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It turns out that I am among the people who are afraid because of the election results. I’d already been informed that our health insurance premium would be going up by $600 per month. Now I’m wondering if I’ll have health insurance at all a year from now. I worry that financial uncertainty will impact sales in our store over the holiday months. Which then affects my budget for next year. There are lots of large question marks. We’ll figure it out and find a way through, but the ambient anxiety in our house has gone up. I have a child who seriously and earnestly advocated for moving to a different country, even though it meant leaving her friends. She’s that scared. I don’t know what the increased uncertainty, and possible unpleasant interactions at school, will do to destabilize my kids’ mental health. We’d barely managed to get to a place where no one was in crisis.

And those are just the top of my head worries. I have larger worries for friends and family whose situations are far more vulnerable than mine. I worry for friends who are more likely to become targets for anger and hatred.

Yet, I believe in the power of people to band together and help each other through. So I’m going to spend today being kind. I’m also going to try to listen to the thin thread of reassurance which is coming to me and saying “It may be rough for a while, but you’ll be okay.” I’m also going to remember that anxiety means I’m focused on the future instead of being focused on today. I don’t have to do all the days ahead of me yet. I just have to do today, one hour at a time.

Since last Friday I’ve been practicing some deliberate cocooning. This means I’m not checking news sites, only peeking at social media to see if I’ve been messaged, and generally letting the larger world take care of itself without me paying attention. I’ve already placed my vote, what small amount of control I have has been exercised. So I’m going to ignore numbers and polls. Tomorrow I’m going to do my best to be occupied with work. Then Wednesday I’m going to do the same while there is furor over whatever result we get. Because no matter the election results, a significant portion of our fellow Americans will be terrified of the result. I hope that those who are relieved can be kind to those who are afraid. Because if I am among the afraid group, I would dearly love to be reassured that things will be okay.

I do think that if we can all be better about how we interact with the people we meet in person, then the sum of millions of compassionate interactions will be the America we’d like to be instead of the partisan one which is visible on the internet.

So tomorrow I will sign a paper to okay printing for the Pristine Seventy Maxims book. I will tweak the layout on the Defaced Seventy Maxims book so that it can go to print in the next few weeks. I will email the next batch of Kickstarter backers so that I can get their orders updated with the version of book they want. I will put finishing touches on a document we plan to release to Planet Mercenary backers. I will answer email. I will fold laundry. I will listen to my son tell me about the first performance for the school play (he’s stage crew.) I’ll listen to my daughter chatter about whichever random thing she is focused on. Maybe I will talk to my college girl on the phone. Perhaps I will send a picture of flowers to friends who I think might need one. Maybe I’ll rake leaves.

When I really think about it, all the fears are far out in the wide world. The things up close are mostly worthwhile and wonderful. For the next few days, I’m going to keep my eyes focused on the things up close.

My social media feeds are full of costume pictures. This makes me quite glad. It is much nicer to have personal pictures that I can click to show appreciation rather than posts full of links where I have to click “hide” to protect myself from anxiety. I’ll take pumpkins and costumes.

We’re having a low-key Halloween here at Chez Tayler. None of my kids are interested in Trick or Treating. Only one of them put together a costume. The other three either didn’t care or didn’t have the energy to devote to thinking one up and making it. We even missed the neighborhood Halloween party. Not on purpose, it just fell in the middle of a working Saturday. We got to the next day before we realized we’d missed it.

I’ve been focusing my energy on Kickstarter management and getting my junior high kid settled into partial homeschooling. I’ve also been clearing the way so I can spend Friday retrieving Kiki from college. She’s coming home for a weekend visit and a doctor’s appointment. So Halloween happened all around me while I was not paying attention.

It is strange to shift from a life where Halloween was a major event requiring weeks of deliberation and planning to a life where we might accidentally miss it if there weren’t trick or treaters at the door. But that is where we are right now. Perhaps another year we’ll get back into the costuming groove, but for this year we’re spending our energy elsewhere.

This afternoon I got to listen to myself say “Yes, I’ve made a bunch of extra work for myself, but the extra work is much less stressful than what I had before. Because I know at the end of the work I will feel confident that I delivered what the backers expected. That is a much nicer feeling than sick doubt.” All of which is true. Much of the piles of work ahead of me are tedious, but right now I’ll take tedious over complicated. So many of the things on my To Do list are complicated and require difficult decisions.

