Author name: Sandra Tayler

Shipping Day: Emperor Pius Dei

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At the beginning of the shipping day we scramble to explain process to an ever-growing group of volunteers. twenty people stand and wait for me and Janci to sort out what we are doing. We have to pull out our dusty memories of what worked last time and make them fit over the physical changes in the store space since the last time we shipped. We have to assess quickly and assign jobs. Everyone is kind and patient. They are glad to be there, but I feel frazzled.

In the middle of the shipping day we have five tables with 4-5 workers at each. They’re working fast and smoothly. The book boxes are beginning to empty. The stacks of packages near the back door grow. Janci and I have time to stand back for a minute and agree that everything is going well. Two of my volunteers brought their toddler sons. These little boys walk with their dads, grabbing stray papers and putting them into the trash. I would not have expected it to work, but it does and they are adorable. Another volunteer has her infant bundled to her chest and reaches around to apply labels. Everyone is working and talking and laughing. I take some pictures and tweet our progress.

Later in the shipping day, we have begun to run out of things. The lists of invoices and labels have gotten shorter. People are asking for new lists much more often. There are more questions. The orders are more complicated. I scramble to help find missing books which have the Elf sketch, resorting to having Howard draw new ones. I stare at the tall stack of Ebbirnoth sketched books and know that the stack is tall because somewhere I made a mistake. I think I just counted wrong, but I look at the packages stacked by the door and wonder if these Ebbirnoths should go in there. But we don’t have a matching scarcity of something else to balance the extra Ebbirnoths, so I must have counted wrong.

At the end of the shipping day, we run out of labels and lists. I tell the volunteers that their job is to sit and wait for the sandwiches to arrive. They must eat the sandwiches because my kids would rather eat pizza than left over sandwiches. The food arrives and so do two new volunteers. There is nothing left for them to do. I tell them this and they look a little disappointed. I point them to the sandwiches and to the table of give away items, saying they earned them by showing up. I hope that is enough to make up for their trouble in coming. Howard sits down and draws a little sketch for each volunteer. He draws in all the books that they bring to him.

After the end of shipping, most of the volunteers are gone. The few that remain help us return the tables to their correct configuration. We pull out a vacuum and clean up the array of potato chip crumbs. My van is full of left over boxes and packing paper. And books. I drive these home and leave them to sit in the hot afternoon. In the cool evening I will get my kids to help me unload. Until then, I sit and try to quiet the fretful thoughts. It all went well. People had a good time. Just over 1000 packages were assembled and shipped in four hours. Once again we broke our own record for fast shipping. I think we can call that a job well done.

Photos and Tweets from the day:
7:45 am: Today is Schlock book shipping day. It is probable that I will tweet as we go. There may be pictures.

7:50 am: Me to @howardtayler : We can start shipping now, I have alerted the medias. (Twitter, Facebook, Google+)

8:30 am: Minions finished loading my van. Babysitters have their instructions. I’m off and running.

10:00 am: The chaos has settled in some. Note to self: next shipping stagger the start times. 30 people waiting for instructions is stressy.

10:30 am: Both the complicated orders tables and the simple orders tables finished Parcel Post simultaneously. Think this means it is going well.

10:30 am: Note to self: Three tables simple orders and two tables complicated is the right balance.

10:40 am: Boxes of postage starting to empty. This is good.

11:00 am: Youngest ever Schlock shipping helper. Three weeks old today. We’ve given her a supervisory position.

11:00 am: This is crazy. We’re going to be done before noon. I credit the record turnout of awesome volunteers.

11:30 am: …and we’re done. New volunteers showed up in time to eat food and visit. Sorry we ran out of work. #sortof

12:30 pm: Mailman brought the small truck. He’s going to have to make a second trip.

1:30 pm: With the work all done, @howardtayler sits around and draws picture for folks.

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Arbors, Porch Swings, and My Gardening Summer

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I should not be looking at arbors and gazebos online. There are so many more urgent and important purchases for us to make. We’re in the fat part of our income cycle, but another lean time is ahead and our surviving it depends upon me being wise now. Buying an arbor does not count as wise, no matter how lovely it would look underneath my wisteria vines. It doesn’t help that our wireless extends out into the garden so I can browse while surrounded by my green things and the scent of oriental lilies. I book mark the arbors and gazebos, knowing that two years from now I’ll delete the bookmarks without having visited them in between. I can hope that by then I will already have an arbor, purchased locally on sale.

