Sandra Tayler

Week of Quiet

By / July 15, 2015

I like this space we created where trek is complete and I excused the kids from most of their scheduled events. I’ve had three days in a row where I focused on business administration, customer support, accounting, and design work. I don’t think I’ve had a run of three good work days in a row since some time last fall. I think I might get two more before the end of the week, which would be exceedingly helpful. Next week is going to be a strange week, three of my four children will be away on trips. Patch has scout camp and my two girls will be off for their trip to visit their grandparents. This probably means that Link will need extra attention from me as I encourage him to contact people outside our house for company. I might get two solid work weeks in a row.

I’m still untangling the threads of thought from trek and from all the months before. I suspect the process is going to take a while and I need to just let it happen naturally rather than trying to force it to go faster. I suspect I’ll pull together thoughts and stories once I have access to the pile of pictures that Kiki has been processing as the Trek photographer. Until then, I’ll just enjoy the fact that I feel calmer and quieter than I have in a long time.

After the Trek

By / July 12, 2015

Framed-By-Foliage1-SM

We’re still sorting our thoughts and our house post pioneer trek. There was a lot of physical clean up because of mud, wet clothes, wet sleeping bags, and all the miscellaneous camping gear. The three adults in my house have spent several long conversations talking about things that happened and how we felt about them. The three teens in my house have dived back into their video games and other familiar activities. I continue to feel scoured out. The inside of my mind and soul feel spacious, as if I’ve gotten rid of emotional clutter. Or maybe the space inside me has gotten bigger. Either way, everything that I can see coming feels more possible than it did before the trek. I still don’t know how all the things will turn out, but I’m less afraid that they’ll turn out badly. Peace and calm are strange sensations after spending so long in daily emotional turmoil.

This next week is a rest period for the kids. We’ve cancelled some things and intend to just let them have an easy week. They’ve earned it. Howard and I will spend the week focused on plowing through work and getting things done. We have two weeks until GenCon and there are things to prepare. This “get piles of work done” also counts as a restful week. We are so glad to have a couple of weeks where we can work unimpeded.

Pioneer Trek Completed

By / July 10, 2015 / 1 Comment

After the storm there is a calm. It is calm inside my head today and it feels strange. Only inside this calm can I see how very afraid I’ve been for at least six months. Pioneer Trek was not the only reason I was afraid, but it seemed specifically designed to punch every single fear I had. It took my family outside of our comfort zone and far away from all our usual coping strategies. It made us uncomfortable and miserable. We were obligated to a large group of people and so we had to find ways to keep going even when we felt broken. All of the struggles I’ve had with my kids were exposed to view because there wasn’t any privacy.

And that was just my emotional stuff. There was six hours of driving with an hour where the caravan of nine vehicles was stopped on the side of the road because of a faulty tire. We had another hour stopped because our bishop received word that his mother had died suddenly. It rained while we were setting up camp the first night. Then it rained again halfway through our second day of hiking. Not just rain, but cold, blowing, almost hail. We were soaked and cold. My son Link was riding in a rickshaw because the walking was too much for him. Other people had to pull him every step of the way and I felt the burden of that. By the time we came to the river crossing, no one bothered to change into their water shoes because everyone had been walking in squelching shoes for more than a mile already. Then back at camp we discovered a wet mess. We’d collapsed the tents because we worried about them blowing away in our absence. All of the tents were covered in puddles of water. Many of the tents had leaked through. Lifting the tent sent water inside of others. About half of camp had wet bedding and it was still raining. We’d taken some of the smallest kids (twelve year olds) and put them inside a heated van because hypothermia was a real possibility. We had word that our planned third day of hiking was not going to be allowed because the group who had gone out that day had to be rescued off the trail. The goal was mild hardship, not actual peril. So the leaders met and decided we needed to pack up and go home two days earlier than planned. Wet things were rolled up and stashed chaotically into the trailers. We fed everyone and then drove from six pm until midnight-thirty. The last part of the drive was through an astonishing amount of rain, thunder, and lightning, all of which was headed right toward where we would have been camping.

We spend the third day all gathered at the church building. We put tents back up to let them dry. We lay out sleeping bags and pads. We cleaned out the rented vans and ate some of the left over food. We finished up some of the planned activities and put a closing prayer on the whole thing.

