps heightened perceptions of sensory input in his brain. It took half again as many deadening shots as are usually necessary and Link could still feel some pain. I watched my son and knew what courage looks like. It looks like holding still when every instinct tells you to flee.

It is done. The healing can begin, and hopefully we’ll not have to do this again ever.

Adventures in Social Media

By / January 22, 2013 / 6 Comments

I want to fund a picture book, The Strength of Wild Horses, and the obvious choice for that is to run a Kickstarter drive. However those who are wise in the ways of Kickstarter have advised me that the project has a better chance to fund if I do some community building first. This makes sense to me.

Completely separate from my Kickstarter project I have been thinking about ways to build community and about some ways I’d like to do that which are difficult to do from this blog. Or rather, I could do them from the blog, but I am interested in seeing how it would feel to run a different sort of place on the internet. I want to run a series of posts talking about different picture books, how they show character traits which are common in high energy ADHD or Autistic kids, and how parents can use those books to help kids and their siblings to come to terms with these traits. It was to accomplish exactly this that I wrote Hold on to Your Horses in the first place. I’ve had a growing list of books for years and would love to find a useful way to share that list.

I’ve also been thinking about stages of parenting. I’m in the middle of parenting headed for the endgame. Several times I’ve had parents who are just starting out come to my blog hoping to find posts about the early years of parenting. There are some. Patch was only a year old when I began blogging, but I’ve grown as writer since then. I’ve grown as a parent since then. My perspectives have changed and I have new thoughts about old topics. I thought it would be interesting to run a series where I link to an old post and then provide commentary from my current perspective. It isn’t the same as me going through being a young parent myself, but it would help me delve into those topics. It is certainly a worthy experiment.

I’ve also been thinking about cross promotion. Many times people find Howard because of Writing Excuses (or some other project) then they find me because of Howard. Having multiple creative pursuits reaches into different groups of people. For a long time I’ve been dependent on Howard’s internet stature as the primary promotional tool for my creative work. Except we have different audiences and I’ve been feeling like it is time for me to strike out on my own to build my own community which is not annexed to his. In the long run I must do this if I want to be able to afford to create the things I want to create. I need to believe that Hold Horses and One Cobble are works strong enough to be the foundation of a community.

All of these thoughts connected with the advice to build community in advance of running a Kickstarter and the result is an experiment that I intend to run for the next several months. I’m going to extend myself a little bit further online to see what I can accomplish. I’ve picked venues where I’m already comfortable and have been for awhile: Facebook, G+, and Twitter. These are places I like to play already and so I’m just introducing a new game into those spaces.

On Twitter I’ve just set up an account @OneCobble. It will be a simple feed of links back to this blog. This provides a simple way for those on Twitter to follow the blog without me feeling like I’m spamming everyone with links to blog entries. People who want to see every single blog entry will follow @OneCobble. Others will be able to blissfully ignore it.

On G+ I’ve used the new communities feature to set up a One Cobble at a Time community. This is where I’ll post those blog links with commentary. I’ll also post links to articles of interest. I’m sure I’ll come up with other things as well. I’ll be deliberately trying to encourage conversation about these topics.

I’ve also set up a One Cobble community on Facebook. At first I expect it to be nearly identical to the posts on G+, but I’m quite curious to see how the two communities develop differently. If they don’t become different, it will be because I’m talking to myself and I’m pretty sure I’ll get tired of that in a hurry.

Facebook also has a Hold on to Your Horses page. This is where I’ll post about those picture books. It is also the measure I’ll use to figure out when I have enough community support for a Kickstarter to be successful.

A month from now I’ll evaluate to figure out which of these ventures is adding happiness to my life and which is adding only stress. I’ll see whether I can feel an increase of interest in the things I write and do. Perhaps at the end of that month I’ll pull back inward. I don’t know for sure. I just know that this feels like the right experiment.

I haven’t yet sent out invitations to these new feeds and communities. I’m still debating whether I should or if that feels spammy to me. (It is pretty important to me that I not annoy people by misusing social media tools.) If I do, it won’t be for at least a week. I want to make sure that I’ve already got interesting things in the spaces before inviting everyone. However if any of you blog readers want front row seats while I figure this stuff out, I’d love for you to join me. You’ll be like the guest who arrives early and helps set out the snacks for everyone who will come later. If none of those things sounds interesting, feel free to hang out here. I’ll be keeping this place the same.

