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It has been at least a year since I first became aware of Lolcats. When I first encountered the pictures of cats with misspelled captions I didn’t think they were at all funny. But over repeat exposures I learned the dialect of the humor and now I appreciate them. By “dialect of the humor” I don’t just mean that I gained the ability to decipher the misspellings, but I also learned how the misspellings and the pictures and general knowledge of cats work together to make an individual Lolcat funny (or not funny. Many of them are still meh.) One particular lolcat meme has been very useful to me as a means of expressing my own experiences. It is the “I haz a” meme. The final word may be sad, or happy, or warm. The usual way to express that idea would be to say “I am sad, happy, warm.” Except the phrase “I am sad” implies that at this point in time sadness is my defining characteristic, which may not be true. If I am not completely sad, I have to say “I am a little bit sad” or “part of me is sad.” These statements are longer to say than “I haz a sad.” Taking out the grammar and spelling errors, “I have a sad” implies that I own this small sadness which is separate from myself, but which affects me. This is a very useful way for me to picture emotions which are a piece of my current experience, but which do not dominate it.

All of that is just an introduction so that I can say “I have a scared.” Yesterday we received 5000 books. So far only about 500 of them are sold. I’m getting ready to ship 1000 of them to a major convention. The sales at that convention will be the difference between an extremely tight budget with a stressed scramble to create the next book, or a more relaxed budget and steady work on the next book. I have been scrambling for months just to keep up with my life. I really want option two, the one with relaxing in it. I want like I want air. But it is all out of my hands. I can spend the time/effort/money to get the books to the convention, what happens after that I can not control. All the logic and calculations say that we will be fine, but I have to acknowledge the fear, stare it in the face, own it, then set it in the back of my brain where it will not interfere with the things I must do.

Our shipment of XDM X-Treme Dungeon Mastery books arrives today. I had to go rent a second storage unit to house them because the first unit is already full of inventory. I need to do some research on the cost of warehouse space. I’m pretty sure that the storage units are still cheaper per month, but I need to know where the tipping point is.

We’re getting another shipment of books next week. This will be historic since it is our first 2nd printing. We’ve almost sold out of Under New Management which is the first book we ever printed. The first printing was 5000 copies

No word on distribution deals. More waiting there.

My short story “Stories that Bind” is now available in print. A Time To… Volume 3: The Best of The Lorelei Signal 2008 is now on sale.

I now have three stories available at Anthology Builder, which makes me very happy. In the near future I’ll be putting together a custom anthology full of cool stories.

I’ve found fancy clothes to wear on Hugo Night at Worldcon. Now I just need jewelry to match and I need to drag Howard out to rent a tuxedo for the event. We’re both in a strange mental place where neither of us really believes he’ll win, but a tiny voice whispers “what if.” It doesn’t really matter, just getting nominated is amazing and we intend to dress up to celebrate.

I have been spending far more time as a publisher than as a writer lately. Hopefully life will slow down after the big August conventions.

Gleek is enjoying her trip away from home, but we’ll all be glad to have her back.

Summer is half gone and still chaotic. I’m already looking forward to the return of the school schedule, although I’ll miss staying up late and sleeping in.

The phone call came at 10:30 PM. It was a crying Gleek who is off for her first week-long solo visit with cousins. “Mom, I miss you.”
“I miss you too Gleek.”
“Everything is different here.”
“Families are all different aren’t they?”
“Yeah. No one goes outside. I look out the window and it is all bright and shiny and I want to go out, but no one will go with me!”
“Yes that family is more of an inside family. Do you play fun games inside?”
“Big girl plays great games, but the little girl games are boring. And they only let me have one yogurt a day! I miss you! I want to be at home, but I also want to finish my adventure.”
“Isn’t it funny how we can feel two opposite things at the same time? I feel that way a lot when I’m off at a convention.”
“Yeah. I want both things. Does Bestfriend miss me?”
“Yes she does. She came up to me at church and told me that she’d painted a picture of the two of you together.”
“She is like the perfect friend. She plays outside with me.”
“You’ll have fun when you’re back together. When do you travel to the next house?”
“Tuesday.”
“And then you’ll come home on Thursday.”
“On the 10th.”
“Thursday is the 9th.”
“The 10th will be one week, you said I would go for a week.”
“You’d rather come home on the 10th so you have a whole week?”
“Yeah. I want all of my adventure. Bye.”
“Bye honey. I miss you. You can call me again if you need to.”
” Okay. I miss you too. Bye.”

Sometimes they don’t really need me to fix anything, they just need me to listen.

My brain has not been a quiet place of late. I suppose that makes sense because my life has been anything but routine for months. I keep running from one major event to the next with little time to pause and reflect. None of this is news. I’ve been complaining about it for months. But over the last week I’ve finally figured out how much work July will contain and it is less than I’d feared. I’m very glad to have a less stressed month, but I am also very aware that less schedule stress means less money coming in. This leads to a potential financial stress in a couple of months, but I am not going to fret about that now. Pre-orders are still open and we’ve yet to see how books will sell at GenCon.

