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Here at Chez Tayler life shifts rhythm pretty often. We have the over lapping cycles of school and summer; book preparation and book release; and convention preparations and clean up. These various cycles interact with each other and wreak havoc on my attempts to create helpful life patterns. When our lives shift problems are both created and solved. Sometimes good things get dropped from the schedule and I’m left wondering how we fell out of the habit of family dinner, family home evening, or regular reading. It is normal for good things to accidentally get dropped from the schedule. This is because creating an ideal schedule is impossible to achieve. All I can do is cobble together the best possible schedule for whatever mix of circumstances in which we currently reside. That, and I promise myself to pick up those important pieces and put them back as soon as I possibly can.

We’ve finally reached a point where most of our over-lapping life cycles are in a lull phase. I’m also leaning on the cycles to try to slow them down (or speed them up) and keep things that way for awhile. It is finally time for me to look around and figure out which important pieces need to fit back into the schedule. As usual I have some shiny new pieces that I also want to make fit. On Sunday we had a proper Sunday dinner for the first time in months. This included requiring kids to help cook the meal. On Monday we had family home evening which included a lesson and an activity. The kid chore charts are gathering dust, but the homework board is working well for the younger two. I haven’t been out to do any of the gardening projects I have planned, but the lawn is getting mowed weekly. I haven’t written anything other than blog entries for months, but I did open up my file of agents and begin prepping some queries. I have all these important pieces and some of them don’t fit yet. Shuffling things to make them fit will make some other piece fall out.

Howard came home yesterday. He left when we were barely two weeks into the new school year. Then he was gone for 10 days while we all tried to settle in to a rhythm. Now he is back and things are shifting again. Many business thoughts were on hiatus while he was gone. I have to find space for them again. However having him home is a weight lifted from my shoulders. There is an Us again instead of just me. It makes everything different, even the things which are still my job. Us is stronger than Me.

I just wish I wasn’t stubbing my toes on all these pieces scattered on the floor. At least I can fit in the piece that is this blog entry. I began composing it around 2, but had to hold it in my head until I had time to sit down and write around 10. I’m pretty sure I lost some pieces in the interim. Oh well.

Richard Man was the photographer at the Hugo award ceremony. He has posted all of his photos online where you can see them. I highly recommend wandering through. I believe most of these photos were taken prior to the ceremony, but he also has a page full of ceremony photos. Finally I am able to post a picture of Howard and I dressed up for the Hugo awards.

Mr. Mann has placed a statement on his page regarding acceptable uses of his photos. You really should go take a look at his site. He has photos of the masquerade costumes as well.

Yes, Howard and I look exceedingly serious in all of the photos. We didn’t do that intentionally, nor did the photographer. We hustled into the party late, were told to get photos taken, but they were preparing to begin photographing nominees by category. We had less than a minute in front of the photographers camera, and only a glance at the digital images before we had to dash off to listen to announcements. It is also possible that we were a little stressed about the award ceremony to come. Next time we’ll remember to smile.

“Perfect. Perfect. Perfect.” I was checking handwritten names against the list provided by Gleek’s teacher. The first spelling list of the year required all the students to learn to spell each other’s names correctly. “Oh. This Alysa has a y, not an i.”
“I put a y!” Gleek said.
I turned the paper so she could see it. “On the page it has an i.”
“How did that happen?” Gleek’s whole body filled with tension and she clenched her fists. “I wrote a y! I wrote a y!”
“I’m sorry.” I said then elected to move on to the next name rather than fighting over that one. Several other mistakes were found until on the final name Gleek snatched the paper from my hand and crumpled it into a ball.
“Gleek, do you want to write all of the names three times or just the ones you missed?”
Gleek clenched the wadded paper tighter and glared at me.
“You need to practice these names.”
“I want to take the test again!” I could see in her face the fury at her mistakes the driving need she had to get this right.
“It’s okay to make mistakes, Gleek. They just show us where we need to practice. You don’t have to be perfect.”
Gleek threw the crumpled ball into the trash and collapsed her head onto her arms on the table. Her rigidity dissolved into noisy tears.
New school, new teacher, new peers, new expectations, adjusting to a new biorythmic schedule, and a case of swimmers ear; Gleek was entitled to her break down. I picked her up. I barely can these days, she is getting so big. We snuggled for a bit, put drops in her ears, and I had her tell me about her day. The spelling list could wait.

