Sandra Tayler

The next two weeks will be mostly ordinary. A few unusual things will happen. Kiki has a drama class performance and Howard goes to Penguicon. I do have to babysit NotMyBaby for one week while his new sitter is out of town. I’ve also got a dress to sew for a neighbor and a dress to sew for Kiki. And I’ve got to do all the preparatory stuff for mailing over 1000 schlock books once they arrive. More mailers and labels need to be orders, mailing lists need to be managed, etc. Also I really need to get outside and get the yard ready for planting because in May I won’t have time to think about gardening.

Hmm… that doesn’t sound very ordinary. That sounds crazybusy.

Kiki’s birthday is in May. It comes right after the books arrive. That will be a crazy time, not at all suitable for fitting in a birthday party. So she and I have agreed that there will be a quiet celebration on her birthday and her party-with-friends will be moved to the first week of May. She wants a slumber party. (Insert parental cringing here.) So I have three weeks to arrange Kiki’s birthday presents and party. I’ll have to dig into my box of potential gifts and make sure that I have enough to make her birthday a happy one for her. With life so stressed we may just have to spend money rather than being creatively frugal.

The second week of May books arrive at our door and I’ll be crazy busy trying to get them mailed out. Once all the books are mailed we plan to have a book release party to celebrate. That will probably happen during the third week of May. The fourth week of May I haul all the kids to my brother’s house and dump them on my sister-in-law so that I can attend three days of Conduit with Howard. It will be the first convention appearance where books will be available and it feels important for me to be there.

After that May will be pretty much over and I hope to collapse in a heap.

As of this morning we have pre-sold over 1000 copies of Schlock Book #1. This is an incredible relief to us. It doesn’t mean that I can loosen our tight budget, but it does mean that Howard doesn’t have to start looking for a day job. Our financial state is still like that of a video game character using ice arrows to cross lava, but we just smashed a pot and replenished our supply of ice arrows. Not only that, but up ahead I can see another pot labelled “Schlock book #2.” We get to keep going and that makes us happy.

It would have been nice if we could have gotten the book out sooner, but we simply didn’t have all the pieces we needed to make it happen until this year. Because some of you may be interested in what I mean by “all the pieces” I’ll post them below.

The first obstacle to book publication was Howard’s early artwork. The stories in Schlock Mercenary have always been good, but distributors and readers would have had a hard time accepting that the stories were good when the art looked so unprofesssional. Howard gradually improved his artwork to a point where he felt like it was good enough. He even hired a colorist (Jean Elmore) to give Schlock Mercenary a polished look. When Jean had to quit because of a repetitive strain injury, Howard had to learn how to do the pretty colors himself.

The next obstacle was time. Howard was working 50-60 hours per week for Novell, 10-20 hours per week on the comic strip, and trying to squeeze in family and relaxation time. There was no time left for Howard to be working on putting a book together. When Howard quit Novell, he suddenly had the time, but our family had a serious lack of money. That first year was spent on commercial projects and learning how to live lean so that we could keep our bills paid.

Finding the right partnership was critical as well. At first we hoped that Keenspot would be the right partnership, but we found that we disagreed with the way that the Keenspot business was run. Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games offered to help us publish the schlock book. This offer was a godsend. The SJ team helped us see how the book needed to be formatted and had all kinds of useful marketing ideas. When we discovered that we couldn’t afford to let a distributor take any of the book profit and decided that we had to self publish, Steve Jackson and his team didn’t hold any hard feelings. More than that, they sent us all the files they had put together and gave us excellent advice about order fulfillment.

Joining Blank Label Comics was critical as well. I have to admit that I had reservations about Howard joining another webcomic collective so soon after we left Keenspot. I quickly realized that Blank Label Comics was a very different endeavor. The support from the fellow cartoonists there has been amazing. I watched several of them as they went through publishing books and I began to see how it could work. Steve Troop even volunteered to help us with the layout. Communicating with these other cartoon professionals helped us realize that we’d come to a place where we were really ready to publish and mail the book ourselves.

