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It feels like Friday even though today is Wednesday. This is primarily because Fall break begins tomorrow. It is also because today was the last day of the term, which meant Monday and Tuesday were spent with last minute scrambles to turn in work and not fail classes. But now we’re in the afternoon. All the assignments are turned in. Classes are complete. No one has to get up early tomorrow. So it feels like Friday.

In this drifty free-from-deadlines afternoon, I’m pondering how my kids are beginning to be self steering. College girl has known her life path for six years now, but the other three have been lost and floundering. They’ve been in that space where childhood is over and they desperately need a focus, something to motivate and provide identity, but they don’t know what it should be. As of this month all three younger kids have found a focus and a way forward. They each came to it in their own way and in their own time. Mostly without fanfare, just an “oh by the way mom, I want to be a ________.” For the two in school, the change is subtle, but profound. Their dreams depend on attending college, so all classes matter a bit more than they used to. This doesn’t make getting things done easy. The struggles are real, but it does mean they’re engaged with the struggle instead of trying to dodge it completely. They’re starting to steer, and that is wonderful.

Today is a one of those small triumphs that pass unnoticed. They succeeded at end-of-term push. They’ve kept up with their online classes. There is measurable progress. There is more to do. We have more terms ahead of us, more work to manage. But I can let today be calm and quietly triumphant.

I have lots of creative friends. They are mostly writers, but I also know artists, musicians, editors, jewelers, etc. Many times I hear my creative friends express the dream of being able to do their creative pursuit full time. There is an entire discussion to be had about whether that is the right choice for emotional reasons as well as financial, but that is not the discussion I want to focus on today. Particularly since the “right” answer depends heavily on individual circumstance. What I do want to provide is some information about the realities of living on a variable income, because when most of my friends say they want to do full time creative work, what they mean is that they want to freelance and be their own boss. Freelancing and owning your own small business rarely come with a regular pay check, particularly at first.

The concern that most people have and fret over is that their creative work will not bring in enough to pay the bills. This is the primary problem that people have to face when launching a full time creative career, but what most people don’t wrap their heads around is how a variable income requires different handling and provides challenges even when you are earning enough money. Looking at the particular challenges of a stable, but variable income is something that creative people should consider when deciding whether full time creative work is right for them.

1. You can’t treat a large lump payment as bonus money. Unless you are a freelancer with a long-term, steady assignment, most of your income will come in lumps. They might be small, regular lumps, or giant lumps at irregular intervals. Managing lump payments can be a hard adjustment for a person who is used to budgeting on a steady income. When you have a big chunk of cash sitting in the bank, the temptation to splurge is strong, there is so much money right there. Except that money has to cover bills for six months or a year (or three years, or five years.) If you splurge when the money arrives, then you’re in trouble later. Many creatives temper this by having multiple checking accounts and paying themselves a reasonable “salary” at regular intervals. Or they incorporate as an LLC or S Corp to do the same. This restores the ability to budget on a monthly/ weekly basis. The advent of patronage platforms, such as Patreon, also provide tools to even out the gaps between payments. If you have creative work that earns royalties, then ongoing payments of those royalties can also provide stabilizing payments.

2. Large lumps of money have tax implications. If a large payment comes in December, then at the end of the year it looks like you made a really good living. You will be taxed for all of that money sitting in your account as if it is all profit. The lump of money may even push you into a higher tax bracket. This frequently happens to people who run Kickstarter campaigns where the money arrives in one year but the expenses (printing, manufacturing, shipping) are paid in the next. As far as the IRS is concerned, cash in the bank is profit and should be taxed. This can be offset by changing to a form of accounting called accrual accounting, but once you make that change, you can’t switch back and there is additional paperwork forever. Most creatives just take a tax hit on the years they make a lot, and file a loss on the years when they make less. Unfortunately this often means that the big tax bill lands in the year after the prosperous year and contributes to making that next year into a financially lean one. Boom and bust.

3. Credit and loan application systems are confused by variable income. Most systems use last years tax returns as a predictor for this year’s income, which is not accurate if you’re living the boom and bust cycle seen by many creative folks. Financial institutions also expect to see a bi-weekly or monthly pay stub and use that to calculate monthly income. If your income is variable, it is likely you don’t have any pay stubs. So any time you apply for a loan or credit, you end up having to explain (over and over) where your income comes from, why you don’t have regular pay stubs, and how you are a responsible adult who will be able to pay back the money. You’ll have to dig up additional paperwork and proof of income that folks with a pay stub don’t have to deal with. So make sure you keep documents of your income with invoices and 1099s. You might need proof of income later.