***

“Do you have any homework?” I asked.
“Nope.” Link answered cheerfully. He was holding his brand new 3DS. He’d been saving up his money all summer long, carefully calculating how long it would take. The combination of an unexpected windfall and a price drop meant it was delivered yesterday. Throughout the afternoon I would discover Link hovering near me with his 3DS in hand. He needed help connecting it to WiFi. He wanted it linked to our Netflix account. He had the money to buy a game, but needed a credit card to purchase points. Each request was reasonable, and each gave me pause. My son is venturing out into a world where he can choose his own entertainment and carry it with him. Each connection empowers him to make choices. It is always fearful for parents to contemplate the choices that their children might make. I watched Link’s bright face and could feel the cheerful innocence roll off him in waves. So I gave him rules and handed his device back.
“This is the best day ever!” Link announced as he put his headphones back into his ears.

***

“I don’t know what to write!” Patch moaned. He was faced with the task of writing three sentences describing his hopes for the new year. The problem being that he had no concrete hopes for the year to come. In general this is good, because when Patch plans he plans very specifically and then is quite upset if the world deviates from what he planned. In his new school he is still learning how things work. He has not gotten far enough along in the process to plan for much.
“You mentioned earlier that you wished for printed homework sheets instead of binder paper. You could write that.”
Patch shakes his head, all too aware that expressing such a hope for a teacher to read is tantamount to a summoning spell. He did like the look of Gleek’s homework more than his own, but quickly shifted into wishing for less homework in general.
In the end he wrote three sentences. “I hope for lots of reading time. I hope for lots of computer time. I hope to make new friends.” It was a good balance for him. These are expressions of wish, not plans. He is not obligated by them and therefore they apply no stress to him. This is good, because adapting to homework after dinner instead of play is a sufficient overturn to upset any kid.

***

Kiki brought home a boy after the first day of school. He is a familiar boy who was greeted with delight by all the rest of my children. On the second day of school, we intended for her to have a quieter afternoon. Instead we spent 45 minutes standing in line to get her Learner’s Driving Permit renewed. She now has six more months before acquiring a license will also require a written test.
“I think getting a job would be good for me.” She announced cheerfully as we drove toward the DMV. “It would be good experience and might help me get into college.”
The school counselors spoke of college today, and of ACT testing. Kiki was wrapping her head around the requirements and possibilities.
“I agree that a job would be a good experience. I think you need to be more settled into this school year before we’re ready to consider taking on anything else. Last year was pretty hard.”
“I know.” Kiki said with a toss of her hair. “But this year my classes are set up better. I get to push harder in art and I like art.”
“Well, then you need to finish off both your electronic high school class and your driver’s license before taking on anything new.”
Kiki sighed and rolled her eyes, but I could tell it was pro forma. She is as ready for a calmer year as I am for her to have one.

***

I am tired. The day was trauma free, but it was long and I’m still far from caught up on all the work things which fell behind during WorldCon. However the progress is good and tomorrow looks like it will have less child errands in it.

Breaking the 8.5 hour drive into segments helped the trip feel a lot faster. We stopped at the airport to pick up our booth helpers. Then we stopped in Elko for gas. Then we stopped in Winnemucca for dinner. The hardest leg was the last one because it was late and everyone was tired.

Going to bed right after the long road trip proved difficult. The kids had to burn some energy first. I don’t begrudge them. They were marvelous for the whole drive. Fortunately we had some handy grandparents who were delighted to let them play for a bit.

