Author name: Sandra Tayler

I intended to blog yesterday. I even began composing entries in my head. But then things happened. They weren’t big things, just one little thing after another. Then the day was gone. Most of the things had to do with either kids or the cover for the next Schlock Mercenary book. The cover is almost done, but the kids are no where near finished yet. This is fine. I always knew parenting was a long-haul project. This week’s kid issues mostly have to do with Gleek. She has been noticeably harder to manage for the last month or more. I’m not sure whether that is due to the schedule disruption due to the end of school, or because the days are longer and so she’s getting less sleep, or just because she’s turned a developmental corner into a pushing-the-limits phase. My best guess is that all of these things are factors. So I’m trying to make changes to the things I can and I’m breathing deep to practice patience. In the area of “kid things going well” Link’s tumbling lessons are being perfect for him. I love to see Link pushing himself physically. He isn’t naturally good at sport suff, so I’m glad that he has something that motivates him to practice. Kiki and I are working together to reset her biorhythmic clock so that she’s sleeping at night instead of all morning. Patch has been skating under the radar lately. I should probably pay more attention to him.

Up next for this week are final layout and edits for the interior of The Teraport Wars. We are on the very final leg of the book-creation marathon. We have to get this book done and gone before Howard leaves for the first of his Summer conventions. Yesterday we printed out the cover so we could see it on paper. I cut it out and folded it into a little book. It was oddly satisfying to see it in my hands book shaped. In the business spaces not occupied by Teraport Wars, I’m still working to promote Hold on to Your Horses. The orders continue to trickle in, but I need to do some legwork to make sure that they continue to do so. One of the things I want to do is post translated versions as PDFs. Angela’s native language is Russian, so we’ll start there. I’ve lined someone up to do a translation into German. But there are so many other languages out there that it would be wonderful to have. I can’t afford to go to print with the translations, but creating PDFs only costs me a little time.

And now I have to go make dinner.

Today Patch spiked his hair for church. All during the meeting his hand kept sneaking up to carefully touch the spikes and make sure they were still there. He was adorable sitting there on the bench with his brand new white shirt. The new shirt is long enough that it stays tucked in. Patch didn’t like that. He wanted to untuck it. Five years old and he’s already developing his own sense of style.

Further down the bench was Link wearing a matching white shirt. Link’s shirt was also new, but he was more pleased with the new tie. It is a bright blue zipper tie. No more difficult knots for Link, he just slips the tie around his neck and zips it right up. Link not so happy about the new pants. They were big on him, but better than the ones he had been wearing. Link has grown so much lately that the old pants no longer covered his ankles.

Kiki was also on the bench. She was the only child on the row who didn’t have new clothes today. Since she has more Sunday options than anyone else in the family, I do not feel guilty about this. She’s gotten tall and slender and beautiful as she has transitioned into being a teenager. Her hair is almost as long as mine now. Today she was tired. She’s been taking advantage of the summer to stay up late. We need to watch that or she’ll become entirely nocturnal.

Gleek also sported new clothes. It was a purple dress that used to belong to Kiki. It has been hanging in my closet for years waiting for her to grow tall enough. Today we checked and it fit. Gleek danced with delight and then held very still while I brushed the tangles from her hair. The chlorine from daily swimming has been hard on her hair and so the tangles were fierce, but she held very still and didn’t cry once.

It was a good turnout for Father’s day. After church was over and everyone changed, we had a procession to give Howard some small gifts and some hugs. Later in the day Howard played his new game for the entertainment of the kids. I got to work on my family book project. There was a nice dinner. It was a good day.

Sometimes changes to our family routine come with a bang. I’ll announce to the kids what the change will be and then I enforce the change until it becomes habit. Other times change happens without my planning it at all. I’ve noticed one of these second changes lately. The kids have been eating healthier. This is primarily because I stopped buying crackers or chips and started buying fruit instead. The disappearance of crackers and chips from our diets is the fault of the ants. There is a nest of ants that cruises the floor of our dining area. Anytime they found crumbs, the ants would come out in force. Then I would spend a mealtime exhorting the kids to stop paying attention to the ants and eat. My kids are incapable of eating crackers or chips without strewing crumbs everywhere. I’m not likely to remember to sweep after every snack. The best solution was to just stop supplying the crumby food.

Unfortunately the exit of crackers and chips left us with a snack vacuum. I needed something to hand the kids when they were hungry between meals. Enter the fruit. It started with apples and bananas. Then Patch mentioned that he’d eaten plums at preschool and liked them. So I brought home plums. I bought nectarines too since they were sitting right next to the plums in the store. Both were eaten and enjoyed. On my next trip to the store I cruised around the produce section to see what caught my eye. Grapes came home and so did limes because Gleek had expressed a desire to eat one. (That was amusing. She claimed to like them because they tasted just like her favorite lime-flavor chips, but she did not eat very much.) I started serving fruit with every lunch. It made lunches easy. Sandwiches alone were boring, but if there was a new kind of fruit to try, that was interesting. Then one day I’d forgotten to stock up fruit. I put out celery with ranch dressing, and they ate it.

