Reminder: Don’t forget to go check out my short tale Stories That Bind over at Lorelei Signal. There are only three more days before the current issue expires. You can also vote for the story to be included in the “Best of Year” anthology, or just donate to the story and the magazine. The story will continue to be available in the archives after October 1st, but I’m not sure you’ll still be able to vote for inclusion in the anthology.
We had to order more magnet sets to fill the orders that came in with the orders for Teraport Wars books. The magnets do not arrive at our house in neatly bagged sets. They arrive in a huge box of loose magnets. I’ve found that the best way to turn loose magnets into sets is to first stick magnets back-to-back in pairs; Biohazard/Schlock Mercenary, Corrosive Agents/Naked Singularities, High Voltage/Flammable, and Radioactive Emissions/Microwave Lasers. I then line up four stacks of pairs and put four pairs per bag. Creating the system took some thought, but the implication is boring and repetitive. So I decided to pay my kids to do it for me.
Gleek and Link have a bookfair at school next week and they wanted money to spend. So they happily sat down to start sticking magnets together. They started strong, but their enthusiasm waned after about 15 minutes. Fortunately at this point two of my backyard neighbor’s kids and Patch showed up. I set up stations for each of the kids and then I hovered over them all as a quality control officer. My neighbor’s kids thought that this was the coolest job ever. In fact, my neighbor’s 9 year old son began spouting trivia about Schlock Mercenary cartoons, complete with quoted dialog. This startled me because I’m pretty sure he knows the strip better than we do.
After awhile someone mentioned that putting the magnets together was similar to a chocolate making process that they’d watched on a How It’s Made episode. All of the magnets were instantly transformed into chocolates and the children became chocolate factory workers. But this was insufficiently interesting because they then decided that the chocolate factory was in fact owned by The Evil Monkey Mastermind (Howard). I supplied them with the word “minion” and the game was good to go. They spoke in nasal evil voices as they clipped magnets and put them in bags. They particularly liked the phrase “evil monkey mastermind” (it is fun to say, you try it) but they sometimes spoonerized it. Howard happened to walk through just as someone was saying “evil master monkeymind.” Howard objected to having the brain of a monkey and admonished the minions to get it right next time. It turns out that the way they all became minions was by eating the poisoned chocolate. After eating poisoned chocolate, you become a minion for life and have to make more chocolate to catch more minions.
The minions worked for over an hour until all the loose magnets were bagged. Then I paid them and they ran off to play while I double checked all the bags to make sure that none had duplicates. Only two bags had errors, now corrected. The minions did good work and they all begged to be able to do it again sometime because it was the best job ever.
Phase 1: Collecting orders
Phase 2: Sorting
Phase 3: Inventory Preparation
This phase of shipping preparation runs concurrently with phase 2 and phase 4. This is because the lion’s share of the work during this phase is done by Howard or other volunteers rather than me. It is during this phase that I make sure we have all the supplies and inventory necessary to fulfill all the orders.
This phase begins when a truck pulls into our driveway and drops of pallets of books. We make arrangements to have 3/5 of the books transported to the storage unit. Those books become our inventory for the next couple of years. The rest of the books have to be signed and sketched for shipping. We arrange a day to have a volunteer come help us. This time we shanghaied a neighbor. He would bring a box of books into the house, open it up, and put all the books into a neat stack on our kitchen counter. Howard grabs the stack and starts signing the covers. Every so often the neighbor would grab the stacks of signed books and deliver them to the kitchen table. I am sitting at the table with the sketch stamp and a tall pile of sketch papers. The papers have all be cut to be narrower than the book, but taller than the book. At the top of each sketch paper is the name of the character to be sketched in that book. I grab a stack of books and I put a stamp and a sketch paper just inside the back cover. The primary reason for the sketch papers is so that we can tell without opening the book what character has been sketched inside. This becomes critically important during the packing phase of shipping. The books get boxed back up and the exterior of each box is labeled with the character that is sketched on the books inside. I try to put only one type of sketch per box to prevent confusion during the packing phase. Because Howard and the neighbor moved faster than me, I sometimes had to box up signed but not-yet-stamped books and stack them to be stamped later. “Later” turned out to be 4 days later this time.