Setting up the booth went really well and quickly. We’ve got the right team. I always have a moment during booth set up when I look around and fear that we simply haven’t brought enough stuff. That is when I have to remind myself that I did careful math ahead of time and we will be fine.

I don’t like casinos. Fortunately there seem to be enough places which are not mid-casino that we can hang with friends. We’ve already begun to run into familiar faces. This is happy.

We left the hotel for dinner and found an wonderful Italian restaurant called Veccia. The food was amazing, if a little on the pricey side. As we were walking over we noticed a building under demolition. It caught my eye because of the mill wheel stuck to the side of the front building, which was still standing. On the way home we wandered back toward another section of building still stood. We looked at the wreckage trying to determine what the building might have been. We suspected a hotel. This was confirmed when there were open doors in the remaining section. We could peek inside and see that it was a themed hotel. We saw an ocean room, a castle room, a caveman room, and one that was so bare we couldn’t tell what it was. The top floor was inaccessible, but we could peer in the open doors to spot pieces of murals which suggested outer space themes. One lone door on the edge of the wreckage said “pirate room.” It was fascinating to look at this building which had obviously been created with attention and care, but which was being removed to make way for something else.

This morning when the kids headed out with my parents, I felt myself snap into greater focus. Instead of being split across mother things and business things, I only had one. I wish I hadn’t been so tired heading into the day. It was hard to sleep last night.

But now we’re set up and ready for tomorrow. We’ve had a lovely dinner and an interesting walk. Next we’re relaxing and settling in for a long night’s sleep.

My days have been full of packing, organizing, and cleaning. My evenings have been occupied by connecting with friends, putting kids to bed, and watching the first season of Heroes with my older two kids. (We finished tonight and have happily written our own ending chapters without having to watch any of the remaining seasons.) All of this has not left me much time for the slow unwinding of my thoughts which is the condition most conducive to blogging. Life gets busy, word count goes down. This comes as no surprise to any writer anywhere.

The emotional arcs of the week have been just as tightly packed as everything else. Howard and I both have gone the rounds with self-doubt, anxiety, and pre-convention jitters. Gleek and Patch have both settled back into being content with the fact that they’ll be going to a new school, except I can see the small signs that they’re still a little on edge. Kiki came to me this evening to talk about her pre-trip feelings. She is a homebody and always misses her house and her kitty. Link is the only one of us who is bopping through this week like it is normal.

And yet, it is all coming together. We’re all going to have fun. Then we will move onward again.

My kids start school in twelve days. This means it is the ideal time for me to begin moving bedtimes and wake-up calls earlier. I should be organizing the house and sorting through clothes to see what got unwearably ratty during summer play. My kids need calmness and stability so they can enter the new school year with confidence and a good night’s rest.

I leave for Reno in three and a half days. There are dozens of things yet to accumulate and accomplish in order to meet the various needs of the trip. I must prepare everything so that the booth can earn enough money to pay for it all. I must plan and pack my clothing so that I can present a professional appearance while at the show. I also want to get to wear some of the fun things I own which don’t get aired otherwise. Howard needs all of his things prepared so that he can be Howard Tayler Cartoonist and participate in the Hugo Award Ceremony. The kids need to be prepared and packed so that they can spend 5 days with their grandparents. Those five days are bracketed by long road-trips. The last hours of road trip will end within thirty hours of the first hour of school.

There must be something I can do to make this Reno trip compatible with creating calmness and stability before school starts. Honestly, I haven’t had the time to figure it out. Instead I helped my teenage daughter light a fire in our firepit so that her friends could roast marshmallows. I helped the neighboring mother, who stopped by, to assemble smores for a dozen neighborhood children. Then I let my youngest two stay up past their bedtime playing night tag while I sat and visited with my neighbors. At the end there was a bit of a meltdown followed by a warm snack and a back rub. None of the things I did this evening seem to help any of the things which are coming up, except it feels like I made exactly the right choice for how to spend my time.