4. United States Healthcare tax credits expect stable income to calculate how much subsidy you get. If you’re going to be a full time creative, you probably won’t have employer-provided health insurance. Right now this means signing up via the independent marketplace. (Who knows what it will mean next year or the year after that, US healthcare is in flux and I’m writing from a US experience base.) Most of the math done to decide if you qualify for a subsidy depends on you having a good estimate of what you’ll make next year and that income being approximately what you made the year before. If you underestimate your income, you may be charged a penalty for taking more credit than you should have. There is no penalty for over-estimating income. Many creatives avoid penalties by never taking a monthly subsidy. Instead they pay out the full premium amount and wait until tax time to get refunded for whatever the subsidy would have been. However this means that in a bust year, when money is tight you have to shell out for those monthly premiums and if your prior year is a boom, you won’t have any medical refund to help pay for those premiums. The refund comes after the year when money was so tight you needed it.

5. Your tax returns affect United States federal grants for higher education. A financial boom year means that you look rich when filling out the FAFSA. It means that during a bust year, when you could really use the financial help, you may not get it because of a prior boom year.

6. Items 2, 4, & 5 serve to exacerbate the boom and bust cycle that often happens in creative work. This means that a big lump payment is cause for trepidation as well as rejoicing. A large payment that isn’t carefully managed can guarantee a complete crashing of finances only a year or two later if the next large payment doesn’t arrive in time to rescue things.

Living on a variable income can be challenging, but if you’re fully aware of all the potential complications and how to buffer them, a variable income can be just as viable for ongoing living as a regular paycheck. For some people the anxieties and uncertainties of irregular pay days are preferable to the anxieties and uncertainties of potential layoffs or having to work with people who are chosen for you rather than whom you choose. Other people do better with that predictable paycheck while pursuing their creative efforts in the hours not claimed by their employers. The challenges listed here are not the only ways that living on a variable income is different than regular income, but they are some important points to consider when deciding if full time creative work is right for you.

Yesterday was a rough ride on the parenting front. Today there was a series of small things that gave me hope that my kids are growing in the directions they need to go.

Homeschool was accomplished without drama and for once we got through all the tasks I’d hoped for.

I took two kids to an archery range and they enjoyed it so much that never-leave-the-house boy is interested in going back once per week.

Never-leave-the-house boy has also joined an after school game club where he’s acquired an interest in Magic: The Gathering. Suddenly we have an incentive program for accomplishing school work as he wants to acquire more cards.

There was spontaneous showering and laundry washing by children who used to not care nor change clothes ever.

High school girl is managing school without meltdowns and has been actively engaged with all of her classes.

Twenty year old made an appointment to go play racketball with someone who does not live in our house. He’s going to get to go out and do a social thing.

Twenty year old has also identified an educational program that may enable him to reach for his long-term goals. We’re touring the facility next Tuesday.

College girl has been sailing through her last semester and has taken on a leadership role among her peers in a studio class. She’s working hard, but enjoying the effort.

None of the kids are where we hope they will end up. (Though college girl is closest, only lacking an independent income.) I would like for never-leave-the-house boy to be able to speak to people at school and engage with his classes and peers. I’d like for high school girl to find some regular social activities that connect her with people and some ways to serve that help her have meaning in her days. I’d like for twenty year old to learn enough of the small adulting skills that he can live independently. We can’t do these things yet, and that is discouraging. But we spent several years where I watched them all get smaller and smaller. Where everything was getting worse and getting harder. Now we have hard days, but I can tell that the shape of the difficulty is about growing. Growth is rarely comfortable. After a day with crying, it is nice to have a day with hope.

Some days it hits me. I have a moment when I can clearly see the vast array of my responsibilities to my kids, to Howard, to myself, to my communities, to the world at large and I can also clearly see my limited allotments of time and resources. There is no way that one can adequately cover the other. I simply can’t do everything. Every good thing I do comes at the cost of some other good thing that I could also be doing. Sometimes I can also see how very far my family has come while also seeing how much further there is to go. That moment is overwhelming, because I remember how hard it was to get from where we were to where we are. The thought of expending a similar quantity of effort again makes me want to sit down and give up for a while.