Treats have not disappeared entirely. We still have treatish food for bedtime snacks, but even there we’re doing more bagels and fewer cookies. I think we’re going to be trying lots of different kinds of fruits this summer. Today I bought kiwi fruit. I know lots of people who love them, but I’ve never been able to get past that brown fuzzy skin. Tomorrow’s lunch will have kiwi. I don’t know whether I can make this change permanent, but I have hopes that the trend will last. It isn’t any harder to reach into the fridge for fruit than it is to reach in the cupboard for a fruit roll up. Granted, fruit will go bad if I leave it around for too long, but if we’re eating fruit daily, that won’t happen. All I know is that for now I’m enjoying this exploration into the world of fruit eating.

The schedule I’ve been running these past two weeks is not working. It was better the second week than the first week, but it still qualifies as broken. The good news is that swim lessons run in two week long sessions and starting on Monday I get a brand new schedule. The new schedule has me running one child to swim lessons mid-morning instead of running three children back and forth to swim lessons all morning long. Patch and Kiki are done with swim lessons for the summer. Gleek gets two more weeks. Link is still in Summer school.

Today there were no swim lessons because it was “free swim” day. The kids were all excited about getting to just play in the water. I was very excited about the thought of not having to go anywhere. To resolve this conflict I pulled out my stash of new water toys. I drew aliens on the wooden fence with chalk, then I armed the kids with water squirters to combat the alien monsters. When all the monsters were defeated, the kids drew more monsters and kept playing. This continued until lunch time. After lunch the kids flooded the sandbox and had a glorious, muddy mess. They played in the back yard with water for most of the afternoon. I caught up on my housework, and my shipping, and my email, and my book promotion efforts, and my sleep. I even got a chance to catch up with a couple of good friends. It has been a very nice day.

Hold on to Your Horses is now listed on Amazon.com. I’m thrilled to see it there. We make a much larger profit selling direct, but this puts the book out where more people can find it. Now I just need to pull out that article I read about marketing books using Amazon.

I belong to four online communities. Two are very comfortable places for me. Livejournal is a very happy community for me because it allows me to follow content I am interested in and to be oblivious to the mass of other content. I love being on Livejournal. I love the connections and new friends that I have made by being here. I’m also very comfortable in the Schlock forums, but this is because I have a special status as “Goddess of the Schlockiverse.” The status means that people are always polite and attentive when I decide to post. I don’t post often. I’m a lurker by nature. (This is true in person as well. In a small group I’ll hold up my part of the conversation, but in a large group, I will lurk.)

The problem with lurking is that while I get to know other people, they don’t get to know me. This isn’t such a big deal with in-person contacts, because even though I don’t speak, other people can read attentiveness in my body language and learn a little about me. It is different online. People who lurk in online communities are invisible. I lurk in a community for a long time. I learn who everyone else is. I learn the social rules of the community. Then I post something, and I get little or no response because none of those people know me from Adam.

One of the other communities I belong to is a private writers forum. I got into it on the strength of one professionally published story and knowing several members. It is full of fascinating information and interesting people. But I’m not writing fiction right now, so very little of the information is immediately relevant. There is also an emotional disconnect because I wonder if I should be there at all. I’m not writing right now, and even when I do start writing again, I don’t know if I’ll be following the traditional paths to publication that they are all focused on. Much of this disconnect will likely be alleviated when I meet many of these people at Worldcon in August. They will become more real to me and I will become real to them.

The last community is one I just joined last week. It is http://www.workitmom.com/. It is a community for working mothers. I signed up primarily because it was the best way I could find to get in touch with one of their featured bloggers. Since I’m already signed up, I want to go ahead and give the community a try, but it feels like an awkward fit right now. I’m definitely a working mother, but I spent a full decade completely happy as a stay-at-home mom. This site has several discussions where mothers who work are trying to deal with thoughtless comments from mothers who don’t. It was never said right out, but I felt like these women did not believe it was possible to be an intelligent, completely fulfilled woman without working. I know that is false because I was completely happy and quite thoroughly challenged being a stay-at-home mom. That was a good way to spend a decade. The fact that I’m now happy and challenged to be a work-from-home mother has more to do with the fact that, after a decade, I was ready for something new, than that working from home is better than not working. If I’d spent the first decade of my adult life working, I would probably be shedding my job right now so that I could stay at home with my kids. I’m sure that there are wonderful people on the Work It Mom site who will truly understand this perspective. There are kindred spirits there, but I’ve no clue how to find them. I want to lurk, but that doesn’t help them find me. I also was hoping to use the site to promote Hold on to Your Horses, but that feels like sheer commercialism unless I also get involved in the community and make friends.

I’m not sure what the answers are, if there are any. Much of the problem may simply be the newness of these second two communities in my life. I’ve been in the Schlock forums for 8 years and Livejournal for 4 years. Perhaps online forums are like shoes that have to be worn awhile before they are truly comfortable.

Eight years ago today Howard posted the first Schlock Mercenary strip. At that moment we began a ride that has taken us some very unexpected places. I did not expect my husband to transform into a professional cartoonist. I did not expect to transform into a business manager. I did not expect to be this happy or this busy. I did not expect to be self-publishing books or shipping them. I did not expect us both to be working from home. I could go on and on listing the small and large effects which that first act of creation put into motion.

Happy Birthday Schlock! It’s been a good trip and it ain’t over yet.