Author name: Sandra Tayler

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.

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.

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.