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I have not changed anything in our storefront for months. I was braced for hours of frustration trying to figure out how to input new products. There was no frustration at all. In fact I figured out how to add the option so that people can pick a character for their sketched edition. We’re also considering adding an option for “special handling” so that people who want their books to arrive in pristine condition will be able to have that.

Yay! It’s working!

Howard and I have a very important rule for our marriage. Any time we are afraid to tell the other about something, that something must be told. The fear of telling communicates that the topic has emotional freight which must be examined together. Most of the time we’ll think it all through in advance before bringing the subject up, perhaps even planning the wording we’ll use, but we find a good time and talk the thing over. An example: Suppose Howard and I have agreed to diet together, but I bake cookies on his night out and eat them all up. Afterward I realize that in addition to breaking my diet, I also broke a bargain with Howard that we would diet together. I am afraid to tell Howard about the cookies, but I have to do it. Not telling in this context may seem minor, but it sets a pattern of concealment and deceit which could lead to some very unpleasant places indeed. So I pick a quiet time when Howard and I are both ready to talk and I tell him about the cookies and about feeling awful because I hid the cookies from him. Then Howard tells me it is all okay and he doesn’t care that I made cookies. And we are right with each other again. No secrets.

I love this rule. It is the core of why our marriage continues to be strong despite everything. But even good things can cause occasional complications. A pile of unpleasant stresses happened last week. They were stressful for Howard and for me. Because I love Howard I did not want my emotional reactions to the stresses to cause him more stress. There was and is a whole pile of things that I am afraid about. But if I was conscious of being afraid of them, I would have to talk about them with Howard and potentially add to his list of stresses. So I hid my fears deep inside my brain, so deep that I didn’t know they were there. Unfortunately the fears were like a geyser. I had to exert constant effort to keep those fears suppressed. The result was that I spent 4 days in a near constant anxiety state. My heart raced and sometimes even palpitated. I felt shaky. I felt scared with no reason I could see for the fear. And I was cold. All of this gave me brand new fears for my health and worries that I’d developed an anxiety disorder which would interfere with all the things I need to be doing.

I couldn’t keep it up. Geysers of emotion will not be denied forever. I’ve now talked with Howard about the biggest pieces and will continue to talk about the littler things as I realize what they are.

Biggest fear: We’ve been living on the cartooning income for a year now. It is a miracle that we can make a living this way. I love this life. I am afraid that this life was a loan rather than a gift. I’m afraid that we won’t sell enough books to cover the next six months of expenses. I’m afraid that we will fail and will thus let down all the people who have found hope in our success. That last is a big one. It has made me so happy to be a cause for hope because some people have so little. It hurts to think we might be cause for someone to despair.

Biggest grief: I’m sad for the chunk of money which will never arrive. I’m frightened by the debt holes that we have to fill. I’m frightened by the further dent that will be made paying for the printing of this next book. I am a financial squirrel and it drives me crazy that I have so few resources in hand to cover pending expenses. We have lots of assets to borrow against, but I don’t want to borrow at all. I want to have cash with which to pay bills.

Biggest despair: Over the last week or so, I have spent lots of time wondering why I bother to write. I found myself despairing that my writing was worth anything. The despair made no sense because nothing about my writing has changed since last week when it all felt fine. Then I realized that the advent of the financial crisis makes me want to scramble to find money where ever I can. At this point my writing can not bring in any money. I’ve sold the story that was ready to go. All the other writing is still in process. My writing could not help me solve the current financial crisis so I was subconsciously wondering whether it had value at all.

Other stuff:
The sale of the first Schlock book moved us from a place where we had to pinch every penny into a place where I could occasionally buy things new. I truly did enjoy the challenge of doing things like providing Christmas for less than $100. I enjoyed going to garage sales and keeping track of food inventories. But it was a lot of work and time. This week I found myself staring at needing to do the same sorts of scrimping, only I no longer have the time. Back then my job was to make the money last. Now I’m also doing book layout, and shipping, and writing. I’d much rather keep these new things than go back to the scrimping. I’m afraid that I’ll have to go back.

I remember how stressful pre-orders and book shipping were the last two times I did it. I’m afraid of the incoming stress.

I’m afraid that I won’t be able to do the layout that will need to be done for the book after this one.

I am so afraid of so many things and I can’t seem to stop. I want to stop, because these fears aren’t useful. They keep getting in my way and tripping me when I want to run and solve problems. And that’s why I was suppressing. I wanted to just get things done and fill the financial holes. Once the holes were filled then I’ve removed the causes for fear. Problem solved. Only apparently I’m not allowed to skip the step of actually feeling afraid and admitting it.