Even in “giving up for a while” I have no peace, no pause. My thoughts swirl around me whispering all the things I should be doing right this moment. How dare I rest when there are important tasks to be done. If I had not rested six months ago, a year ago, 3 years ago, perhaps I would not still have so much ahead of me. Therefore if I rest now, it is at the expense of some future goal not met.

My brain is a real jerk to me some days. Particularly on a day when I meet with my kid’s teachers and we can all clearly describe the problems my kid is having yet not one of us has a solution for any of it. And all of us are concerned about what will happen when he switches over to the high school campus next year. And the real solution is a transformation that has to take place in the kid’s brain where he decides that he wants something that education has to provide. He has to want connection with peers enough to speak to people. Right now what he wants most is to be left alone with comfortable things and to never have to do anything difficult.

Then, after I’ve paused long enough, the noise quiets down. That is when I remember that miracles do happen. What once seemed insurmountable becomes simple. Not quickly, but eventually. I remember the years when I wept over kids sleeping through the night. I used to have to sit in the hallway outside their rooms for hours waiting for them to fall asleep. Yet now I live in a world where the house gets quiet because they spontaneously put themselves to bed on time. I can’t tell you when the change happened, just that it did. This growth will also come. I just have to get up and do the next thing. I can’t do all the things, but I can do the next one.

This is my sad flowerbed in front of my house. It is messy with tall weeds that have gone to seed, flowering plants in sore need of being cut back, and dry patches where the plants didn’t get enough water and have simply died. Between Planet Mercenary fulfillment and the August travel I have done no gardening this year. For a time in early summer a pair of my kids were gardening once per week, but that fell apart in July.

The outside of my house is not the only thing to suffer from neglect. Everywhere I look there are maintenance and cleaning tasks which haven’t been done. This is because I’ve been choosing to do other things with my time. I’ve chosen to fulfill promises to Kickstarter backers. I’ve chosen to take a once-in-a-lifetime trip. I’ve chosen to use my non-working time on relaxation rather than on housework. Over all I think I’ve made the right time management choices, but whether or not they were correct I’m surrounded by the consequences of them.

I’m hoping to have all of the Planet Mercenary Kickstarter fulfillment complete by the end of September. We’re launching a new Kickstarter next week because work doesn’t stop and money must be earned to pay bills. However we’re being careful to structure this new one so that it won’t completely take over all of my creative time. And we plan to have it completely fulfilled by the end of February, so it is time-limited in a way that Planet Mercenary wasn’t. This means that in October I’m going to have space in my schedule and I can decided what to do with it.

Some of that space is already spoken for. I’m partially homeschooling one of my kids. I was last year as well, but this year I’m giving the process more focused attention. The most important thing this kid can learn is how to make himself do stuff that he doesn’t want to do. So I’m providing the framework inside which he can learn that. Intellectually, he’s totally on board and understands what I’m doing. Actually doing the hard things…is different. So he gets a regularly scheduled slice of my full attention.

A portion of that time will go toward household tasks. I hope. The truth is that I’m likely to find another big creative project to dive into. I’m also likely to drift for a bit because I’m now going on ten solid months of massive project push. My brain is tired.

No matter how I choose to spend my time, It is always good to remember that everything I choose to do is at the expense of some other thing I could also do. This is why I must occasionally step back and make sure that my daily usage of time matches my long-term priorities.

When I read the news of a big disaster, I am always sad for those who are affected. Yet sometimes the scale and distance make the event seem impersonal. I know that there are people in Texas who lost everything in Harvey, but I don’t feel a personal grief because I’ve never been to those places and I don’t have any friends who currently live there. This is why the news seeks out individual stories and photos because those personalize the disaster for people like me who don’t have a prior connection to the disaster area.

Irma is different. I’m crying a bit about Irma before the images and stories even happen. Some of the reasons feel small and silly compared to the size of the coming disaster. (And compared to the disaster already created.) But even if they’re insignificant portions of the reasons to grieve, they are pieces of what I feel as I check in on the news to see whether Irma’s track has changed, where she’s going to hit land, how strong she will be.