Pioneers are kind of a big deal here in Utah. We have a holiday devoted to them. Since half of the pioneer story is about traveling across the plains, most of the holiday celebrations are about parades. This morning was a children’s pioneer parade and Gleek has been excited about it for a week. Her best friend’s mother made skirts for both the girls and we pulled out our pioneer bonnets. Then we transformed our wagon into a covered wagon. It was the recipe for Saturday morning happiness.

It didn’t hurt any that at the end of the parade, a firetruck provided a huge spray of water so that everyone could get wet. Life is good for my pioneer girl this morning.

Most elevator rides vanish from memory because they are non-events, this one lingered. The opening events of the convention had concluded so Mary and I were headed to our shared room on the 9th floor. With us in the small space were half a dozen other people bound for some floor beyond ours. At six the doors opened and a teenaged girl stumbled into the elevator with a gasp that could have been the intake of breath after uproarious laughter or might have been the end of a sob. We all stepped back to make room for her, as one does on an elevator. She turned and leaned into a corner, her face was red with tears and she continued to give shuddering gasps.

Usually the sight of someone crying fills me with sympathy, I reach out to help unless the situation is already under control. Yet something in this young woman’s face declared “Look how distraught I am. Pay attention to me.” The girl gasped again and snot blew out of her nose, trailing down her face. She turned to the elevator in general and said “Are any of you going to Great America?” This reference to the amusement park a few blocks away made me wonder if she’d been frightened by a ride, but surely fright would have worn off before she finished the trek to our hotel and up to the 6th floor. No one in the elevator answered right away. None of us moved and yet somehow it felt as if all of us had taken a step back from the overwrought emotion on display.

I’d barely had time to process the young woman’s behavior and my reaction to it when the elevator doors opened again. Floor 9. I hesitated for just a moment before the “it’s my floor I must get off” instinct kicked in. Another woman had leaned toward the girl, obviously intending to help. Her motion triggered the “situation is handled” circuit in my brain. Mary and I stepped off the elevator and the doors concealed the unfolding drama from our eyes.

“I’m a little glad not to be dragged into that.” I said. Mary agreed. Yet thoughts of that girl resurfaced throughout the weekend. Because I walked away I would never know if her drama was the over-reaction of a young person or if she was in true distress. Her behaviors were so out-of-context from everything else. Her entrance was so over-the-top that My brain had to circle through suspicion before I could engage sympathy on her behalf. She was well dressed and healthy. She had no physical injuries. In some ways her behavior seemed like an act, part of a scam. All of these factors bounced around in my brain, but our exit arrived before I had enough data to figure out how I should feel about her.

On the final morning of the convention I was ambushed by an unexpected pocket of sadness. I found myself discussing with Mary my homesickness for California. It was an odd homesickness, because I’ve visited my native state many times and never felt it before. Mary listened kindly as I sorted my thoughts out loud and offered tissues when the conversational paths made my eyes leak.
“I’m sorry.” I said as I wiped my eyes and blew my nose.
“Why do people apologize for showing honest emotion?” Mary mused in a quiet voice which made clear to me that she thought no less of me for my tears. Before I could answer her question, Mary found the answer for herself. “Because we don’t want to be the girl on the elevator.”

Displays of emotion are hard to ignore. We’re wired to pay attention to them, to react. The emotions of others either draw us in or repulse us. I wanted to defend myself from the emotions of the girl on the elevator. Whatever she was feeling was strong, like an undertow with the power to pull a swimmer out to sea. I am not surprised that I reacted by stepping out. Social convention says that we only reach out to strangers when we are truly desperate, that level of desperation was out of place in a hotel elevator. If the girl had stepped on the elevator calmly, if she had been trying to hide her tears, I would have felt differently about our encounter. It would have demonstrated a level of rationality which would have increase my belief that she really needed help. How odd it is of me to be more ready to help someone who has a measure of control rather than one who displays open desperation.