“Woe is me” isn’t very fun to read, nor is it very useful to anyone. Since “woe is me” was the theme of yesterday, I did not post. In hindsight it makes sense that I had to have a day to emotionally react to the events of last week. I was too busy to react at the time. But the emotional reactions aren’t useful since I’ve already formed a plan for going forward. Instead they were a thing to get out of the way.

The mood of the day was also not helped by the illness I’ve picked up. It makes my heart race and my limbs feel weak even when I’m sitting still. The feeling is similar to post-adrenaline-rush. It took me awhile to figure out that the sensation was an illness because the swollen lymph nodes and creeping headache are much more subtle signs to pick up. The clincher though is that eating vitamin C restores me to nearly normal. (Wish I’d figured that out yesterday instead of this morning.) Unfortunately the racing-heart and weak-limbs feel very similar to fear reactions. In fact for much of yesterday my back brain kept deciding that since my body felt afraid, it should provide a reason for the fear. So it kept throwing “reasons to be afraid of the future” into my forebrain. It took me awhile to see that loop and break it.

Considering the amount of stress I was under last week, I should not be surprised that I’m sick. Hopefully it will be a short illness. I’ve got things to do and I’m really tired of reminding myself that I’m not really scared. I’m just sick. I will get better. I want to tackle the things that are coming with joy at the challenges, not fear of failure.

When considering a child’s birthday party the first question I ask is whether I really need to have one. If I can find a different alternative that will still make my child happy, then I’ll do that. Some parents love to run kid’s parties. I do not. I don’t hate it either. It is just a lot of work and thankless effort. There are few things more engrumpifiying than to spend hours preparing a party, hours at top speed running the party, then to have one of the guests complain because the prizes aren’t big enough. (I would have liked to provide bigger prizes, but I was out of time and money. Since this particular child ate his weight in pizza, I’m pretty sure he got his money’s worth.) This year it was very apparent that Link needed a party. I’m not sure that Link has ever had a big birthday party. Most of his birthdays we invite a friend or two to join us for an activity of some sort. This year Link wanted an all-out Mario Party birthday. So that is what we did.

Know the children you intend to invite. I happen to know all of the boys who came to the party. Half of them are in my cubscout den. The other half will soon be. I’ve had all these boys at my house before, so I knew roughly what to expect. I also knew that most of them would be happily involved with the party I had planned. I would never plan such an elaborate scheme if I did not know the guests in advance.

Parties always begin with an awkward phase where some of the guest have arrived and some have not. It is good to have an activity that people can join in easily, but which provides some focus to the gathering. Otherwise the guests will be tempted to pull out toys and I really don’t want to be tripping over toys later. Sometimes this activity is a craft or a coloring page. For Link’s party we just provided pizza to people as they walked in the door.

The core of the party is the games. It is important to keep everyone focused on playing games together otherwise you have children wandering off to examine presents, or open presents, or get out toys. The last thing you want is children bouncing around like super balls while you’re trying to get them to play musical chairs. One of the keys is to keep the games short and focused. For Link’s party we used the Mario Party format of having a larger game broken up by mini-games. We laid out paper spaces in a trail on the floor. The kids rolled a giant die to move. Then they had to follow the instructions for their space. They were all trying to collect 15 beads by the time they reached the end of the trail. Some spaces made them lose beads. Other spaces gave them beads. Every so often a space would indicate a mini-game. The mini-games were really short. See who can blow the most bubbles. Throw three balls into a basket and get three beads. Draw pictures and see if the other kids can guess what you were drawing. That kind of thing.

If you’re going to do a big elaborate game like Mario Party, it is a good idea to play test it ahead of time. This week was insanely busy. We had no time to play test, so I adjusted the rules as we went. The required bead count dropped from 30 to 15. We ran out of Mini-games and so I declared all the mini game spaces to be +2 bead spaces. Patches took turns whenever he wanted to. Gleek took no turns at all. She was much more interested in making bead-and-pipe-cleaner art. Then halfway through the party one of the guests arrived late with his little sister in tow. Fortunately one of the other guests was unable to make it at all, so I had enough prizes. There was no way I was going to send away a little girl who had high hopes of attending a party. It was chaos. At least for me. I was constantly running, mediating, making sure that turns were taken, heading off tantrums from Gleek and Patches. Which leads to my next point.

If you’re going to run a big party, full of children, round up help. Howard was unavailable today. I knew that he would be when I planned the event. But then Kiki defected to a friend’s house because she didn’t want to be near a party full of boys. This left me alone with Link, 6 guests, Gleek, Patches, and one little sister of a guest. The fact that I was alone with all that, is my fault. There are people I could have asked to help. But I didn’t ask. It all turned out okay. I really think that all the kids had fun. None of the guests had any upsets. Gleek and Patches each had several upsets because I was unable to pay attention to them and soothe things over, but we weathered it all. But I wore myself out keeping everything going. If I’d had help the experience could have been more fun for me. And we might have gotten some pictures of the event. Link took some video and pictures with his new Vidster, but the image quality on that is pretty poor. Oh well. I didn’t have a spare thought to think about grabbing the camera.