While I was at SiWC I got to sit down with a close friend and talk about the things in her life and the things in mine. We talked for hours. Several times during that conversation I spoke things that I hadn’t put into words before they came out of my mouth. This is one of the treasures about long hours spent with a friend. There are so many thoughts that I’ve buried deep underneath the surface pleasantries. I never meant to hide them. I’m not ashamed of anything that is in there. I just didn’t have time to pay attention to my thoughts as things happened. So I end up with layers of thoughts, so many layers that I’ve forgotten what the floor looks like. I write about the things as they happen, but fundamentally writing is like talking to myself. It does not spark the same insights that happen when my thoughts meet someone else’s thoughts.

Many of the thoughts buried in my head are sad. I’ve collected memories of many difficult moments over the past few years. The sadness doesn’t go away just because the thought is buried. It leaks. And it doesn’t magically get better even if the situations which caused the sadness are mostly resolved. Before I can let the sadness go, I have to find the source of it and see it for what it is. Only then can I move onward. All these layers of unprocessed emotion are part of why the anxiety gets bad sometimes. They are definitely a source of fatigue. It is hard to keep moving with so much built up in my head.

I’m trying to be better about seeing friends. I’m trying to spend time with people who don’t mind listening while I sort. There’s just so much that I worry I’ll wear out their patience. It would be very nice to start reducing the quantity of unprocessed emotion rather than watching it accumulate.

In the past four days we have relocated our wall mounted television, disassembled and reassembled our Ikea couch so that it is mirrored from its former configuration, pulled down our wall mounted media shelving, prepped half the room for painting (the other half got painted a month ago), and began repainting trim. The room is going to be so much nicer when all the things are done. The rearrangement makes much better use of the space. Also, we were really tired of the white walls which had 18 years of accumulated nicks, stains, and smears.

Other things I’ve been working on:
Prepping the annotated PDF of the Seventy Maxims book. I need to get that to backers this week.
Assembling a powerpoint presentation on cover design
Working on a presentation about picture books.
Shipping packages
Helping my two school kids track their homework
Taking my older son to his first class at Passages, which is a transitional program for autistic adults
Mowing the foot-high lawn so that it won’t kill itself over the winter

Even with all of that, I’m surrounded by things I ought to do, but haven’t managed to squeeze in. I need to catch up on laundry because tomorrow Howard needs to pack for his trip to ConStellation over in Huntsville Alabama. The Planet Mercenary book needs more attention (though I’ve spent significant attention aiding and abetting Howard’s editing time on that project.) I see cluttery spots all over my house, and then there are the spots which are outright dirty and need to be cleaned.

I haven’t had a whole lot of time for slow thoughts about big things. And some of my thinking time gets sucked into politics or into watching a hurricane slowly create disaster as it marches inevitably across homes. With something that huge, all a person can do is get out of the way and then hunker down until the storm passes. That last sentence applies equally to the hurricane and national politics. I’ll be glad when we finally get to the day when I can cast my vote. I’ll be even more glad when the noise dies down.

The good news is that it finally feels like we’re stabilizing into the school routine. We’ve finished clearing up the make up work from our trip. The days have begun to have a rhythm to them. That’ll be disrupted a little by Howard’s trip this weekend and then by my trip next weekend, but the routine is nice to have.

I keep looking at my calendar, mapping out the shape for the next few weeks. It is a necessary task because the cruise trip loomed so large that I couldn’t see past it. Now the trip is behind me and I have to figure out how to organize the next things. My two school kids have extra homework, but we now have all the papers we need to get that done. I’ve cleared out the shipping queue and done the accounting. The last loads of vacation laundry are running now.

That only leaves the giant projects which feel horribly overdue and which I can’t always wrap my brain around. There are moments when I can see exactly how it is all going to work. Those slip away from me when I get distracted. Then I am left with doing the next step, because I can see how to do that. The hope is that enough next steps in a row will eventually land us in project completion.

In the midst of building momentum for the big projects, I am also trying to use the lessons learned on the cruise trip to make small changes here at home. Over time small changes create massive shifts in trajectory.