I wish I had better or more solid conclusions to draw from this. All I have are observations about how easy it is to decide to step out of someone else’s crisis.

In the month of April I watched a long time friend, Dave, turn himself into a writer. He’d long been capable of writing things which were entertaining or insightful, but in April he took up a challenge to write 30 short stories in 30 days. He decided they were allowed to be awful stories because he would learn from the awfulness. I think it was somewhere in the second week when there was an almost audible click in his thinking. He changed from someone who occasionally wrote things into being a writer.

About two years ago I was tucking Patch into bed and he told me very solemnly that he’d had a vision for his life. He was going to be a cartoonist and draw Halo comics. He spent quite a long time detailing the ways that he planned for this to work. His plans included lots of practicing and would start the very next day. Morning dawned and Patch sprang out of bed to implement his plan. He discovered that drawing was harder than imagining drawing. Yet he still comes back to this dream and remembers it because it allowed him to picture a creative future.

Several months ago and online acquaintance Silvia Spruck Wrigley talked about becoming a writer. She gave me permission to quote what she said:

I wrote a diary from a young age without much belief in it or any thought that I would be a writer. I remember one day, I must have been about 12, I was upset at my grandfather and started creating my diary entry in my head. “Life isn’t fair! Or at least Opa isn’t!” I was pleased, this was a good opening. I was looking forward to writing it into my journal that evening. I repeated it to myself. It was a revelation that I had composed this with malicious aforethought. I was reading a lot of Judy Blume at the time, so I’m pretty sure that was a part of it, but it was a stunning realisation: that I could plan my words, that what I wrote could be improved, that there was good and bad presentation.

All three of these stories demonstrate an emergent moment. It is the time when a person’s self image shifts and new paths for the future become possible. If you ask any writer, they can probably tell you one of their emergent moments. I remember beginning my first story at 6 years old and being proud of using quotation marks. At 13 I saw that Terry Pratchett had first been published when only 17 years old. I decided to do the same. The results for me were quite different, but belief in that dream carried me through my teen years. In 2005 I wrote a short piece of fiction which made me a writer again after a decade’s hiatus. In 2009 I had an epiphany in which I realized that my blog counted as writing. Those are just my writing emergences. I’ve had them for parenting, gardening, being grown up, and dozens of other life roles. The moment of emergence will be different for everyone, but we all have them.

Emergent moments are inherently vulnerable. They shake the foundations of who we think we are and it does not take much to drive a person back away from the newly emergent possibilities. The first emergence is particularly fragile. My friend Dave had an emergent writing moment when he was 13 and unfortunately phrased criticisms made him shy away from writing. Writers at their early emergent moments need encouragement that this new future they can suddenly see is possible. They need to be told “Keep Going.” Detailed instructions and criticisms can wait until the path is set.

One of the coolest things I get to do as a parent is to witness the emergent moments of my children. I watched Patch’s comics with delighted amusement. More recently there was an evening when Kiki was feeling overwhelmed and doubtful about her ability to succeed at being a freelance artist. She talked to me. She talked to Howard. She did some thinking and reading. Then she came to me and her whole countenance had changed. “I can do this mom. I don’t know every step, but it is what I am supposed to do. It will work.” I looked into her eyes and knew that it was true. Like most paths it may wind some places that she doesn’t expect to go, but the trip will be a good one.

Emergence, like triumph and being grown up, is not something that can be given. Each person must reach out and take it when the time is ripe. However there is much I can do to help provide fertile ground so that those I love can ripen their moments of emergence. I can build patterns of possibility and encouragement into our lives. Then I can meet those emergences with quiet love and encouragement.

I spent 8 hours of Saturday in my office prepping the PDF of Massively Parallel for Hugo Voters. It looks good. Then I sat and watched Spiderman with Kiki. She’d seen it before, but at 15 she has a much better grasp of social nuance than she did at 7. She loved it. I can’t wait to show her Spiderman 2, which she has not seen before.

In all, a very good day.