Let the social media experiments begin.

In Which My Brain Skitters Across Many Topics

By / January 7, 2013

At 6 pm I couldn’t figure out what to make for dinner. I had a cupboard full of food ingredients and a row of cook books, but every time I tried to put my mind to solving the problem of dinner, my mind went somewhere else instead. Mostly it mused through some social media outreach I’m planning for Hold Horses and Cobble Stones. I’m both excited by the possibilities and a little worried that I’ll get worn out by it. However when I yanked my mind firmly back to planning dinner, it then galloped off in the other direction to consider the beginning of the year accounting. It is how I spent most of my work day and I’ve gotten it mostly complete. Yet those last few tasks are like a book laying open in the middle of my brain and I keep checking to make sure I remember where I stopped. Then of course I can also consider which step comes next in the project of repainting the front room. My brain also has thoughts about that, but nary a coherent thought about dinner. Fortunately we had frozen meatballs, which the kids did not appreciate nor eat, and left over sloppy joes, which they snarfled down joyfully.

My big conclusion is that I wish the thought of making pretty websites was as exciting to me as the thought of making a pretty dress, but it just sounds drudgerous. Drudgerous really ought to be a word. Wait, that conclusion didn’t match anything that came before? That means it is a fairly accurate representation of how my brain is running this evening. At least we made it through dinner, played a game as a family in which no one had a temper tantrum, finally convinced Link that his ingrown toenail really does need a minor surgical procedure to fix it, and then got 50% of the children into bed.

Did I not mention Link’s toenail before? We’ve been dealing with the thing for a couple of months. I hauled him to the doctor last Friday, but the very idea of letting someone else poke at his feet was unnerving. So we came home with antibiotics and care instructions. They didn’t work. So we’re headed back on Wednesday morning. It is just one in a long line of odd ball doctor visits which means I’m once again good friends with all the office staff. We’ve had a scratched cornea, an abdominal strain, chronic heartburn, and now this toe. We’re not at the end either, coming up is a case of minor eczema which we really ought to get checked, Gleek probably needs braces, and Kiki tells me she’s got wisdom teeth coming in. I dub this the school year of endless minor medical expenses which all add up.

So tomorrow I have a work day. Wednesday will be eaten up by toe treatment. Then Saturday will be entirely consumed by academic testing for Gleek and Patch. I really hope Patch feels better by then. He’s been running a low fever off and on for two days. This test determines whether he’ll be able to stay in the school program that I feel is right for him. I’m trying not to stress about it, or at least to hide my stress so that Patch does not pick up any of it. Fortunately my brain is highly distractable this evening. If I wander into the front room, it will probably start thinking about paint again.

Taylers and Their Screens

By / January 6, 2013

It is Sunday afternoon and the kids have been watching Phineas and Ferb for hours. Howard and I have watched snatches of the show as well, because the cleverness reaches out and grabs us as we pass through the room. Kiki watches while sketching. Link watches while seated at the computer, multi-tasking between an online game and the show. Gleek bounces around the room, teeters on Howard’s balance board, does a puzzle, or shoots bands for the cat to chase, all while also watching the show. Patch is the only one to give the show full attention, but then he’s the one curled up under a blanket with a pot nearby just in case. I could tell myself that Patch’s illness is the reason we’ve allowed this marathon video session, but the truth is that the TV is on more often than it isn’t. Usually it is showing a video game, but it is on.

When Kiki was two years old the bishop of our congregation (think pastor) issued challenges to families for two weeks and then had them report on the outcomes of those challenges. These challenges were things like: read scriptures for an hour a day, live off your food storage, or no electronic entertainment. When I heard about that last one, I felt quite smug. Howard and I owned a television, but it lived in the basement and was only hooked up to a VCR. We watched shows recorded for us by others and I took Kiki down there to watch Winnie the Pooh or Hercules which were pretty much the only kid movies we owned. Going two weeks without electronic entertainment would hardly have been a challenge for us at that time. Now it would represent a major pattern shift. We would all suffer electronic withdrawal and would struggle to find new habits. Yet I would not trade my life now for the one I had then. The introduction of video games has solved problems and provided avenues for growth even as they have become issues for overuse.