All of that, plus months of advance stress. And I’m very glad for all of it. Here are the things which would not have happened if we hadn’t been miserable:

Link got to see other members of our congregation willingly pulling him along in his rickshaw. In fact there were more people who wanted turns than got them. I didn’t hear anyone complain that he got to ride when they didn’t. On the first day I broke because he had shut down and I was terrified that the experience would break him in a permanent way. By the third day I saw him working side by side with others and talking to them.

Gleek, Patch, and Kiki all checked up on me to make sure I was okay, because they saw how stressed and cold and miserable I was. They saw me cry messily. So did others and they took care of me too.

Gleek walked with me through the cold and rain, her arm around me.

Kiki stepped up and had some hard conversations with Link during the time when he was so emotionally shut down that he was ready to just sit in a van until time to go home. He talked to her about things he’s never said to anyone except me.

Patch forgot his rain poncho back at camp, so during the cold, wet walk he was completely soaked. Yet he kept going. He was one of the hypothermia kids we put into dry clothes and into a heated van as soon as we hit camp.

And those are only the specific instances that I can remember off the top of my head. More than anything else I think that the calm comes from knowing that this hard experience was really important for all the members of our family. I still don’t know why, at least not all of the whys. I do know that hard experiences force growth and we’ve been in sore need of some growth. I feel like this experience has shifted some things in me. It has built connections with our church community. It pushed all of us beyond our limits, so now we get new limits. I am less afraid of things to come, because I can’t imagine that any of it will be harder than the past three days. I feel scoured out and clean with most of the mental chaos washed away.

All that remains is to put away the camping gear, wash away the mud, and to sleep until we’re not physically tired anymore.

Projects in Process

By / July 4, 2015 / 2 Comments

It appears that more than a week has passed since I last posted. I was wondering how that could happen, then I made the following list of my projects in process:

Pioneer Trek
Preparing for this has been an endeavor which has required multiple shopping trips and lots of thinking. We aren’t a camping family, so there was quite a lot of gear that we didn’t already have. Or at least we didn’t have enough of. On top of that, Howard has been working hard to make sure that his work is far enough ahead that he can go internet silent for four days. So have I. This will be our longest trip away from the internet since we started running an internet based business. Also this will be the first trip since we got our cat where both us and our backyard neighbors are absent at the same time. They usually take care of her while we’re gone. So I’ve had to do quite a bit of thinking about who would care for her and what instructions I should give for the care of a cat who is accustomed to going in and out of the house as often as she can convince a human to open the door.

And then there has been a full load of anxiety attached to all of the above. I’ve spent quite a lot of energy telling myself that everything will be fine. The truth is that trek may very well be an entirely miserable experience. Or it could be a fantastic one. I don’t know how this will turn out, I just know that it is an important experience for our family to have. We felt that strongly when we agreed to go. I’ll admit that I’d like to come home and help my kids process and learn from amazing experiences instead of helping them process miserable ones. I have to remind myself that my job isn’t to make sure that my kids only have good experiences. My job is to help them learn and grow from whatever experiences they have. It is really stressful spending so much time and energy preparing for a thing without knowing how much emotional clean up we’ll have to do afterward. We leave at o’dark thirty on Tuesday.

Planet Mercenary
Howard and I have been figuring out how the workflow needs to go. He’s been doing art direction. I’ve been handling contracts. We started the process for manufacturing cards and dice. Alan continues to run playtests and tweak the rule set. I’m putting together the structural skeleton for the book, deciding how many pages will be devoted to each section.

Mental Health Management
I’ve been driving at least three and a half hours each week taking my kids to various appointments, therapy sessions, and classes. This does not include the time that I sit and wait for them while they are in these things. Though I don’t do as much sitting around as I’d expect because I tend to drop one off, drive another one, then pick one up, then pick up the other one. It is hard for me to tell if any of it is producing increased emotional stability and coping skills. I think I won’t know the results of this summer until school starts. I do know that we just revised our plan for Link. His therapist (the second one we’ve tried, and the one I thought might be able to help) is leaving. Instead of handing Link off to a new therapist, we’ve decided to take a break for a bit. We’ll let him process the classes he’s taking. And let him process the experiences he has during Trek. And let him process going to visit his grandparents without his parents also there. In addition to all of that, we’ve been doing some medicine switches. Changing mental health medicine is a slow process which requires observation. I think that things are improving. The kids are negotiating their frustrations in ways that are more productive. And that is not for lack of conflict over video games, food, space, etc. I sometimes feel guilty that I’m not providing more summer outings, but the kids are bonding over shared games, and I have to remember that is worthwhile.

