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I am in transition this week. There are a last few details to pull together for XDM, so I’m not completely done there. But I’m also starting to look ahead to May and realizing that I need to plan a book shipping event and a book launch party. I can see those things up ahead of me, but I’m not quite ready to really dive into them yet. I am also looking around my house and seeing all theneglected housework. I’m trying to find the motivation to catch up. I think it might be buried under the laundry, but I’m not sure. I’m also trying to muster the determination to make the kids do their homework again. And yet we’re already shifting into the run up to the end of school. The homework gets sporadic and there are many end-of-school activities.

Most of all I am transitioning between last week’s high intensity work into a more normal schedule. It feels…lazy. Because it feels lazy, I’m having a hard time remembering that I am not, in fact, on vacation. I still have work to do.

Tonight for a family activity we played hide-and-seek. By “we” I mean all six of us, Howard and I included. The game was Link’s pick. At first I was not all that thrilled about it, but standing in my first hiding place, trying not to breathe loud, my mind hearkened back to similar games from my childhood. It was very much the same. Standing there, listening to noises, trying to figure out if people are close, hoping they won’t see you because your hiding spot is too awesome, getting bored, being a little uncomfortable, deliberately making noise so that they’ll find you faster. That last bit was almost the best party. The rounds lasted about ten minutes because the kids had a hard time finding people. I would listen carefully for the sound of frustration and start making noises so that the kids had clues. The older the child, the fewer clues they needed. Even with me making noise, I was usually one of the last people found. It isn’t that my hiding places were amazing, it is just that I know how the kids think. I know which types of obstructions will render shoes or toys completely unfindable to them. All I had to do is hide in those places. Mom is good at hiding from kids. Mom is also very, very good at finding kids. They did not need to give me any hints. I found them all inside three minutes. Again, I know my house and I know my kids. Finding things is something I do daily. I’m good at it. I never realized before that hide-and-seek is an educational game. It teaches kids how to search methodically. Howard was also good at hiding and finding. The game was fun. Next time I think we ought to play sardines.

I’ve spent all day recovering from the two-week long working marathon. It is a little like waking up. I’m tired and not inclined to take on anything strenuous. Bit by bit I’m starting to open up parts of my brain that I had shut down so that they would not distract me from the hyper-focus I needed to get the XDM project done. Three weeks makes a habit and so many of these thought patterns are a bit rusty from four weeks of disuse. But now I am remembering the writing projects that were set aside. I am looking around my house and seeing the organization it needs. I am remembering that I like having friends and spending social time with them. These possibilities are opening up to me again. I’m remembering who I am when I’m not working 10-13 hour days.

This evening we got together with long-time friends who moved back into the area last year. It has been 8 years since we spent time with them regularly, but they are the kind of friends where we can easily pick up right where we left off. There was reminiscing, and new stories shared, and laughter had. A good time was had by all. We need to get together with them again. Once a year is far too seldom. It was a nice parallel to be reconnecting with friends on the same day when I’m reconnecting with myself.

Tomorrow there will be more work, but the work will not dominate the day. I will be back in balance and that will be nice.

I worked for 13 hours yesterday. Today I only worked 10 hours and then I had to stop. I had to stop because I ran out of things to do. You heard me right. The next task on the XDM list is paging through the book with Curtis and Tracy, which will happen at a meeting on Monday morning. For the first time in weeks I have time that I can use for leisure. I think I shall read. And sleep. And snuggle kids. I think anyone who works for 54 hours one week, and 63 hours the next week, is entitled to a lack of ambition for the following 36 hours.

By 7:25 this morning I realized that we were going to be late getting the kids off to school. Rather than upping the level of stress to try to hustle them out the door on time, I decided to embrace the lateness. We did not dawdle, but we did not scramble either. I even did two rounds of driving kids to school. Kiki and Link were each about 5 minutes late. Patch and Gleek were about 30 minutes late. I wrote notes to excuse the tardies. We can’t make a habit of it, but it was the right call for this morning.

Part of the reason for the lateness was the laundry crisis. We had reached a state where there were huge piles of clean clothes, but no one could find anything because all the baskets had overflowed into one another. We also had piles of dirty clothes and completely empty drawers and closets. Usually the kids do not pay much attention to laundry, but without me doing it, they have started to notice. Just yesterday Gleek lamented that she had no clean clothes because no one was doing laundry. Apparently they’ll eventually notice when the clean clothes stop magically appearing for them. I spent some time this morning segregating the laundry into the correct baskets. This afternoon I will require the kids to put their clothes away.