After the games, everyone is wound up. This is when you do the presents. Some people like to do cake first, then presents, but I find that sometimes kids have trouble relinquishing ownership of the things they’ve given as gifts. It is easier to leave behind the pile of shiny things if there is a promise of treat food. Then while they eat. I stash all the presents in a corner so that they don’t cause fights later. Eating food usually calms the kids down some. That was the case with this group. We didn’t have cake, just ice cream. They ate it happily. Getting them all served was hard on me because I had to track all the requests for sprinkles or no sprinkles and glasses of water or milk.

The party can end right here. You can send the guests home. But we still had some time left, so I chose an activity that let the kids wind down a little and which required minimal effort from me. I turned on some Looney Tunes cartoons. I think for future large parties I’ll keep the time down to an hour and a half. That seems to be my limit for high-energy chaos management.

Have a quiet activity planned for after the party is over. After two hours of a dozen loud children, all I want to do is hide from children. For the rest of the day I send away all the kids who show up at my door wanting to play. If my kids want to go play at a friend’s house, that is fine, but I can’t deal with any extra kids here. We all need some quiet time after the over-stimulation of birthday party.

Today has not been a good day for focusing. About lunch time I looked around and realized that I have the pieces of 6-7 projects laying around because I got them out, started work, then wandered away, and never went back. I’ve got laundry on the bed partially folded. I’ve got two books that I started today. I’ve got pictures for The Terraport Wars laying out because I was going to scan them all. I’ve got a birthday cake baked, but not frosted. I’ve got a birthday party partially planned. I’ve got birthday presents partially wrapped. There is probably something else as well, but I won’t remember what it is until I trip over the pieces of it.

I’m pretty sure that this is just a reaction to the high-focused stress I was under Monday through Thursday. Unfortunately I’ve been in this same state for three Fridays in a row. I’m beginning to think that I just need to expect Friday to be an unproductive day and plan around that. We’ll see. For now I need to clean up a few of my messes, kick myself into gear, and make sure that Link has a happy family party this evening.

This was a long day. Many things happened that are deserving of their own entertaining/enlightening entries. I’m too tired to write them all tonight and since tomorrow and Saturday look just as full they may never get written at all. So here is the cliff’s notes version.

I got up late and scrambled to get the kids out the door.

The morning was spent scraping together a last few edits for the Schlock book. We should have a new version to look at tomorrow. Then there will probably be more edits. At least the “to edit” lists keep getting smaller and smaller. I also spent time doing accounting. I paid all the bills, looked at incoming bills, and counted how much money remained. The answer is “not very much.” We need to move back into full frugal mode until we have money from the book. We’ll evaluate again after that. At least I discovered that I had squirreled away several pairs of shoes for Link which are now the right size. This is a relief because he was down to one pair of barely-fitting shoes.

I then took Patches with me to the dollar store to buy prizes for Link’s party. This turned out to be a problem later when Gleek was devastated that I’d gone to the dollar store without her. We resolved the issue by having her come along with me when I went on a different errand and we stopped at the dollar store on the way home. She browsed everything cheerfully, then bought gum with her own money and we came home.

I got fingerprinted this afternoon. That particular errand took 2 hours out of my day. They have a very cool scanning device so that ink is no longer required for this process. Gleek watched fascinated and to be honest so did I. On the way home Gleek examined her fingers. Then we discussed finger prints and hand prints and the fact that police sometimes use finger prints to find bad guys. Then we discussed toe prints and hand creases and the blue veins that are under the skin. Then we talked about what it would be like if our veins weren’t bendable. Then the conversation morphed into an impromptu a cappella song about our bodies and how glad we are that we’re bendable and that people don’t steal our bones.

All day I’d been trying to settle myself into a frugal mindset, the one where I think twice before buying anything. One of the ways that this was expressed the first year after Howard quit Novell was by baking. I couldn’t afford to buy treats for the kids, so I made treats instead. Today I made cookies. I made a big batch and made each cookie smaller than I usually do. I had enough to let the kids eat some, have some for bedtime snack, pack some for lunches, and give some away. I also made dinner.