GenCon
Out past the trek, Howard and I will both be going to GenCon. I’m very excited about this. I’ll get to go and be with other writers. I’ll get to dwell in a professional space and put down much of the parenting things. We run a booth at GenCon, so there are lots of preparatory things we need to do. I did the big shipment of merchandise to our crew there. This past week Howard and I ordered new pins, bags, and badge holders which will be at the show. That required decisions and design time. We’re actually a bit later on ordering those than we wanted to be. Some of them will be shipped direct to us and we’ll haul them to the show in suitcases. Also in my GenCon planning was figuring out child care while we were gone. I finally decided to send the kids to stay with their grandparents. This will mean they get to fly as unaccompanied minors (direct flight, only one hour long). The boys get their trip while I’m at GenCon. The girls get their trip a week earlier. Thus I’ve arranged for the house and cat to be tended at all times. There will be more GenCon scrambling after I get back from trek, I’m sure.

Schlock Mercenary / Regular business
The usual operation of things does not stop. There are orders to fill, email to answer, and accounting to do. We’ve also got the next Schlock book in process. There are more design decisions to make with this book because it is the first of the next set.

Household
Just like regular business does not stop, neither to regular household tasks. People need food, which requires shopping. We have defaulted into eating quite a lot of frozen food or eating out. This is hard on the budget, but does solve the problem of hunger. Though the kids are starting to talk wistfully of foods that are not microwaved. I’m hopeful that post-trek we’ll get back to meal planning and cooking more often. The other house project that is in process is preparing to paint Gleek’s room. She’s the only kid who didn’t shift rooms earlier this year, so she’s the only one who still has dingy white walls. This week Kiki and I have been helping her organize and sort her things. Gleek is old enough now that she’s ready to give away things she’s outgrown or at least store them instead of having them out. After trek we’ll pull things down from the walls, wash walls, and prepare to paint.

Writing
Blogging has been sporadic, obviously. Yet I’ve gotten started working on the revision of House in the Hollow. My goal is to have it submittable this fall. Writing is beginning to come back, which is always nice.

So that’s what I’ve been up to and what I’ll be doing in the next few weeks. I’m sure I’ll return from trek with stories to tell. Though if the stories are hard, telling them may wait a while.

Podcast Interview with The Creator’s Cast

By / June 24, 2015 / 1 Comment

Scott King of The Creator’s Cast recently interviewed me. Those interviews are now live. I’ve listened to them and am glad to say that either I didn’t say anything dumb, or that Scott used his excellent editing skills to make me sound good. They are good interviews. Scott asks good questions.

The first is a Meet Sandra Tayler interview where I talk about all of the things that I do. The second digs in deeper to talk about creative process.
Creator’s Cast Meet Sandra Tayler
Creator’s Cast Sandra Tayler Chat

Preparing to Trek

By / June 22, 2015

Pioneer prep
This is how I’ve spent large portions of the last few days: gathering clothes and sewing skirts. Our family will embark on a pioneer trek in just over two weeks. As you can see, historical realism isn’t really what the venture requires. We’ve got plastic buckets for luggage carriers and the fabrics I used are definitely not period. It is more of a pioneer LARP than a historical re-enactment. Howard labelled it Brigham-punk LARP. Yet we’re all going, because as a family venture it pulls us all out of our usual context and will thus spur us to growth. Theoretically. It might also spur miserableness and resentment from those who feel severely technology deprived. I might be one of them at some point. I certainly had moments of grouchiness while sewing all those skirts and thinking about all the other projects that were waiting for my attention.

