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It feels like such a short hop, only four hours in a plane, so much shorter than the trip I just took with multiple hops and full days of travel. Hop, and I’m in Indianapolis. It is familiar here. I’ve been this place before. This exact Hotel. I will soon see people that I get to see only once per year. The prior trip was a venture into new places, foreign lands. This trip is more like a family reunion.

I’ve arrived late in the evening, though back home it is less late, so I am awake. Howard met me here, but he came from far to the east. He is sleeping now, still working to re-set his internal clock to the day/night rhythms of this place. He has two more days in which to adapt before the show begins in earnest. I’m glad to see him. He is even more glad to see me. We’ve only been apart for a week, but he’s been away from home for over three.

One of my worries in advance of his month-long travel was that breaking his patterns for so long would break him somehow. I forgot that brains are significantly location dependent. I remembered it again when I got home and discovered that all the shipping thoughts which I’d set down for weeks were apparently stored in the driver’s seat of my car. They were right there waiting for me when I climbed in for a quick errand. Howard will be able to slip back in to his home thoughts and work again. Yet when he returns he’ll have new thoughts and experiences, just as I did. Travel caused me to see familiar things in new ways. I would have liked time to explore that experience, but the turn around to this trip was filled with urgent tasks.

Now I am here. GenCon begins on Thursday.

We have an internet package on the ship, but it has a strictly limited MB ration. I may be able to continue to blog words, but no pictures. I possibly won’t be able to do many words either, in which case, I’ll still write things up, hopefully to post when I return to the world of internet. We’ll see.

It has been a full week since I last had enough space to think writer thoughts. Shipping has consumed most of my hours for the past three weeks. There is one week more before I switch over into travel mode. In between shipping, I’ve had two doctor’s appointments and one medical test in the past week. Swallowing is harder for me than it should be. This is probably an after effect of radiation therapy I had twenty years ago. The difficulty was minimal and static for decades, so I adapted. It has felt a little worse lately, hence seeing my primary care doctor, an ENT, and going in for a fun test where I swallow barium sludge so they can x-ray while it goes down. Yesterday was a more specific test where they will ruin food by mixing it with barium and then took x-rays while I chewed and attempted to swallow. The most sadly terrible one was the oreo cookie with barium filling. I walked out of the test with a diagnosis of “dismotility of the swallow mechanism” some instructions for eating carefully and a referral to a speech therapist who will give me a set of exercises designed to strengthen throat muscles.

This is one way where life is not like fiction. Fiction is organized with narratives unfolding neatly, usually in chronological order. Plots and sub plots are clearly delineated. Life muddles everything together, tangled and overlapping. Pretty much everyone I know is caught up in a web of things that keep them busy, things they need to get out of the way so they can do other things that they want to do. I have to remind myself that the tangle is my life. This July my life is about shipping, swallowing, hauling my kids to work in the warehouse, watching them work, and preparations for my upcoming trip. It is also about fixing food, taking out the trash, going grocery shopping, negotiating for use of the big TV in the family room, replacing worn out clothing, and hundreds of other little tasks. What I have to remind myself is that all of the To Do items are in support of this life I’m living, and in the moments when I can clear away the stress of the To Do list, I recognize that the lifestyle I’m supporting is one I’m happy to occupy.

It is Sunday morning and for the first time in weeks, I have a space where I feel like I am allowed to set aside shipping thoughts for a day. I worked all last week and even more yesterday to make sure I had this space. Invoices for next Tuesday’s shipping are printed and sorted. I can’t begin printing postage until tomorrow. All the supplies are either in hand or enroute. I already know what lists I will ship on Thursday. There is email I could manage, but it can wait until Monday morning. I have space to breathe and to contemplate the fact that by the end of this week I will have shipped almost everything. What remains will be international orders and orders containing handbrain screens.

For the first time in months I’m able to contemplate my upcoming trip and make plans for it. Howard and I will be traveling to Europe to take part of the Writing Excuses conference and workshop on a cruise ship in the Baltic sea. I have never been to Europe before. It was always something that was out of reach both financially and in terms of schedule. But the Writing Excuses conference has made it possible. I don’t know what the trip will be like. I expect to see and experience amazing new things. I expect to have to eat unfamiliar foods some of which I’ll like and others I won’t. I expect to get homesick and to come home with my head full of new thoughts. It is going to be a good trip.

Howard’s trip will be more extended than mine. He will stay in Europe after the cruise to tour some castles and then attend WorldCon in Helsinki Finland. I’ll return home to check on the home front, answer emails, manage business things, likely ship some packages, deal with school registration issues, and dozens of other small management tasks. From Helsinki, Howard will fly directly to Indianapolis for GenCon. I will join him there for a week of convention. At the end of that we’ll fly home together and won’t want to leave the house for a good long time. I arrive home the day before my kids begin school and six days before I have to drop my college kid off for her (hopefully) final semester on campus.

I’ve watched these trips coming on the calendar. I’ve felt the pressure of them. I worried that I wouldn’t get enough shipping done before time to go and that I’d then feel guilty for running off on a big trip while backers were waiting for their packages. Now it looks like I won’t have to carry that guilt. I’ve got two weeks of hard work ahead to make sure that I have shipped everything I can possibly ship before departure.

I’m halfway through the second week of Planet Mercenary shipping. The third big shipping day is scheduled for tomorrow. The postage is all printed, supplies are there, work crew gathers at 8:30 tomorrow morning. And I am tired. Some of it is physical tired. A six pound package doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re shifting 400 of them, that means we’ve moved more than a ton. Then there is moving supplies and boxes of books to keep the work stations stocked. But even more than physical tired, my brain is tired of all the tracking and pre-planning that is necessary in advance of a big shipping day.