After signing over 1400 books, Howard’s hand had to rest before moving in the next section of work. All those boxes of signed and stamped books were hauled down to Dragon’s Keep. Then Howard opened up the boxes of books, drew a picture in each book, and boxed them back up. This time we had 1000 sketch editions. We allotted three weeks of time for Howard to do the sketching. He’s trying to do about 100 per day. Many of the signed books did not need to be stamped or sketched. These just remain in boxes waiting for the shipping day.
While Howard is doing the sketching, I take some time to double check our physical inventory against the reports generated by our store. In theory our store will only sell what we have, but anyone who has run inventory will tell you that things get lost and misplaced. In this case I made several orders to various suppliers to make sure we have the necessary inventory. As the new inventory comes in, I stack it all in boxes. It will all need to be transported down to Dragon’s Keep for the packing phase. I also make a count of the types of boxes and need and what quantities. The different shipping methods have different boxing requirements. The majority of our orders are a single book in a fold-up box. Larger orders go out in 2″, 3″, or 4″ boxes that we order through Uline.com. The flat rate orders require special boxes that I have to acquire from the post office. I place orders now, so that the packing materials will be here before the big shipping day.
Next phase: Phase 4 Printing Postage.
The books are all stamped and ready for Howard to draw. For the first time all week, I’ve reached the afternoon feeling like I have done enough. There are still piles of things left to do, but I’ve already accomplished the big “Must do today” list and have started on the “As soon as possible” list.
In hindsight, this week was a very hard one. Last night I got to the end of the day, knowing that I’d done an excellent job managing everything the day threw at me, and yet I was still tripping (literally) over tasks that were incomplete. I was so tired, I didn’t even have energy to feel guilty about being grouchy at the kids. The fact that the kids very obviously earned the grouchiness, also helped with the not feeling guilty.
Today has been better. Tomorrow will be as well.
Hold on to Your Horses and the Schlock books can now be purchased from both The King’s English Bookshop and Sam Weller’s Books in Salt Lake City. This includes copies of the The Teraport Wars. All of the books are signed. I’m not sure if there will be any signings at those locations, but I have begun the necessary communication to make that happen. Now we cross our fingers and hope that the books sell so it can be an ongoing consignment relationship rather than one where the store politely hands back our books at the end of the 3-6 months. There was an author picking up her books a the same time I was dropping mine off. She did not look thrilled to have only sold one book in six months.
Now that I know that consignment relationships with independent bookstores are fairly easy, I’m going to need to do more research. I should definitely see if I can place some books in the area where Angela lives.
The cold calls to the bookstores turned out differently than I expected. I got no reaction to the words “television interview”, but the minute I said “consignment” a flood of information about qualifications and forms flowed out. So tomorrow I’m taking a trip up to Salt Lake to fill out forms and drop off books. Hopefully while I’m there I’ll also be able to set up some book signings for both Howard and I. That will be tomorrow’s adventure.
I figured out what I forgot to do yesterday. I didn’t prepare the number sheet so that Howard could cross of sketch editions as he draws them. Fortunately this did not impact today’s work since Howard really needed to rest his hand for awhile. I made up the number sheet and delivered it to Howard along with a stack of stamped and ready-to-be-drawn-in books.
I’m still very tired. The tired was not helped by Patch deciding to climb into bed with me around 2 am. He tossed and turned and kept waking me up. Fortunately I was able to catch a nap today.
Our garage is now empty of pallets of books. This is because we hauled 2800 lbs of books into the house, had Howard sign them, the stacked the books to wait for sketches. I did all the re-stacking. This means I personally hefted over one ton of books today.
A nice Schlock fan with a forklift and a large truck helped us move the remainder of the books over to our storage unit. I should say our New storage unit, because our old one was far too small. So we also moved all of the stuff from the old unit into the bigger one.