This pioneer trek thing is fairly common here in Utah. My facebook page is filled with pictures of folks who’ve already been this year. I looked at their faces. Then I looked at their heads. All the men were happily wearing their hats. All the women had sun beating down on them and bonnets dangling by strings. This tells me that pioneer bonnets are annoying to wear. Note that we have hats instead. I also sewed nice big pockets into all the skirts, because if I have to hiking in a skirt, I want pockets to carry all my things.

Mostly, I’m looking forward to the trek. I like being outdoors. I don’t mind camping. I enjoy hiking. I do carry quite a bit of anxiety about how some of my kids will handle the stress and fatigue. I always get anxious if Howard is likely to be stressed, because some piece of my brain is convinced that preventing his stress is my job. (It isn’t.)

With the majority of the clothing acquired, I can move on down the list of equipment. We’ll be ready when the time comes.

A Pause

By / June 20, 2015

In the heat of summer afternoon I walk into my garage. It is hot in there. Hotter than outside and the thermometer tells me that outside is ninety degrees. I walk into the garage anyway because it is almost organized and I like looking at the neat shelves where there used to be chaos. This has been Kiki’s project for the week. She’s been pulling things off shelves and laying them out where I can see them. With the things arrayed on the floor I can see that almost half of it has no use for us anymore. We’ve thrown things out and taken multiple trips to donate things to good will. There are a few shelves left, but mostly the garage is done. This makes me glad.

There are other projects that I’ll have Kiki do when the garage is done. This is her paid work for the summer. She is my assistant. I have her doing the work which I haven’t had time for. Some of it is shipping or warehouse organization. Quite a lot has been house organization. All of it has made me better able to do my job and is money well spent. Standing in the garage, my mind thinks over those things I hope for her to get done before she goes back to school. I feel an impulse to go look at the calendar, to add up the days, to calculate if there will be time. Instead I keep my feet firmly planted on the concrete steps. Either the things will get done or they won’t. No point stressing myself with schedule math on a Saturday afternoon.

I’m trying to be better about taking the days as they come. I’m trying to stay in the day I’m having rather than always running ahead in my mind. I can’t do it all the time. Part of my job is to track the schedule and plan ahead. This is true both for my publishing work and my parenting work. But surely on a Saturday afternoon I can let that go and just look at evidence of work well done instead of fretting over work yet to do.

Words I’m Thinking About

By / June 20, 2015

Kintsukuroi: To “repair with gold.” The art of repairing pottery with gold or silver lacquer and understanding that the piece is more beautiful for having been broken.

When I first ran across this definition, my heart sang a little bit. Because there are times when I am broken and it helps me when I realize that sometimes “broken” is part of the process.

Tesserae: an individual tile, usually formed in the shape of a cube, used in creating a mosaic.

What the definition does not say, is that in many mosaics the tesserae are made of broken pieces of something else. It puts me in mind of the early pioneers who smashed up their fine china to be used in the building of the Kirtland temple. Sometimes things must be broken so they can become something else.

Fernweh: Feeling homesick for a place far away that you have never been.

I don’t have a specific place I’m longing for right now, but frequently I find myself wishing for a peaceful retreat in a place of beauty. Rather than trying to resolve this by running off, I’m looking at the qualities that I desire: peace and retreat, restfulness. Then I’m seeking ways to include those into the days that I have here. I’m recognizing that my fernweh has more to do with being in need of rest than a desire to be someplace else.

Under Water

By / June 17, 2015 / 2 Comments

Every summer we get the public service articles and news casts. “Drowning doesn’t look like drowning!” they tell everyone. And they’re right. Most drownings aren’t made of splashing and screaming. Someone just quietly vanishes into the depths, unable to bring themselves back to the surface where they can breathe. People drown because they’re out of their depth. Because they get too tired. Because once drowning begins, the rational portions of the brain get over ruled by instinctive panic.

Depression is like that too. On the really bad days, people just vanish. I know that my hardest days have me pulling inward, not reaching out. “Get help” everyone says to depressed people, but help is hard to summon if you’re already underwater.