My house feels empty. My parents were here for almost a week. Before they came I was worried about having guests in the house while we had the stressful week of opening pre-orders. I was worried that my inability to pay attention to my guests would be a source of stress. The opposite turned out to be true. My parents just slid into the household without a ripple. They left me alone when I needed to work and picked up all the household slack that Howard and I were leaving around. But now my parents are gone and they took Gleek with them. She gets to accompany them on a trip through Idaho to visit cousins. This long-promised solo trip is something that Gleek has really been anticipating. I’m glad she gets to go, but the house feels empty. It always feels empty when one of us is missing.

Two days ago I had my first experience with someone knocking on the door looking for work. It was a little scary. I was very aware of the possibility that this was a scam attempt or a fishing expedition to scope out our house for theft. On the other hand I was very aware that this man, his wife, and baby might really be so hard pressed for money that knocking doors was the best option. They did not want charity. They wanted work. I did not let them into the house, but I did give them some work in the garden. He worked hard and when he was done the rest of the yard lived up to the flowers my mother planted. I think it has been years since the exterior of my house was so nicely groomed. I paid him for the work and he left me his name and number so I can call him if I have more work. It is possible that the tale of woe was fabricated, but I received fair work for the money I gave, so I don’t much care. It was a chance for everyone to come out ahead and I think we all did.

Over the last few weeks I have been using my down time to watch The Office on Netflix. The show is sometimes painful to watch because some of the characters are extremely hurtful to other characters. Most of the hurt is unintentional, but that does not make it less painful. For me the most fascinating thing to watch has been the evolution of the series itself. It starts out as a faux documentary about an office full of caricatures who interact with each other in amusing ways. But then there will be these small brilliant moments when a new facet of the caricature is revealed and suddenly instead of a caricature, there is a person I actually care about. The annoying people remain annoying, but somehow it becomes affectionate annoyance. I understand how these people still work together despite all the pain. All that said, I’m not sure whether or not I’ll be watching season five when it comes out. I’ve loved watching these characters grow and the next logical step is for some of them to move on and leave the office. Unfortunately due to the nature of serial entertainment, those characters can’t be allowed to leave. They must stay, trapped. In order to retain character tension, the relationships must be broken up and reformed. If no one is allowed to move on, then the illusion of life which I’ve loved is destroyed. Instead of The Office it becomes more like Sartre’s No Exit. I’m not sure if I want to watch that.

Yesterday I had no work to do. The internet had gone into hibernation for the holiday weekend and I’d already answered all the email. Not only that, but my house and garden were both in beautiful shape due to the intervention of others. I ended up sitting down and playing Fable 2. I think that is the first time I’ve really played a video game in years. It was fun. But I also got up from the game with an awareness of how expensive video games can be for me. They don’t want to just stay in the leisure time. Instead I want to start stealing time which should be spent on other things instead. Also there are already five people in this house negotiating for turns with the game. Adding a sixth doesn’t seem very helpful. It is possible that my character will languish in neglect. But perhaps I’ll find the odd hour here and there when I can putter in a video game universe.

Our Fourth of July celebrations were extremely low-key. Howard and Kiki spent most of the day either groggy or sleeping after their all-night game session. Link, Patch, and I just hung out at home. At dusk we joined some neighbors for fireworks. Our contribution was a box of party poppers left over from New Years. I did not have to plan or organize anything which made it a nearly perfect holiday for me. It was good to have a real break.

The calendar for July is largely empty. I have been diligently keeping it that way because I knew that there would be XDM shipping in it. Now that the first day of orders are in, I can see that it will be a small scale shipping rather than a large one. This frees up the rest of the month. Howard is going to have the space he needs to build up buffer in advance of the August conventions. This is good. I will have time to get back to some of the household tasks that have been ignored. I may even have time to tend the flowerbeds that my mother planted for me. I may finally have time to clean up and have a space before diving into the next big thing.

I had written off the yard for this year. Every time I walked up the front steps I could see the towering weeds drowning out the flowers. Whenever I thought about it, I wanted to cry because I love flowers. It is not that I couldn’t find time to weed. It is that once I start weeding, I’ve opened the door to gardening thoughts. Once I begin weeding, I want to plant and tend and construct in the yard. Small scraps of time spent weeding would only cause me to grieve for all the things I do not have time to do. So I schooled myself to ignore the weeds. Mostly. Except sometimes when I would see them and feel bad that my house looks so unkempt, and I would worry what the neighbors must think about looking at the mess. The fact that I have wonderful neighbors who really don’t mind does not stop me from minding on their behalf.

Yesterday I emerged from hours of accounting to discover that my mother, who is visiting, had wandered outside and began weeding. She had cleared a large swath of the front flower bed. There were my perennials, visible again. She cut a huge swath through all the weeds, clearing two long beds and three tree circles. She single-handedly filled up our huge garbage bin.

This by itself was a gift beyond measure.
But then she bought flowers.
She bought flowers to plant in the clear spaces she created. For the first time in months my yard has beauty.
Just thinking of it makes me want to cry.
I have flowers.