We do have a pair of trips that land before the end of October, one for Howard, one for me. But compared to the cruise they are logistically tiny. Pretty much all we have to do for Howard is pack a suitcase and shove him onto a plane. My trip requires a bit more preparation because I have two presentations to fine tune. Yet once the presentations are done, I expect the trip itself to be a delight. Howard will have the kids so the only one to manage will be me. Also, the conference features several writing friends I am excited to spend time with.

It is nice to be able to see far ahead on the schedule without a massive anxiety thing in the way.

Sometime in the last month I had a conversation with a friend where we were commiserating about how often we feel like failures. She said something along the lines of “Yeah, I got grocery shopping done today. That’s it.” I don’t really remember the rest of the conversation, but that sentiment (and the self-critical tone she used to say it) have stuck with me.

As a society we seriously underestimate the value of household tasks such as grocery shopping and laundry. I’m not just talking about how we don’t pay money for this work, we also speak of these things as if maintaining a functioning household is so simple that every adult should be able to do it without stress. That is simply not true. Many household tasks are very complex, we just lose sight of that complexity because they are so familiar that some of them have become routine for us. Anything we practice becomes easier for us to accomplish, but that does not make the task itself easy.

Take grocery shopping for example. It requires the ability to inventory food currently stored at your house. Then you have to plan for future eating based on your past eating experiences. You have to evaluate rate-of-use on foods to decide when is the right time to replenish a particular item. You also have to calculate how much money you have available to spend, which might require a review of your budget. You have to look at your schedule to figure out when you have time to make the trip, which requires a knowledge of how long grocery shopping usually takes. You have to arrange for transportation of yourself to the store and back with the groceries. Even if you have a car readily available to you, that adds an entire set of tasks to keep the car functioning so that it may be used at a moment’s notice. Once you are at the store, you have hundreds of micro decisions to make. If you didn’t bring a list, you have to remember what you have at home and select based on that memory. Whether or not you brought a list, you have to navigate the store to find the items that you need. This requires a knowledge of what items are usually grouped together and where this particular store puts that particular grouping of items. While in the store you are confronted with hundreds of items which tempt you to purchase them. You have to decide, on the fly, whether or not you should. This involves thinking about budget, space in cupboards/fridge/freezer, and also an evaluation for whether this tempting item matches the diet or lifestyle that you want to have. Each micro decision makes your brain a little bit tired, rendering each subsequent decision fractionally more difficult than the one before it. When your cart is full or your list complete, you face further micro decisions: which line to check out, how to stack things on the conveyor, and paper or plastic. Or if you use a self-check option, then you need to navigate the system of ringing up and bagging your own groceries. When you arrive at home, all the things you have purchased need to be relocated to their appropriate storage locations.

Grocery shopping is far from simple. It is a hugely complex task and it is only one of many household tasks that require regular attention to keep things running. Yet we tend to discount the time, effort, brain necessary to make sure these tasks happen. If you add in tending to the needs of pets or other people, the level of complexity multiplies. It is all valuable work. Yet so often we (I definitely include myself in this) arrive at the end of a day full of household tasks feeling like we accomplished nothing important. Which is funny, because for people who lack basic necessities, these “simple” household and life maintenance tasks are of primary importance.

Adulting is hard. Most people struggle with some aspect of it. I’m watching my adult children as they learn to navigate all the household management stuff, and it reminds me how complicated it really is.

Wednesday wasn’t really hard, not in comparison to some of the hard days we’ve had in the past few years. At least this time my kid was able to recognize the impending meltdown, call me, and articulate what went wrong. I still had to bring him home and let him curl up under a weighted blanket with a soft thing to hug tight until the shakes went away. Yet both he and I spent some time with the thought “how are we going to do this year if things are already going off the rails?” Except things weren’t off the rails, not really. This year he has several classes that he actively enjoys and looks forward to attending. This year he’s able to call me between classes and tell me “I think it might be good for me to have a notebook so I could write notes on when I’m anxious. Then we could figure out what is triggering it.” This year he is looking for solutions instead of flopping into a heap.