Twenty four years ago I landed in Sarasota Florida for my honeymoon. Howard grew up there and his siblings still lived in the family home. (They’ve since moved to Utah.) Howard drove me around the neighborhoods where he used to live and the beach at Siesta Key where he spent so many of his summers. We stayed at his grandmother’s condo. As Howard showed me places, he talked about the threat of a hurricane as a fact of life. Some of the houses were built up on stilts in preparation for that event. I remember him telling me that a hurricane was inevitable at some point and that when it came all the buildings on the keys would be scoured away. People knew this. Builders knew this. They built on the keys anyway because the hurricane could be a hundred years away and in the meantime people wanted to enjoy the beauty of the gulf coast. And I can’t say they were wrong to do so. It was beautiful. I’m glad I got to go there. I hope many people got to see it. What the builders and home buyers can’t accurately say is “we didn’t know this would happen.” Because they knew. Everyone in Florida knew, hurricanes always come eventually.

Irma’s current track shows the eye of the storm rolling right over Sarasota or passing just to the west of it. Irma will likely be a Cat 3 hurricane when that happens.

I remember visiting at the house of one of Howard’s friends. It was a beautiful middle class home that would have fit right into the neighborhoods where I grew up, but the back yard did not end in a fence. It ended in a sea wall. I could walk straight out the back door, across 100 feet of lawn, and then jump off that wall into the ocean only about four feet below. It wasn’t open ocean, but a canal-like area with other neighbors across with way who also had a sea wall. And a dock. These houses all had a dock with a small or medium boat. Ten minutes of slow boating would take any one of these people out to open ocean spaces. It was beautiful for an adult, frighteningly fenceless for parenting a toddler. The house was six feet above the high tide line.

The expected storm surge with Irma will be 10-15 feet. That entire house will be underwater and probably scraped away entirely. These people we know will lose everything they didn’t take with them. I hope they evacuated. They had thirty years of living in this idyllic place, but this was always a possibility. I hope they prepared for it.

My brother evacuated from Tampa. He left on Friday morning when the storm track showed Irma rolling over Miami. We were glad that he was going even though at the time it looked like Tampa would probably be fine. Now Tampa will be hit hard and we’re glad he is elsewhere.

Last September, not quite a year ago, I went on a cruise in the Caribbean. We made port at Nassau, the Bahamas, St. Thomas, and St. Martin. All of these islands felt the force of Irma in the past few days. The places I visited and found beautiful are destroyed. It will be years before they are beautiful again.

For all of my life, the name Irma was just my Grandma’s name. It was a name I’d never heard anywhere else. I knew she didn’t like it much. It hadn’t been a fashionable name since before she was born. The name wasn’t passed on to any of her grandchildren or great grandchildren (though her middle name was). I felt a little sad for the name Irma, so unwanted. So I wrote notes for a picture book featuring a little girl named Irma whose name was old-fashioned and who liked old fashioned things. In the book she would doubt herself but learn about individuality. I hoped that the book might give the name Irma some charm. I knew most people would never have heard the name before. Now everyone has heard the name and has a very specific association for it. My little fictional Irma will probably never get her story.

All of this is in my head muddled up together with images of the storm track and of post-hurricane disaster scenes. And yet I don’t have as much cause to grieve as Howard whose childhood locations are about to be scoured away by wind and water. Nor as much cause as the people who currently live there and may lose everything they have. My grief is small, a piece of my experience of today. There is nothing I can do to alleviate the coming damage. So I check in with the storm track, and then I step away and try to appreciate the day and home that I have. I want to enjoy my sunshine, flowers, family. Because some day disaster may strike here instead of elsewhere, and when it does, I’d like to have stored up years of happy living first.

Also, I should review my emergency preparedness supplies. That is also a good use of the day. Because when disaster strikes Utah, it will likely be in the form of an earthquake and we won’t get to see it coming for us. I’m not sure which is better, watching it come slowly and having to make choices about what to lose or having it hit fast and just having to try to salvage. No matter where we live, there is a disaster which could happen and which preparedness could make more survivable.

Stay as safe as you can Florida. Please.

The second week of school is complete and we’re beginning to see the patterns which are settling into place. It will take several more weeks before the patterns are fully set, but I like the shape of things so far.

High school girl has been stepping up and managing all her things despite (or perhaps because of) a last minute decision to discontinue one of her medicines. She loves most of her classes and hates none of them, which is a very nice change from last year.