Then I simultaneously managed homework time and Kiki’s crisis over a friendship. I listened to Kiki, provided information that she may not have had before, made a few suggestions, and tried to help her not let her emotions spin out of control. Kiki was very mature about analyzing what was going on and trying to figure out how she wanted to proceed. I watched her struggle and could see the path I would choose out of the difficulty, but my choice would be made on the basis of years of experience with personal interactions. The path is clear to me because I’ve walked similar paths many times before. The path was not clear to Kiki. I knew the path she took would be a stronger, surer path if she blazed it for herself. If I let her find her own answers then she will learn things that will make the next situation easier for her to deal with. So I tried to put up signposts to give hints about what the road might be like down various paths, but I didn’t tell her which path to take. She picked a good path all on her own. I can see that it is a good path, but she can’t yet and so she’s still all in knots this evening.

Then there were cookies and Harry Potter read aloud.

Next will be bedtime.

This morning: We learned that our layout guy is ready to move on to other things and will not be able to do any further books for us once this project is done.

Around noon: We learned that a large chunk of money that we’ve been expecting for three months is never going to come.

Afternoon, 5 minutes before the start of den meeting: I learned that I am no longer allowed to bring Gleek and Patches with me to cub scouts because they run amok and are a liability issue.

Things come in threes.

I hope this means I can be done with bad news for awhile.

Last night I was so tense my shoulders wanted to crawl up behind my ears. (This phrase is totally stolen from my friend SomebodyStrange, but it is so accurately descriptive of my current state of being, that this is the second time I’ve used it in 24 hours.) I survived the meeting about my creative writing class without incident. Link liked his new art class. I navigated dinner and getting the kids into beds before departing for writers group. My drive coincided with a huge storm front so I drove for 20 minutes dodging blown debris, watching street lamps flicker out, and playing “where is my lane?” through driving rain while simultaenously trying to find the road I wanted to turn onto.

Writers group went well. I knew I was not in a good emotional place to process the commentary that was made, so I just made notes. I’ll look over the notes and assess the situation on a day when I won’t take every comment as evidence that I should just give up this whole writing thing. That emotional state has far more to do with my current level of stress than anything that was said. After the commenting period was over there was an enjoyable conversation in which I got to participate, but mostly I just basked as intelligent conversation bandied around me. I was able to just sit without once having to get up and fetch something for a small person.

I was well and truly tired by the time I got home. I crashed into bed like a wet spaghetti noodle. Then Patches woke me up 10 times during the course of the night. Then I got up and began the morning hustle. Then I checked my email and learned that our wonderful layout guy has decided that as soon as he’s done with this book, he is also done being a layout guy. The solution is that I have to learn InDesign so that I can do the layout for the next book. I hustled the kids off to school, and my internal spring went TWANG. Apparently you can only wind those things so tight before they break. Go figure.

Once Howard picked up all my pieces and put me back together, we focused very closely on the problems for today. I’ll deal with tomorrow’s problems tomorrow. Today doesn’t have any insurmountable problems in it. First on the agenda was food. Howard provided some. Second was sleep. I went back to bed.

I slept for 3 hours. I dreamed that I was part of a play. I had to be in costume and redo my hair for it, but I was also expected to learn dance steps. Only the rehearsal rooms kept moving around and I had piles of stuff on the stage that had to be moved and I had to get in line to get a badge because the play was today.

Yeah. Having to perform, while feeling ill-prepared and unready, with rapidly changing expectations for my performance. I wonder where that came from.

The many hats of Sandra Tayler

I am a wife. I am a mother. I am a writer. I am the chief financial officer for a business. I run inventory and shipping. I am a cook. I am a housekeeper. I am a tutor. I am a cub scout den leader. I am a teacher. I am a chauffeur. I am a counselor/therapist (primarily to my kids, but sometimes to others.) I am a gardener. I am an editor. I am a reader. I am a friend. I am a daughter. I am a sister.

I’m going to stop there because that list is already and insane number of things for one person to be.

Occasionally I get asked how I manage it all. I think they are hoping that there is some grand secret that if they can just grasp, life will get easier. I wish there were. Mostly I stay sane by switching hats a lot. Occasionally I wear several hats at once, but then I have to walk funny to make sure that they all stay balanced. The important hats get worn every day. I make sure I block out sections of time to just wear the mommy hat. I also block out sections for the wife hat and the business hat. As much as possible I try to wear just one hat and focus on it. But frequently this means I’m switching hats back and forth over a matter of seconds. When I’m on my A game, I get really good at that. Some hats sit on the shelf gathering dust. A glance at my yard will show that I have not been wearing the gardener hat much this year. I keep looking at it gathering dust, but not taking the time to put it on.

It really helps when I have Howard standing next to me helping me switch out hats. He came home early today for that exact purpose. This was good cause I’m only just barely keeping stress-panic at bay. The stupid thing is that most of the stress is merely because I’m so stressed. All the pieces fit. It will all work out. If I could just believe that rather than worrying over stuff, this week would be fine. I just need to handle the task that is in front of me and deal with the rest when I get there.

How do you walk a long road? One step at a time. How do you fill a hundred roles? One hat at a time.