There were so many pieces that had to fall into place. I’m amazed that it has finally all come together. Schlock Mercenary is poised to fly and carry our family along with it.

Link is sick with a fever today. When kids are sick they seek comforting activities. Link chose to pull out the Nintendo 64 games. They are comforting to him because he is good at them, they have happy memories attached, and they tend to be less complex than the gamecube games. I walked past as Link was playing Super Mario 64 and was ambushed by the following memory:

Link was just under 4 years old. He’d just begun to be able to play video games, but the Nintendo was new and we didn’t have very many. We solved this problem by renting games from Blockbuster. Super Mario 64 was one of the games we rented and returned. Several months later we rented Mario Kart. Link loved driving the little karts around, but on one particular course he kept driving off the road and up to a castle. We finally figured out why when we heard Link talking to the Mario on the screen. He was begging and trying to convince the MarioKart Mario to get out of the kart and go into the castle. He knew there was a game where Mario went into a castle and he wanted to be able to play that game. Nothing we could say would convince Link that this wasn’t the game where Mario went into the castle. He could see Mario and he could see the castle. He was sure that if he could just convince Mario to go into the castle he could play that other game. His frustration only ended when we returned Mariokart to the store. Fortunately his birthday came shortly thereafter and we gave him Super Mario 64 and he was finally able to make Mario go into the castle.

This past week has been stormy both inside my head and outside my house. Today the sun is shining in both places. This is good.

This morning I spent some time doing self-imposed homework on ADHD. I know lots of people with this diagnosis and it is fascinating to comprehend how their thought processes work. Despite it’s name ADHD isn’t a disorder, it is simply a different way of processing information. That knowledge opens up worlds of possibilities for harnassing the inate capabilities of an ADHD mind to contribute constructively to the world. It is a new and fascinating course of study. Having my mind engaged in a new project always helps lift my mood and calm my spirits. (That is actually an ADHD trait, one of several that I exhibit despite the fact that I’m not ADHD. This seems like additional evidence that ADHD is only part of a spectrum of human thinking patterns.)

While I was reading the mailman came to the door with a package. The package contained books. Someone cared enough to send books to both Howard and me. The books were really good choices too. I don’t know if the person who sent them reads this journal, but thank you very much. You turned a fairly ordinary day into a really good one.

One of the books I recieved was Ish by Peter Reynolds. It is a marvelous childrens book dealing with creativity. It fits so perfectly into my day because my current study book is about the interactions of ADHD and creativity. Now thoughts from both books are floating around in my brain making little connections. For the first time in several weeks I want to do something actively creative. I want to write or draw or garden. Or perhaps like the boy in Ish, I will just feel creative and happy while doing ordinary things. Ordinary things can be creative too.

I am so glad to have reached the calm after the storm. I’m going to take a little while to coast and then I’ll pick a direction and set sail again.

Book sales are meeting our expectations, but not up to our wildest hopes. That’s okay because some of those hopes were pretty wild. Besides we’re only 3 days into a month-long pre-order period. We still have time to use marketing strategies to get more people to pre-order. Being past the break even point removes a lot of the tension. Now we just need to bring in enough orders so that we can afford for Howard to start working on the layout for Book 2 as soon as we’ve mailed out Book 1.

Gleek continues to improve. She’s still sleeping more than usual, but much of the cranky has disapeared and her appetite is back to normal. I’m being very good about making sure she gets her antibiotic twice a day. And I’ll continue to observe her closely for probably a week after the antibiotic is gone. I really don’t want this particular affliction back anytime soon.

Patches has definitely acquired some abandonment issues. On Tuesday I left him with Howard for 10 minutes while I picked up Gleek from preschool. I told Patches I was leaving, he indicated that he wanted to stay. Apparently he changed his mind only moments after I walked out the door because I came back to a little boy who had been sobbing and screaming for his mother for almost 10 minutes. I snuggled him in my lap, read him a story, and rocked him to sleep. For the next week or two I probably won’t be leaving him behind at all. Hopefully that will help him establish enough emotional security that we can ease him back into staying at home while mommy runs quick errands.