Junior High boy isn’t stepping up, but he’s willingly admitting when he doesn’t engage with class. This gives me the chance to communicate with teachers and build structures that require/encourage him to participate instead of hide in a book all day. The home school portions of his schedule are also under way. He’s going to be work all year long, but that is the story of 14 years old. At least this year we’re working with a smart kid who doesn’t want to do “boring” and “pointless” school work. That is much preferable to massive anxiety disorder that reduces boy to minimal functioning and depression.

College girl is discovering that her semester is lining up in exceedingly convenient ways, so that she will be able to be done on campus by December. Also her life is made much better by the fact that one of her roommates is an apartment-complex-approved cat who functions as an emotional support animal to one of the human roommates. Fortunately the cat is quite happy to spread the emotional support to humans beyond his owner.

Post-high-school-non-college boy is living at home and intends to begin applying for jobs since he isn’t ready for college at this point in his life. In the interim, he’s been working for me as a shipping assistant and working on some projects of his own. He’s begun to take charge of things in his own life and has been adulting around the house more. He’s on his own path for launching into independent adulthood and we’re going to give him the space to grow up more for a couple of years.

Howard is home from his month-long travels and has immediately found an exciting new project about which we can’t currently disclose any details. He’s no less busy than he was in the first half of this year, but is far more relaxed and happy with the things he is doing.

I’m spending the month of September shipping packages and finishing off the last details of the Planet Mercenary Kickstarters. I’m also setting up for the products and releases that we’ll need to handle between now and the end of the year. I’m putting more attention and effort into tracking the kids’ educational stuff. I’m finally able to be the back-up to their teachers and provide necessary structure so that the kids can’t get away with not doing their work. By beginning to mid October my schedule is going to open up. I’m going to have spaces like I haven’t had for a year or more. I’m not sure yet what will flow into those spaces.

It all feels …nice. Normal. Not chaotic. Without a foreboding sense that everything is imminently falling apart. All my people seem to have stabilized, which is a really nice change from the past four years. I haven’t had everyone stable simultaneously since late 2012. It feels like that state is going to continue for a while, but whether it does or not, I still get to have this space where things are calm, so I’m going to make sure I take time to pause and notice that things are good.

The school year started barely twenty four hours after I returned from GenCon, so there wasn’t much time for me to re-calibrate my brain in between. Fortunately some portion of my brain just remembered how everything needed to go, so we got up on time and got kids out the door on schedule. They’ve now been in school two days, which means they’ve had the first iteration of all of their classes. I’m pleased to report that my high school junior is excited by most of her classes instead of feeling oppressed by them. This is a huge improvement over last year. My 9th grader isn’t actively excited by classes, but he’s not dreading school either. I’ll take that. The college girl departs for school on Friday. Come Monday I need to help the post-high-school non-college kid apply for jobs. Also I need to sign up the 9th grader for some independent study classes. The best part is the complete lack of foreboding. I feel like this year is going to go well instead of being terrified that it won’t.

GenCon was good. I struggled with anxiety and brain noise a lot more than usual. It made some things harder than they needed to be. Planet Mercenary was well received and had a solid start at making its way out into the world. We had some important business conversations which may lead to fun projects. I got to spend time with my booth crew, who is like family. One of my favorite events every year is the crew dinner that we have on Sunday evening after all the work is complete. Then we can just enjoy being together. Maybe it was because of the 50th anniversary, but this dinner was full of reminiscing and stories of GenCons past. It was fun to hear about things I hadn’t been present for, and to relive things that I had. I also got to hang out with writer friends, which is also a joy.

The post GenCon accounting is mostly complete. There are a few more things I must do before I can put away the GenCon folders until sometime in January. I’ve also begun wrapping my brain around the piles of shipping which need to be done. I ordered more shipping supplies so that come Monday I can begin plowing through work. I also began reaching out to potential bonus story artists, which is a task I really should have done before I left for Europe, but which fell through the cracks. The Adventure PDF, the GC secrets PDF, and the half sheet inserts for the handbrains are also on my To Do list. I’m hoping to wrap up all of these things by the end of September so that I’m available for new projects after that.

Tomorrow I post Kickstarter updates and help my college girl pack up her life for what is (hopefully) her final semester of college.