Yesterday I imposed a time limit on screens. Not only did I declare the limit, but also clarified that a one hour turn meant video games OR computer, not one hour on each. The kids did not argue with me because we’ve imposed limits before. In theory we’re always using timers to regulate turns. Timers went off and so did the screens. The boys earned additional time by doing extra chores. I allowed this because with the temperatures in single digits playing outside was an option with limited utility. Sleep reset all our brains, and Patch was sick, so not a single timer was in use today. In theory yesterday was better run, but that day was cranky and today felt nice. The kids did not just watch the shows, they giggled together and shared jokes. Kiki and Gleek joined together in a chorus of one of the songs. Link and Kiki re-enacted a particularly funny scene. They all had ancillary activities. Their minds and imaginations were engaged.

Thus it goes in our house. We have cycles of heavy video game usage, heavy show watching, and then periods where we eschew these things to play board games, draw pictures, or ride bikes. Our habits change and the biggest change is that I no longer feel like I am failing when my kids engage with electronic entertainment.

Cranky Saturday

By / January 5, 2013

I went to bed exhausted last night and woke up cranky this morning. I’ve tried to keep it under wraps, not spit it randomly at the other people in my house, but I have not always succeeded. Things got done, but without focus or a feeling of accomplishment. The evidence I have of competence is the fact that I made dinner, the kids did some chores, the stack of pages ready for editing when I have brain enough, and a patch of “Castle Stone” colored paint in the middle of a dirty white wall. I’ve now passed the point where calling off the project is just as complicated as completing it. So painting is in my future. But hopefully on a day when I can feel less cranky.

Events I’m Excited About

By / January 4, 2013 / 1 Comment

I’ve kept my events for 2013 close to home and fairly sparse. Home is where I want to be this year and I have plenty of projects to keep me busy all year long. However there are a few events coming up that I’m excited to be involved with.

Orem Writes: Talking about Blogging
January 30 7pm Orem Library.
For this event C. Jane Kendrick and I will be talking about our experiences with blogging and answering audience questions. I’ve never met Ms. Kendrick before, but I’m very excited to get a chance to talk to her because she blogs like I do, where telling stories on the blog is the point of writing rather than using the blog as a promotional tool. I’ve been reading her blog regularly for the last month (ever since I discovered it) and thoroughly enjoy it.

Life, The Universe, and Everything Symposium
February 14-16 Downtown Provo Marriott
This is an event that Howard and I enjoy every year. If you are interested in writing genre fiction or in talking about it, you simply can not get a better event for the price. I haven’t seen an official schedule yet, but Howard and I are usually teaching something interesting during the event. When we’re not teaching, you’ll be able to find us in the dealer’s room where we’ll have set up shop under the big Schlock Mercenary sign. I’ll definitely have copies of Hold on to Your Horses and Cobble Stones available. Depending on how quickly I work I may even have the 2012 edition of Cobble Stones. Please stop by and say hello.

LDS Storymakers Conference
May 10-11 Downtown Provo Marriott and Conference Center
I’m really excited about this conference. They’ve given me an entire hour to talk about blogging, why I love it, and how a blog can be more than just a marketing tool for authors. I expect this presentation will be greatly shaped by my conversation with Ms. Kendrick in January. I’m also teaching a class on structuring your life to support creativity. Howard is teaching World Building and Focused Practice. The conference is more expensive and it definitely teaches from and to and LDS viewpoint, but it offers a world of education to anyone seeking to write as a career. Well worth the time and expense.

Writing Excuses Workshop and Retreat
June 10-16 Chattanooga TN
Registration for this event is full this year. Though you can still apply for a scholarship spot until January 15th. Howard, Brandon, Dan, and Mary will all be there running the event. My attendance is probable, but there are some family commitments which are in direct conflict and I can’t say for certain how I’ll be able to resolve those conflicts. Hopefully this retreat will be such a huge success that they’ll schedule another one.

In the second six months of the year, I don’t have any professional appearances scheduled. Which is fine, because that seems pretty far away.