Fortunately a good night’s sleep will help.

In the mean time all six Taylers took an hour to light fireworks in our cul de sac. It was only us out there instead of the forty or fifty people who gathered yesterday. Some years we like the energy of participating in a big group event. This year we were happier with our own little celebration. It was a nice way to finish off a long day of work.

The details of last week’s shipping efforts are detailed over on the Planet Mercenary update page. I’ll be posting similarly detailed updates over there each Friday until the shipping is done. The short version is that I need to ship 1000 packages (or more) per week until everything is in the mail. I’d take it slower except we have convention travel coming at the end of July. I really want the packages sent before that.

We’re starting to see pictures and reports from people who have gotten their packages. It makes me want to hurry and send all the rest so that no one has to wait for much longer. Unfortunately I keep hitting my physical and mental limitations and have to take breaks. Also there are other life things which have to be taken care of.

All of my thinking has turned into lists instead of long and careful thoughts. I will be really, really glad when Planet Mercenary is delivered.

I’ve spent the past week mired in words. Most of them were in emails as I was communicating with the 600ish people who backed both Planet Mercenary and the Handbrain screens to help them combine their orders. All that communication was rewarding because so many people expressed excitement and thanks about the impending shipping of the project. Also I know that every bit of organization that I do now will be less organization work that I have to do later.

The other words I’ve been wrestling this week are the words for the next Schlock Mercenary bonus story. I’ve hammered out the shape of the story and the cast, but I need to tune the details of the story. Then I have to fine tune the words. Focusing on it is hard because there are so many other things that I could also be doing with my hours.

List of other things:
Errata documents for Planet Mercenary
The Game Chief Secrets PDF
The 2017 GenCon adventure
Preparing for shipping out thousands of packages

I’m in the final crazy push to the end of July, when things should finally slow down.

We’ve reached the point in the school year where it is essentially over. My two teenagers will still go to the school buildings for four more days, but those days will be filled with administrivia and a last minute test or two. They’ve managed to not fail classes, which wasn’t a certain thing a week ago. This not-failing is because of a last minute scramble to turn in work which somehow didn’t get done or turned in earlier in the term. Four days from now we embark on summer.

I know some families whose summers are filled with extra trips and outings. They strive to keep their kids busy and engaged. This summer is packed to the edges with work for Howard and me. We will sneak in family activities around the edges, but for the most part summer for our kids means lots of free time rather than lots of structured activity. July will have some school in it, because both of my teens are doing some independent study work. I’ll probably reinstate my rule from last year where I don’t police screen time as long as the kids spend a pre-agreed amount of time either learning or making before they screen. But that is the limit of structure that I believe I can sustain while also sustaining the quantity of business tasks I need to do.

The learning and making is important because it requires my teenagers to stretch themselves. They begin to explore who they might want to be as adults. They begin to define who they are right now. I might add an additional requirement about getting out and doing things with friends. Perhaps I’ll even require that some of that friend time take place at not-always-my-house. I love having my kids’ friends here, but my kids need to learn how to navigate being a visitor at someone else’s house. They don’t do that often enough.

The other half of my children are both adults. They will be working, one at a job (once he acquires one) and one at setting up a freelance career. All four kids will get pulled in to the shipping work that needs to be done this summer. I suspect we will all be tired of packages before it is done.

With all six of us home all day, we’ll all have to participate in more household clean up. There will be more negotiation over use of space. There will be more times where we’re getting in each other’s way. For now I’m fine with that. By the end of August I’ll be longing for the structure that a school schedule supplies, but for now I’m glad to let it go.

We launched a Kickstarter on Monday, and it has been highly distracting all week. Some of the distraction is just watching and wondering if it will fund, but much more of it is the massive influx of email. Each time we update, that creates another comment thread where people can post questions or thoughts to us. Several times I’ve read a question and had to take a minute to carefully figure out which Kickstarter they were asking questions about. This is particularly important because in the last forty-eight hours I’ve gotten questions about the Challenge Coin Kickstarter that we ran four years ago, The Planet Mercenary Kickstarter that we ran two years ago, and many questions about the Handbrain Screen Kickstarter that is currently running. It fractures my ability to concentrate to manage all of this.

On the happier side, Kickstarters also provide a lot of positive energy. People are excited and interested in the results. People express kind thoughts and confidence in our ability to deliver a quality product. All the well-wishes are heart warming.

We have two and a half more weeks doing everything we can to make this Kickstarter amazing. After that will be a wait of a couple of weeks before we have the screens in hand. Then comes the shipping. The shipping will be big and complicated because the screens and Planet Mercenary books will both be shipping close together, but once it is done I will have a huge weight lifted. I will have finally delivered to the backers who trusted us two years ago. I’m really looking forward to that.

In the past six months my thoughts have turned into lists. They are endless lists of urgent tasks accompanied by a sense of impending failure. Yet lately the lists are shorter, and I begin to see the results of those lists in projects accomplished. The lists are going to last through July, but they now have some spaces between them. Those spaces are going to get larger. Occasionally when I am inside of one of those spaces I feel a little lost. I’ve forgotten what to do when my days are strictly constrained by urgent tasks. I know that I should begin picking up my own long-neglected projects, and I will, but not just yet. First I need to teach my brain that it is okay to not think in lists all the time.