I’m so tired I can hardly think straight, but I think I got all of today’s critical tasks done.
Tomorrow I need to get on the phone to a couple of independent bookstores and say “Hi. I’m going to be on TV and I would love to be able to say that people can buy the book at your store. Would you be willing to stock my book? Oh and while you’re stocking books, you should take a look at these Schlock books too, because they’re awesome and you should stock them too. And maybe we could arrange some author signings in the store.” Only I hope that tomorrow I’ll think of a much smoother way to say all of that.
When I was growing up the walls of our house were sprinkled liberally with signs. Some of them were just paper. Others were plaques. Some were adorned with animals or scrolled writing. Others were plain words. All of them had cute or insightful “sayings” on them. “World’s Best Mom” they declared, or “This mess is a place”, “To rationalize is to tell yourself rational lies”, etc. They were the kinds of things that frequently end up on bumper stickers, and the all belonged to my mother. It was a vast collection that eventually burned in a house fire. The fact that my mother did not bother to replace them afterward makes me surmise that it was one of those collections that gain their own inertia as everyone kept giving her signs, rather than her own desire to wallpaper her house with “sayings.” I read all of those signs many times over during the years that they hung on the walls. I frequently recall various signs as an appropriate time in my life occurs.
Today I am remembering one sign in particular. It was a hand-lettered sign on plain paper that said “You can even eat an elephant, if you eat it one bite at a time.” We have 5000 books in our garage and a huge task ahead of us to get them all signed, sorted, and prepped for mailing. They weigh as much as an elephant. We have three weeks before the scheduled mailing day, which is more time that we usually allot. However we usually clear the decks of everything else. We have not been able to do that this time, because other people scheduled big things for us, unskippable things like Link’s cub scout Arrow of Light ceremony, an over night camp/hike, a television interview, a tree full of ripe pears, and the annual case lot sale which requires me to haul food home and then put it all away. It is rather like being told that since you’re eating anyway you should have this turkey and that mountain goat to go along with the elephant. So today is the day when we survey the whole project. We assign tasks and goals for each of the days in the next three weeks. Starting tomorrow, we’re no longer allowed to look at the whole elephant. Instead we have to focus only on the chunk allotted for that day. Once we start eating, we’ll only get depressed if we contemplate how much there is still to be done.
I’d be tempted to make my own copy of the sign and hang it on the wall as a reminder, except that I don’t want to start a collection such as the one my mother acquired. I wonder what task it was in my mother’s life that prompted her to hand write that sign and hang it on the wall. What task did she face that was so huge, she needed a daily reminder to just keep working at it? I suspect it was the task of raising children from babies to adults, a gargantuan task for anyone. I suppose I’ll have to ask her once we’re done with the elephant in the garage.
Why is it that events seem to clump together? I’ve used Neil Gaiman’s quote before, but it still rings true to me, so here it is again. “Events are cowards. They don’t occur singly, but instead they run in packs and leap out at you all at once.”
I already spent a whole entry talking about the television interview. It is real. I’ve gotten the email packet and a couple of forms I need to fill out and return. While I was surfing for further information about Julie and her show, I came across the fact that Body Worlds is showing in Salt Lake City. Body Worlds is an exhibit of plastinated human bodies arranged as art. All the bodies are provided by donors who will their bodies to the exhibit after they die. I first heard about the Body Worlds exhibit 5-7 years ago and was fascinated by it. At that time it was doubtful that the show would ever be allowed in the states. It popped up in the news every so often through the years, but never close to me. Now it is here and Howard and I have already purchased our tickets. We are going.
The third thing happened as I was poised to buy the tickets. We got a phone call from a truck driver who was just minutes away from delivering 5000 books to our door. This delivery arrived 4-5 days earlier than we were expecting. This doesn’t change the shipping dates, but it does allow us more wiggle room between here and shipping. Also it is nice to have the garage full of books again. This is our fifth garage full and it doesn’t get old.
So, a television interview, an exhibit I’ve been wanting to see for half a decade, and book arrival. That’s a nice cluster of good things.