Also contributing to the lateness this morning was the urgent need for me to write notes to teachers about class placements for next year. The end of April is when those placement meetings are held. I long ago learned that the best way to get my kids placed where I think they need to be is to speak with the teacher just prior to the class placement meetings. I missed it last year. I didn’t want to miss it again. The notes have been written and delivered. It is good to be putting parenting stuff ahead of business stuff for one morning. But now I need to get to work.

Note: You know you’ve been doing too much editing when you say something and your brain supplies an image of where the commas should go into the sentence you just spoke.

Today was a long slog. I spent six hours entering edits, pictures, and layout for a single chapter. Granted, it is the longest chapter in the entire book, but still. Six. Hours. By the end of it I was eyeing the remaining 10 chapters with a sense of panic. If I spent that long on all of them, we would run out of time before I ran out of editing. Just as I untangled my head from the chapter of doom, email arrived with all our tables and charts. In color. The book is black and white. I broke the tables while converting them to grayscale, but fortunately Howard and the table designer rescued me from my panic and reassured me that all will be well. Then I had to scramble to put together a file for a “wetproof” which is a test print of images and text using the actual ink and paper. Got that done too. Which was a great relief, since that was supposed to be the highest priority task for today.

Part of the reason that the chapter of doom took so long is because there were so many distractions. I had a steady stream of email all morning long. Some from Tracy. Some from friends. Several from our printer. Several from merchandise partners. The shiniest emails were the ones containing mock-ups of the XDM cover design. We have finally arrived at a design that is so pretty I want to hug it. The last bits of shiny are being applied and then we will get to show it off to the world.

Speaking of shiny, one of the big distractions of the morning was the doorbell. It was a Fed Ex delivery from China. We have our advance copies of The Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance. The rest of the copies are on a boat and will arrive in a month. It is beautiful. I held it and flipped through it. Then I was struck with the realization that it is as much my book as Howard’s. He did all the writing and drawing, but I’m the one who made it be a book. I organized it all. I arranged for the printing. Holding the book was a very triumphal moment. It would have been nice if Howard and I could have spent the day basking in the glory of accomplishment. Instead we tiredly put the shiny books down and headed back to work. It will be several days before we can do the traditional auctioning of an advance copy.

Bit by bit we are getting closer to finished. Every day I get to color in some more boxes on my XDM tracking chart. Tomorrow will be a satisfying day. I’m set up to knock down a bunch of boxes quickly.

This is me sitting and blogging on my laptop while the kids are falling asleep. Once they are asleep, I may use the hour between now and bedtime to get some more work done on XDM. If I do, then today will be a 10 hour work day for me. Yesterday was a nine hour work day. I want to push hard and just get it all done, but I wear out and those other waking hours get spent on things like eating, and dishes, and paying attention to the children. Sometimes I’m not paying attention to the children directly, but rather thinking ahead and planning for future needs of the children. Today the thinking ahead amounted to me providing dinner before the children declared themselves starving.

Today was a long day, a tiring day, but it was all just getting work done. This is much better than the fear-driven scramble of last week. Now it just remains to see if I will run out of work before I run out of time.

For the last year or more I have been calling myself a full-time working mother. That is inaccurate. I did the math yesterday. I average 20-30 hours per week of business tasks. Some weeks have 40+ business hours, but other weeks only have 10 or so. 30 hour of work per week counts as part-time, not full time. I have a newfound respect and awe for families where both parents work full time. Our house has been crazy this past week because no one is paying attention to the little things that make the family run smoothly. We keep running out of clean dishes and clean clothes. We keep tripping over clutter. We keep walking past that dried-up dollop of mint-n-chip ice cream on the kitchen counter. (How long has it been since we had mint-n-chip ice cream? One week? Two weeks? Has no one washed the counter thoroughly in that long? eeep.)

I can work for 30 hours per week without hideously impacting our family schedule. It means I do business while the kids are out of the house and focus on household when they’re home. That works well. The minute I go over that for any extended period of time, things start to get messy. This is good to know. We can not have a long term pattern that requires me to work more than 30 hours per week. Short-term high-working-hour patterns, like for book shipping, or this XDM scramble, or a convention are acceptable so long as they are sufficiently spaced out by periods of normal.

I’ve worked for 8 hours so far today. I may be done for the day, or I may put in some more time after the kids are abed. In some ways having them back in school has been easier. I had 6 quiet hours today. Other things have been harder. I had a hard time keeping my cool this morning while helping the kids get ready for school. I wanted to rush everybody off to school so that I could get to work. Only that doesn’t work well. In fact at one point Link looked at me and said “I just want you to be happy mom.” Gleek and Patch both chimed in with agreement. They can tell I am stressed and they want their calmer mom back. I hugged them and apologized. Just one more week and the craziness should be largely over. I could see the end of XDM layout for the first time today. Three chapters have been declared “done” which means that they’re ready for proofreading. I made a chart so that I can track what is left to do on each chapter. It may be silly, but having boxes to fill when each task is finished, make the job seem possible. It definitely makes it easier for me to see what I should work on next. I think I’ve broken out of the overwhelmed middle of the project and now I’m on the home stretch.