Thursday was a little hard, but only in my head. The events of Wednesday churned up emotional sediment that clouded my thinking all day long. I woke to the day certain that anything I touched was doomed to failure. So I pitched my plan to do creative work and instead asked Howard to give me the files for Random Access Memorabilia. Doing layout on a Schlock book is familiar. I know exactly how it needs to go. The work was comforting because I know it isn’t overdue or complicated.

This morning was better. All my kids attended all of their classes. I was able to see that I’m not failing at everything. I can also see that despite shifting around kids’ school schedules multiple times, and despite having to bring my son home mid-day 3 times (so far) We’re still aimed at having a good school year. Of course there is a great big disruption coming up in two weeks when I take all of my kids on the Writing Excuses cruise. That will mean missed classes, make up work, and having to re-orient ourselves when we get back. Yet that too will be a learning experience.

I acquired a waterproof camera because I expect the Writing Excuses cruise with my kids to include water-based events that I want to record. I took it to a local pool to test out how it works, the answer is: pretty well. Seeing the screen underwater was a bit of a challenge, as was aiming for moving targets. But out of 170 photos, a few turned out really well.

GenCon begins this Thursday, but my GenCon week has already begun. I’ve been prepping and packing since late last week. Today I’ll board a plane so that on Wednesday I can help set up our booth. We’re booth 1343. Here’s a handy map to help you find us.

If you are at GenCon, I hope you do take some time to stop by. One of the things I love about GenCon is that we have a fantastic booth crew. I seriously do not know how we would run this show without them. Because they’re amazing, I’m able to go and spend time with the GenCon Writer’s Symposium instead of being pinned to the booth.

The symposium has put me on some events and I’m excited about them. I believe the symposium space is all located inside the Westin Hotel. You can see the full schedule and info at http://www.genconwriters.com/

Thurs 10am The Business of Self Publishing. Location: Cabinet (which I assume is a conference room named cabinet rather than an actual cupboard.)

Friday 4pm Writing Author Bios. Location: Congress 1 (Again, pretty sure this is a conference room)

Saturday 5pm Structuring Life to Support Creativity. Location: Congress 1
This is a solo presentation about which I am excited and nervous.

Saturday 6pm Breaking Through Writer’s Block. Location: Congress 1
Another solo presentation right after the first one.

On those solo presentations, I’m torn between hoping that I won’t be speaking to an empty room and fear that the room will be dauntingly full of people who expect me to say articulate and useful things. Fortunately both presentations are ones that I’ve given before and they were well received. Some of my time on the flight to Indianapolis will be me refreshing and updating my notes.

This year’s GenCon will feature nine Planet Mercenary Demo games. Much of my work in the past couple of days has been to make sure our marvelous GMs have the info and tools necessary to run the games. And here is where I must sing the praises of our book designer Mike Brodu. He made beautiful character sheets for us.

The games will be run at 9am, 1pm, and 6pm on Thursday, Friday, Saturday. They’ll all be located in the JW Marriott room 202. You’re welcome to wander by and see the fun. Or you can stop by the booth and come get one of the spare character sheets. We printed up extra and there is a space on the back where Howard will draw you a sketch. The sheets are labeled GenCon 2016, so they’re collectible. I’m certain we’ll run games again next year, but the sheets will be different from these.

Another reason to come by the booth is that we have lots of fun things to look at and buy. Force Multiplication will be there with the bonus story that I wrote. We’ll have copies of Hold on to Your Horses and Strength of Wild Horses. Additionally, I’ve packed some of Keliana Tayler’s limited edition prints into my bag. They’re worth seeing.

As always, we’ll be sharing our booth with Jim Zub. If you haven’t heard of SkullKickers or Wayward, you definitely need to stop by and take a look. Jim’s work is fun to read. My kids have been asking for the next installment of Wayward ever since I brought home the first treasury. While you’re wandering the dealer’s hall, stop by the Crafty Games booth. That is the convention home for Patrick Kapera who is our editor for Planet Mercenary. His work is amazing and they’ve got a new Mistborn game out which is based on the work of Brandon Sanderson.

It is going to be a very busy week. If you’re not at GenCon, but want to follow along, I recommend checking my twitter feed @SandraTayler or Howard’s twitter feed @HowardTayler We try to tweet as we can during the convention. It is possible that I’ll blog as well, but often I’ve used up all my brain by the time I can sit down to write words.

And now I must go do all the last minute things to prepare.