I signed Patch up for level three swim lessons. Unfortunately his skill level is only at level two. The disparity is because I had to register for lessons six weeks ago and I made a best guess that turned out to be wrong. Today Patch did not get in the water for swim lessons. This is because yesterday his teacher dunked him and now Patch is scared that the teacher will do it again. I’ve spoken with the staff and they’re going to see if they can shuffle him into a level two class, but the level two is already very full. We’ll see what tomorrow’s lesson will bring.

At dinner Gleek sobbed because I had sent back two movies to netflix before she’d watched them. I sent them back because the movies had sat around for over a week and every time I suggested watching them the kids begged for a third movie instead. So I sent them back and got the third movie. But Gleek had watched the third movie and sobbed with offended tears that I had sent those other ones back without telling her. The upset continued until I required her to either eat dinner or go lay down in bed. Amazing thing, once the food was gone, the movies did not matter anymore.

Kiki called me from Space Camp. She was tired and over stimulated. All she wanted was to curl up in her own bed away from everybody. I know how she feels. I get the same way at conventions. I reach a point where it all feels horrible and I wonder why I bothered to go, but then I get through it and things are okay again. So I talked her through how to survive the next thing. I told her she could call me again if she needs to. Then I’ll talk her through that too. If I go retrieve her, then Space Camp will forever remain a failure for her. She can do it.
(Edited to add: Kiki called back 90 minutes later. She was calm and rational. She had a solid plan where she came home to sleep and will go back to finish camp first thing tomorrow morning. I am so impressed with her ability to calm down and solve her problems. More importantly she feels mature and able rather than feeling like a failure.)

To my knowledge, Link has not melted down today. If he has, it was at camp and I’ll only hear about it later. Howard and I are likely to have melty days tomorrow. The first day of pre-orders is always full of stress and high emotion.

I guess we all have our turn.

I have returned from camping. The laundry piles of epic proportions (and also epic stench) have been run through the machines. I worked my way through all the emails. I mailed all the packages. I organized the store so it is almost ready for Wednesday. I took kids to swim lessons. I discovered while at swim lessons that Gleek has a stomach flu. I tended Gleek, who lay limply on the couch for a significant portion of the afternoon before she began to bounce again. I bought new shorts for the kids whose shorts had all mysteriously vanished. I dropped two kids at space camp. I bought dinner. There are things yet to do, but I am no longer feeling so stressed I want to cry. Looks like I might be able to manage this week after all.

Tomorrow there will be accounting and more store organization. There will undoubtedly be more email. I might even catch up on blogs, LJ, and Facebook. Wednesday we begin to find out whether XDM and the Under New Management sketched editions will sell enough to keep us going through the next Schlock book release. I still have thoughts to unpack about huge extended family reunions and camping trips, but I think I’ve done enough for one day.

I’m going to be unplugged until Sunday afternoon. I’ll probably have things to muse upon when I get back, but for today I am too busy packing.

The book shipping for Scrapyard was just over two weeks ago and I am just now starting to feel settled again. The spate of order corrections has subsided and I’ve reorganized my shipping area so that I’m set up for daily order handling instead of massive shipping. I’m not sure whether it is good news or bad news, but most of the order corrections can be directly traced to my errors. I was so frazzled during the month of April that many things got misplaced. I’m going to call it good news because I can arrange to do things differently this next time. For one thing, I won’t be scrambling to put out a book while I am simultaneously managing customer support for a pre-order. My breathing room will last for about a week. Next Wednesday we open pre-orders on both XDM X-treme Dungeon Mastery and on sketched editions of the Under New Management reprint.

In related news, my attempt to upgrade from Adobe CS2 to Adobe CS4 are still incomplete. I successfully uninstalled CS2, but CS4 informed me that my computer is too old and stupid to run it. In order to appease the program we need to give it more RAM and install the latest service pack for XP. The service pack has been installed without incident, but the RAM is going to take a week to arrive. This leaves me unable to do an graphic design work for a week. This is okay since I’m going to spend some of the time away from my computer camping. But even though it is unlikely I would have used those programs anyway, the fact that I can’t use them makes a piece of my brain nervous. Why is it that any change to the way a computer runs always necessitates buying more new things to support the new thing you actually wanted?

At least arranging shipment of books to Gencon was simpler than I expected. I’ve now arranged for two pallets to be picked up from my house and shipped to the Indianapolis warehouse. I’ve also arranged for transport of those pallets to the show floor. I’ve even filled out bills of lading for sending whatever remains back to us. All of this is not cheap, but we still hope the show will break a profit for us. Getting books to Worldcon in Canada is proving to be more difficult. Howard and I will not be running a booth in the dealer’s room. We’ve attempted to contact dealers and set up a consignment deal, but so far no one has even responded. So I guess we’re just going to have to tell fans to buy books in advance if they want Howard to sign them. The focus for Worldcon will be on panels and visiting rather than on selling, which will actually be a nice vacation for us. Last year I spent the entire convention in the dealer’s room. I had fun, but this year I want to do some of the other stuff.