Trial and error is an astonishingly bad way to treat an illness. Unfortunately for many bodily ills, it is all we have. I ran up against this when I had my tumor almost twenty years ago. “Let’s try surgical removal.” the doctors said, only they used many more polysyllabic words. When the tumor came back I was not thrilled to hear “Let’s try surgical removal AND radiation therapy.” It was a relief to talk to the oncologist who walked me through case studies and evidence. He showed me “We know what this is. We can’t guarantee that radiation will work, but it is your best chance.” I took that chance. It was miserable. The emotional after effects took a decade to shake. Yet it worked. I have to remember that in the middle of the process it felt like the doctors were just stabbing away in the dark.

“Have you tried therapy?” “Let’s try this medicine.” “That side effect is unfortunate, let’s try a different medicine instead.” “Well, you have to find the RIGHT therapist. Sometimes it takes a couple of tries.” At first seeking help for mental illness is a hopeful experience. sort of. I don’t know anyone who gets to see a mental health professional before they’re exhausted from managing their issues. You finally get in to see a doctor and that is a triumph. He’s an expert. He’ll know what to do. Then at some point you realize that even the doctors are stabbing in the dark, trying to figure out what will work. They just have a bigger wealth of knowledge and experience. But it is general knowledge, not specific. You have to be the expert on you or on your loved one.

The doctor hands you a flotation device, but you still have to swim to shore. The therapist teaches you how to use your arms and legs effectively, but you still have to swim to shore. Your loved ones want to show up in a boat and rescue you. But this is where the metaphor falls apart a little, because depression doesn’t give you a choice about whether or not you end up in the deep water. Learning to swim is imperative, because sometimes the friends and relatives don’t notice when the drowning happens. They can’t watch all the time. The only way out of the water is to swim. It is hard to watch someone who won’t swim and resists learning.

Lately my life feels like waterworld, no land to be seen, just swimming forever. It doesn’t help when trial and error brings me to a therapist who might be able to help my son if given enough time, but then life events mean that the therapist has to stop being a therapist. I thought we were at a point where we could just keep swimming (Swimming, swimming Dory’s voice sings in my head.) Instead I have decisions to make. Do I continue to use the grad student program and risk another therapist bailing on us? Do I venture out and try to find a different clinic? Do we let it rest for a while and see what the summer brings? I can’t even tell if therapy was accomplishing anything other than to give us a mandatory appointment each week. I’m quite tired of appointments. It also doesn’t help that we’re in a process of switching or adjusting medicines for two kids. I have to second guess all of my decisions.

So when the therapist tells me his news and asks what I’d like to do, I don’t have an answer. Just the soft feel of water closing over my head. Drowning is silent and it doesn’t look like drowning. I don’t stay under water because I learned how to swim long ago. I don’t even know why so small a piece in the ongoing treatment dumps me so deep in the water. I just have to follow my training: Find the surface. Float face up until you have strength to swim. Then start swimming in the direction of the shore. I can’t actually see the shore, but all rational measures tell me it is out there. And I have to remember that only a day or two ago I was out of the water. So were my loved ones. Many of the days are good and even on my worst days I can think of a dozen people with whom I would not trade troubles.

So on the swimming days, I’ll keep swimming. And I’ll excuse myself from some of the expectations. And maybe I’ll go watch Finding Nemo and let Dory sing to me.

Short Summer

By / June 16, 2015 / 2 Comments

I’ve heard people complain that they face an empty page, or an empty screen, and their minds go blank. What a strange experience that would be. I have felt blank on occasion, but most of the time my head is roiling with words. I stare at the emptiness and struggle, not for lack of things, but because there are too many of them. Lately many of the things I could write come with cautions for why I should not. New growth does not benefit from over exposure. Also the internet has seemed an unfriendly place of late. Yet writing is one of the means by which I sort my thoughts. So I put my hands to the keyboard and search my mind for a thread I can pull.

June is half gone. I would like to settle in and have slow, predictable days. But the weeks keep having events. I can’t help but click forward and look at the weeks to come. I count the weeks until Howard goes to LibertyCon, until Pioneer Trek, until Howard and I both go to GenCon. There are spaces in between, but I wish I could shoehorn some extra weeks in there. Because by the time I’m done counting to the end of GenCon, I’m right there next to the beginning of school again. The summer is too short.

I should be better about not checking the calendar so often. Time feels short because I keep counting and measuring it. But there are things it is important that I get right this summer. I have appointments I can’t miss and they are mixed up with all the things I can let slide.