Porch swings are less expensive than arbors or gazebos. I look at those for awhile too. I would not place it on my porch, which is too narrow, but I could hang it from the swing set on those evenings when my kids do not want to swing. It would be lovely to have a place to sit outdoors. I have those plastic stackable chairs, but they never were comfortable and have developed a permanent layer of filth from residing outdoors, year round, for eight years. I bookmark a lovely wrought iron swing with a flower pattern.

It is strange having these gardening dreams. They sprang forth from dormancy like flower bulbs discovering the earth around them is not frozen anymore. I love letting them grow even though I know that it may make the coming winter, both literal and figurative, harder on me. I still have time, three months before outdoors becomes inhospitable and I have to look inside for projects to dream. Or perhaps the opposite will be true. Perhaps hours outdoors now are filling my reservoirs, giving me reserves through the cold and dark. That is a lovely thought. It encourages me to sit and soak up the feel of grass under my feet, to smell the lilies and mimosa, to push back the grape leaves and see how many bunches of baby grapes I can find.

My neighbors are gathered outside. It is not an official event, we all just wandered out into the pleasant evening and discovered each other there. I listen to them talk. Their summers are busy, filled with going places. We’ve been at home this summer instead of running around. Ours has been the busy-ness of at-home routine rather than events and adventures. I think we needed this. It let us grow in calm and quiet ways, like the plants in my garden.

We are now entering that portion of the summer which I thought would be crazy stressful. It is busy and there are definitely elements of stress. Then I step outside and wander or work in my garden. I clear out overgrowth or pull weeds. I feel the living air blow around my face and I feel the dirt with my fingers. Sometimes I get hot and sweaty with this work, that is part of it and I don’t mind. Working with plants, my mind lets go of my lists and stresses. I stop clutching them so tightly and some of them slip away completely, not important after all. The garden is good for me and I seek more reasons to be outside in it, which is why I research arbors and porch swings even though I know I will not buy them today. It gives me hope that perhaps next summer will also be a season with gardening.

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Shipping and Convention Prep Status Report

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We are in the last run up to Emperor Pius Dei shipping. This is the season of our lives when the kids tend to themselves because I am busy. Fortunately for me, they are old enough to do so. Balancing the shipping work with family care used to be a lot harder. Shipping season has also been made tremendously easier by hiring a shipping assistant. She’s been helping me for four shipping events now.

Today will be bundle assembly. We’ll be putting together Emperor Bundles and shrink wrapping them. This will make our lives worlds easier on the shipping day because the volunteers will be able to grab a single wrapped bundle rather than 7 individual books. Bundle assembly involves hefting around boxes of books, rearranging the contents, and then hefting the boxes again. Next week I need to round up some strapping young men, hopefully with a truck, to help me shift three pallets of books from our garage over to the storage unit. Then Howard will be able to park in the garage again.

After all that is done, and the odds-and-ends of shipping is cleared away, I’ll ship Howard off to GenCon and dig in to the serious preparations for WorldCon. We’re going to be playing tetris with two vehicles, 8 passengers, luggage, and booth supplies. Fun.

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Joy and Sadness on a Summer Morning

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I stepped out on my front porch in search of my younger two children. I’d come up from a deep work focus with a vague awareness that they’d gone outside to play. It was time for me to ascertain their exact whereabouts. On my next door neighbor’s lawn eight children had formed a band. A CD player provided the music. My son and his same-age friend were dancing about with pvc pipe constructions which yesterday had been swords, but were obviously now transformed into guitars. Two four-year-old boys swung pvc pipe drumsticks to pound on imaginary drums. One ten year old boy was the lead singer and everyone else rocked out as back up dancers. The pavement was cool against my feet as I watched the joyous energy from a distance. Later it would be much too hot for such vigorous energy outdoors, but in the morning sunlight they were beautiful.

My joy at watching them tipped over to sadness. In the background of their frolic was the For Sale sign. Half the children in the band would soon be living somewhere else. The parents of the other two neighbor kids are engaged in a country-wide job search. My mind’s eye subtracted all those other kids, leaving mine alone. A tear trickled down my cheek. These are not my kids’ only friends, they have many, but this game, played in this way, with this group, would soon vanish forever. I will miss it.

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My Car Thinks I Live in Canada

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We’re planning to drive to Reno for WorldCon. This means 9 hours, in my car, across a desert. A pre-road trip check up was definitely on the schedule. It became urgently on the schedule when the air conditioner stopped blowing cold and started blowing warm. Since I was taking my car in anyway, I decided to make a list off all the issues it has to see whether they could be fixed and how much it would cost. My list looked like this:

Air Conditioner!
oil change
tire rotation
tune up
windshield wipers too small
windshield wipers range of motion
sliding door jammed shut (for over a year now.)
back hatch handle broke off
Odometer showing kilometers instead of miles.