Hours worked today = 7
Hours worked this week = 54

Many times Howard has reached the end of a stressful/busy day and has been exhausted and yet apologizing that he couldn’t work more/harder/faster. Then I soothe him and tell him it will all be okay, because I want him to slow down instead of run himself into the ground. I don’t know that I’ve ever been on the inside of that feeling before this week. I worked a 54 hour week and I want to cry because there is so much more to do. If I could just have worked harder/smarter/faster then I would be closer to done right now. I’ve been overwhelmed by the hugeness of parenting frequently, but this is different. It feels different. I honestly do not know how people work 40 hour weeks one after the other for months on end. Let alone 50-60 hour weeks. People do it, but continuing at this pace would grind me into a powder.

Parenting. This is the first time in my life when I have experienced my parenting tasks as a break from work. Have been my primary job for my whole adult life. They will be again just as soon as I can get this huge project kicked into shape. In the meantime, the kids are mostly foraging and fending for themselves. I try to make sure that there are plenty of cheerios and hot dogs on hand for them to eat. Then I emerge from my office all brain frazzled and flop on the couch to watch whatever movie or game they are occupied with. It is so good to just snuggle with them. To hold them close and remember that book layout is not the only thing in the world. The kids are feeling the effects of the lack of attention. Today Kiki and Link had a big blow-up. Patch has been easily upset. Gleek is running fast and being harder to steer. I sense these things vaguely, but I can’t focus on them right now, except in spurts. A few minutes here or there devoted to a particular child as our paths cross. The pattern would be extremely destructive if it were to last longer than the next week or two. But it will not. And things will be better when the kids are back in school next week, providing more structure to our days. And I have all day tomorrow where work is not allowed. I need a sabbath break more than I think I’ve ever needed it before.

The kids got their park trip. Finally. I promised it to them Monday evening, but then the weather went cold and snowy. I didn’t get to take them. Janci took them while I worked. I’m glad they got to go. I wish I could have gone.

Work hours for today so far= 10
Work hours for the week so far = 47
Work hours expected for tomorrow = 4-8

Howard and I keep throwing each other off. He’ll call me to request a layout shift. I scramble to get it done. I call him back to tell him that the shift requires other shifts. Those other shifts change the shapes and locations of the pictures he needs to draw. This throws him off his game because he is back to figuring out what to draw instead of pounding through pictures. The fact that he is stressed about the quantity of remaining pictures, sends me back to the layout to see if I can re-arrange and consolidate, or eliminate, some of the picture spaces. I scramble. I can. I do. Then I call him to tell him what I did, which unsettles him yet again because we have to make sure that I have not eliminated spaces he already had ideas for. I didn’t. During this whole process we run into to communication trouble because Howard’s printout no longer matches what I have in InDesign.
“the picture on page 29”
“Page 29 has no picture.”
“Yes it does. The orc picture.”
“Oh. That’s page 27 now, but I moved the orc to page 57. He fits better there.”
“So am I drawing a picture for page 29, I mean 27?”

I finally had to create a new printout and drive it down to Dragon’s Keep just so he and I could be talking about the same layout. Things will change yet again after the meeting tomorrow morning with Tracy and Curtis. Hopefully those changes will be tweaks rather than major rearrangements, but there will be changes. There are always changes. Every time I look at the document I end up jotting down a page full of notes about things I need to fix. Every time I look at a page, I find something wrong. And that does not even count the editorial comments that I have to go through and enter. However the editor is working on a copy of the document that is at least 6-7 iterations old. Many of the layout changes are a result of her early comments, but most of the layout she is looking at is out of date. Not all of it though. And the text has not changed. And she is catching all sorts of things that need to be fixed in the text. Fortunately most of the textual things to be fixed are small. This is good. We don’t have time for major fixes.

Have I mentioned that this process is crazy? …and yet I think we’re going to manage it.

While I was at Dragon’s Keep handing over pages to Howard, I was able to show the pages to my friend Janci who was also there. She took a look at it and said “Wow, this is looking really good.”
I really needed to hear that, because all I can see anymore are the things that are broken. Only they are not nearly so broken as they used to be. And I had to search to find broken things to show her. This thing keeps transforming and each iteration is closer to being done.