Link’s bottom teeth have grown in crooked. I completely failed to notice this until yesterday even though they’ve obviously been doing this for months. Fortunately he has an occlusiguide which is supposed to help teeth grow into the correct places. I just haven’t been making him wear it. We found the thing and are working on having him wear it much more often. Yet another life detail for me to keep track of. Whee.

Kiki has begun her journey through the emotionally wracking world of preteen female peer relations. Kiki has a friend A who is also friends with B, but neither A nor B want to be friends with C even though C and B were previously good friends. (For a whole month!) Kiki doesn’t want C to be left all alone and is trying to use her influence to fix the situation. It gets more complicated from there as we add players D, E, and F. I’ll spare you all the details. I am very impressed with Kiki’s maturity in handling this situation. We talked it all over for almost an hour last night and there was not a single moment of melodramatic emotion. Kiki has placed herself in a hard spot because she believes it is the right thing to do. Not everyone can do that, especially during the difficult preteen and early teen years. As Kiki talked, I could see the patterns of needs and wants that are driving this conflict. None of these girls is bad, they’re just immature and struggling with inclusion and exclusion and power. They’re trying to learn how to be friends when being friends means more than just playing the same games.

Me? I’m feeling back to normal. I was completely incapacitated by stress Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning. I couldn’t think, couldn’t work, it was all I could do to maintain adequate levels of child care. Yesterday was something of a recovery day from that. Today I’m hoping/planning to dive in and get some real work done. I have accounting and laundry to do. Also I need to get to the library. Kiki has decided to face her new found fear of snakes (she was bitten by one on Tuesday) by reading lots of books about them. There are some parenting books I want to check out. And a book about Faberge eggs. I’m hoping that last one has lots of pictures. Beautiful pictures with lots of up close detail. Now if only slush will stop falling from the sky long enough for me to run errands.

I’ve figured out why I’ve been so stressed yesterday and today. For months I have been telling myself that as soon as we open preorders for the book we’ll be able to plan our future financially. That was a mistake. It is going to take at least another week before we have enough information to begin forming plans. The opening sales for the book have been wonderful, but I’ve been unable to be happy about it because of continued limbo when I expected to be limboless. I need to stop expecting all of the money to arrive today.

Also, I didn’t have time to recover from the emotional roller coaster of the weekend before I climbed onto the emotional rollercoaster of preorders. No wonder I’m feeling a bit queasy.

Gleek is recovering well. She is crankier and sleepier than usual, but her appetite is picking up and she is playing.

Patches seems to have reverted to his usual secure and happy self.

Book pre-orders opened yesterday. We’ve already broken even on the books. Now we just need to see how long the flow of orders will last. Will it bring in enough money to fill our financial reservoirs so that Howard doesn’t have to go get a day job? I can’t help feeling like the first 48 hours of preorders will determine the outcome. I can’t stop being stressed.

We’ve recieved the press match copy of Schlock Book 1. It is beautiful! You should all go buy one now.

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/preorder/

The following realization came in response to my sister’s comment on a previous post. The realization is important enough that I want it to have it’s own entry rather than being lost in the comments:

Your comment helped me realize why I’m so upset over my management of Gleek’s illness. I have parented for almost 11 years. I know my kids and I know childhood illnesses. I’ve been Doctor Mom for chickenpox, ear infections, strep throat, colds, stomach flu, roseola, hand foot & mouth disease, fifth disease, and assorted viruses. These days when I take my kids to the doctor, it is because I know exactly what is wrong. I just need the doctor to confirm my diagnosis and give me a prescription for antibiotics.

Gleek’s illness was new. I’ve never had a child with a bladder infection or kidney infection before. I failed to diagnose it in advance. I feel like I should have been able to do so because I’ve had multiple bladder infections and a kidney infection myself. But she wasn’t exhibiting the classic symptoms. This illness fooled me and several doctors as well. I need to stop punishing myself for not being smarter than the doctors.