In the actual event, I forgot to mention the back hatch handle, so that isn’t fixed. Everything else has been addressed. The wiper range of motion was addressed twice when I returned to make clear that having a five-inch-wide swath of unwiped windshield on the edges was exactly the problem I wanted fixed. I don’t need extra blind spots. The sliding door now opens for the first time in over a year. This will make carpooling and loading much easier. I hope it stays fixed this time.

The most amusing fix was the odometer. At some point, (a year ago? two years ago?) it started showing kilometers instead of miles. I’m really not sure anymore when it happened or what pre-dated the change. It may have been the same disastrous cracked windshield replacement which caused the problems with the wipers and during which the glass company put in the wrong window, then put in the right window but didn’t seal it, then finally got the window right but broke the wipers. Yes, I think I’ll blame them.

Having the odometer proclaim kilometers is a mild annoyance. It means that I can’t use the odometer to count miles during road trips without also doing math. It means that any time I take the car in to be serviced it appears to have traveled twice as far as it really has. The mechanics at the dealership looked at it and told me that there must be a short in the control block which is setting the defaults to Canadian. I think this is tech speak for “I have no clue, but if we replace this really expensive part I bet the problem will go away.” Then they showed me a magic method for inducing the car to show mileage when the engine is turned off. I say magic because the mechanic demonstrated and it looked simple, but I’ve been completely unable to reproduce the feat at home.

So my car thinks we’re in Canada, but I don’t mind because it blows cold, has a squeaky-clean windshield, and the side door now opens.

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The Final Essays

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I had four essays left to revise. These were the ones I skipped over when I was doing my beginning-to-end revision of the whole book. I skipped them because they were hard and my brain just couldn’t figure out the right way to wrap the words around what I meant. In one case I wasn’t even sure what I meant, which made the word wrapping particularly hard. I finished the big revision push at the end of June, then these essays sat. They sat on my desk printed on paper where I could see them. Out of sight truly is out of mind with as busy as I have been. I needed the occasional stab of guilt when I cleared away whatever was on top of them and found them again. I was feeling the guilt about every third day, but not finding the time to solve the problem.

I have writing projects waiting for me. I’m going to dive into plotting for two books. I have references to read and post it notes ready. I also have a text to read about sentence level construction. Then there are one or two mood books which are in the same genre or have the same feel. I want to read them to feed my writer brain. All of these things are on hold pending the completion of the four essays. If I move on before finishing up, then I’ll lose track of the essay thoughts. I’ll have essays scattered over my work space both physically and in my brain. But if I put them away incomplete, I will never finish them.

Today I sat down for a writer’s hangout on google+. There were four of us writing for 45 minutes and then visiting for 15. Having other people there was more helpful and less distracting than I expected. I stayed in my chair because it felt rude to wander away and not come back. Since I was stuck in my chair anyway, I forced my brain to stop avoiding the essays. I got two done. The two harder ones remain, but I’ve looked them over and am hopeful that my back brain will stew on them and present me with a lovely solution.

For the past week or more, I’ve not spent much time actively being a writer. My focus has been on family and house things with a side order of business tasks. It is interesting to note that rather than feeling like I was suppressing my writing self, I’ve been feeling freed from it. There is a lot of stress associated with seeking publication, and excusing myself from that has been very good. Besides, I have a garden to tend and a dress to sew. The garden will wait, but the dress needs to be complete before August 15 when I leave for WorldCon. Today’s stint with writing also showed me that some of the “freed from” feeling is associated with simple avoidance of effort. I was procrastinating. Having expended the effort and untangled the knots, I feel happy. And my desk guilt has been halved. Tomorrow I’ll do the other half.

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Pioneer Parade

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Pioneers are kind of a big deal here in Utah. We have a holiday devoted to them. Since half of the pioneer story is about traveling across the plains, most of the holiday celebrations are about parades. This morning was a children’s pioneer parade and Gleek has been excited about it for a week. Her best friend’s mother made skirts for both the girls and we pulled out our pioneer bonnets. Then we transformed our wagon into a covered wagon. It was the recipe for Saturday morning happiness.

It didn’t hurt any that at the end of the parade, a firetruck provided a huge spray of water so that everyone could get wet. Life is good for my pioneer girl this morning.

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Evening on My Porch

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Gleek dashes across my field of view in the darkening twilight. She is pulling our plastic wagon which has been transformed into a pioneer covered wagon using branches clipped from our pear tree, a piece of white knit fabric, and duct tape. Historically accurate it is not, but it is enough that Gleek can imagine the rest. She’s ditched the long pioneer skirt and bonnet in favor of clothes which let her do tricks on her bike. The bike is parked in front of a house across the cul de sac and the wagon is the vehicle of the moment.

I am seated in a camp chair on our front porch. It is not the most attractive of porch decor, but I love having a place to sit. The house felt too close, too full of noise and people. I needed to be outside, so I came here with my laptop. I sit typing, and witnessing the evening pass. Most of the neighbor children have been called indoors, Gleek still pelts her way through her games. The house is too small for her most days. I notice that the street light has become the primary illumination. My laptop screen is bright in my face.

“Are you ready to come in?” I call to Gleek.
“Ten more minutes mom! Please?” She does not wait to hear my answer. She dashes on past with the empty wagon clattering along behind her. Go ahead and run for a bit more child. I’m not ready to go in either.

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Gardening Over Time

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“Lawn is boring,” the gardening book said. “Why fill your garden with boring lawn when there are so many other things you can plant instead?”
It was 1999 when I read those words and believed them. I was in the middle of my year of peace after a tumultuous five years of life upheaval. It was a year when all my creative energies were split between my two young children and the plants in my garden. I dreamed of the day when the little sticks of wisteria would cover the back wall and bloom in the spring. I dug up grass along all fences and created garden beds. I planned to have strawberries and an abundance of flowers. A large section of lawn was dug under to become a new vegetable garden. A section of lawn around the corner of the house became my compost heap, piled high with lawn clippings and other plant detritus. I had a clear vision for what my yard and gardens would become. In my mind I saw blooming flowers, climbing vines, and some lawn in between to provide play space and visual distance. It would be a place of beauty.

Last week I raked out the four-years-overgrown vegetable garden. It was so thick with dead stalks and new growth that multiple passes with the weed whacker were necessary. My metal rake dug out mats of buried weeds and garbage. The pile filled two black trash bags when I was done. Once I was sure that nothing dangerous remained, I ran over the whole thing with our mower. When the weather cools, we’ll throw down some grass seed. That vegetable garden I dug out a decade ago is destined to become lawn again. So are some of the garden beds and the former compost pile. We learned to our chagrin that a compost pile next to the house attracts pests who then want to enter the house. I am now working as hard to put lawn back as I once worked to reduce it. Lawn may be boring, but it is easy to maintain and still attractive. I’ve discovered that a well-kept garden brings me more joy than a disheveled one, no matter what the plants in it may be. I’m trying to bring the required garden maintenance down to match my available time.

Those little wisteria sticks have done a beautiful job of covering the back wall. They grew and twined, cracking the lattice right off of the cinder blocks. In the spring they bloom. In the summer everything is shaded by a canopy of trees which Howard and I planted with our own hands. The scraggly oak remains scraggly and we’re finally admitting it will never thrive, but the others are all marvelous. This summer I am reaping the consequences of yard decisions made a decade ago. On the whole there is more good than bad. A decade from now perhaps I’ll once again be digging up a patch of lawn to plant more garden. Its all good.

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Moving Onward after a Quick Turn-Around Rejection

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“I’m afraid this isn’t a match for me, but thank you for the look. I appreciate it.” Said the answering email a mere four hours after I’d sent of the query with a quiet prayer to accompany it. I’d sent it off knowing I was unlikely to hear anything back for months. I was glad of the space. During those months I was free of obligation to that project. During those months I could unwind my tendrils of hope to attach them somewhere else. I know many authors view the long waits for query responses with distaste. I’m sort of glad about them.

Instead I’m staring at the simple words and know that it is time for me to do something again. The ball is back in my court. Instead of waiting, I’m back to researching. I’m also having to quell a whisper of sadness. The tendrils of hope were truncated. It is easy to tell myself the agent didn’t even read the query, but I’m pretty sure he did. It just wasn’t what he was looking for. Then I wonder if the query itself is at fault, if he’d just seen the book then the outcome would have been different. The speculation is pointless. At some point this book will catch the eye of an agent, or it won’t. My job is to write the best book I can, the best query I can, and to send them out. The rest is not my job.

I haven’t the energy to begin researching again tonight. The wisps of sadness are too strong. So I clicked through my regular internet rounds and saw that another person has volunteered to help with the shipping party. Sadness dissipates when faced with such good will. I am fortunate. Then Patch appeared at my elbow even though he was supposed to be in bed. “I just wanted to give you a hug mom.” And he did.

Tomorrow will be full of work. I must assemble a shipment of things for GenCon. I need to help construct a covered wagon for the pioneer parade on Saturday. I need to garden. I’m looking forward to all of these things.

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