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XDM in the morning and CSI NY later

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This was a good layout day. I figured out how to make a table of contents and how to put automatically update page numbers on all the pages. I also helped refine even further an already fun visual joke for the book. We have one week until the drafting of the text is done and the editing of the text must begin. However I may have found a way to make the editing of the text not drive me insane. Hopefully my idea will fit into the budget.

In only mildly related news, I’ve been watching episodes of CSI NY when my brain just needs to rest. I liked the first couple of seasons a lot, but season three was weak. In season four I really started enjoying it again. It took me awhile to figure out why. But when the hero used a hand scanner to take images of a body and the coroner took those images into his holodeck where he then did a virtual autopsy on the floating 3D image of the body, that was when I figured it out. Somehow CSI NY went from being a law enforcement drama, to being a science fiction law enforcement drama. Everyone in the show is carrying around flashy technology which only exists in hideously expensive forms or which is only theoretically possible. Nothing is done by hand, it is all from some high tech source. It is like they pushed New York into the future by 20 years. So now the show is like watching Star Trek the original series. They even have a Captain Kirk. And yet somehow the puzzles still work and the technology is not deus ex machina. So yay for unrealistic entertainment.

XDM in the morning and CSI NY later Read More »

Progress

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The Good:
My shrinkwrap system arrived. I now have the capability to shrinkwrap all those boxed sets we’re going to be assembling. The system is not terribly efficient, but the price tag and storage requirements are much nicer than the $2500 L-bar system with conveyor belt heat tunnel. Besides I suspect that the kids will have fun wielding the heat gun (think fancy hair dryer.)

I have also place orders for magnets and posters. It feels good to be collecting the things I need for shipping in June. There are boxes and packing materials to order, but first I have to do the math to figure out how much I’ll need.

The Bad:
I have figured out that my insanely busy week working on XDM layout, will coincide exactly with my kids’ spring break. I need to put some thought into how to manage all the kids at home while I am working frantically. Hopefully I’ll find some solutions that don’t involve endless videos and treats. Advance planning will be necessary.

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Breaking the feedback loop

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One of the hazards of my existence are the Howard/Sandra emotional stress feedback loops. It goes like this. Howard is stressed because of the amount of work he needs to do. Sandra is stressed because of the amount of work she needs to do. Sandra is also stressed because she is worried about how stressed Howard is. Howard gets even more stressed because his wife is overstressed and not handling things well. The additional stress radiating from Howard, piles on top of the stress from Sandra, and the circle continues until we manage to get enough work done to unravel the mess. Or until someone collapses into a ball and cries. (By someone, I mean me.)

BUT, occasionally out of the feedback loop mess, a miracle occurs. Sometimes seeing the stress of the other person causes us to kick out of our own stress. This happened last night. Howard was so stressed that at 8 pm he decided he needed to escape the house. He also decided that he needed to spend time being a Daddy in a place where there were no business distractions. So instead of putting the kids to bed at a reasonable hour, Howard packed up the three oldest and took them to the movies. It was the right choice. Kiki, Link, and Gleek had all been sad that Patch got to see the movie last Friday. They danced with delight at getting to sluff bedtime.

Once Howard left the house, everything was quiet. I looked around at the cluttered mess and realized that if it was still cluttered when Howard came home, he would walk back in the door and just pick up his load of stress. The house needed to be different when he got back. So I set to work. I picked up, vaccumed, dish washed, swept, and laundered for a good ninety minutes. The house was transformed into a place of order. (So long as you don’t examine the closets too closely. Shh!) When I began the task, it was just another thing on my list to get done. But as I got working, I found that my own mood lifted. I felt great and so I did more cleaning than I had originally intended to do. When it was all done, and the house was still quiet, I sat down. I felt so happy and peaceful. It was as if I had cleaned up all the stress and put it away with the clutter.

It worked too. Howard came home and the surprise of clean house prevented him from picking back up all of the stress. Today has been so much better than the last few days. Howard and I have both been very busy, but it has been the happy-invigorated busy rather than the I-dare-not-stop-or-it-all-will-fall-apart busy. Also, the more I work on the XDM project, the more I love it. This is going to be a fun book. Today is a good day.

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Monsters in my head

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I spent most of the last five days very afraid. I have been working hard at not admitting it; at telling myself to just stop fretting and get back to work. But the fears lurk so that no matter which way I turn it feels like one is ready to claw out of the shadows behind me.

There is a reason that the makers of monster horror flicks try not to give the audience a clear view of the monster. The more time we have to examine the monster, the more we can see the seams in the rubber suit, or the aliasing around the edges of the cgi. The more the audience studies the monster, the less realistic it seems. The monster lurking and springing from the dark edges of the screen is terrifying because the protagonist does no know from whence the next attack will come, nor what shape the attack will take. The monster in the middle of the room can be observed, predicted, out maneuvered, or de-masked. Oh look it wasn’t a monster at all, it was just Mr. Smith in a monster suit. Scooby Doo had it right.

So this morning I took a high powered spotlight and shined it into the corners of my brain. I’m kicked those lurking fears right out into the middle so I could really get a good look at them. I sat down and listed in detail every stray fear that crossed my brain. Every fear about the kids. Every fear about XDM. Every fear about reprinting Under New Management. Every fear about the upcoming book shipping. Every fear about failure. I did not evaluate any of it. I just wrote it all down. Eventually I ran out of things to write down. It took awhile, because the list was long, but I did run out.

The next step was looking at each fear individually. Some of them were so obviously ridiculous that just looking at them banished them. Being afraid I won’t get the laundry done today is simply not worth the emotional energy. (Ha! I’ve demasked you laundry, you can terrorize the Tayler house no more!) Others were not completely ridiculous. These fell into two categories. Things over which I have control and things over which I do not. For the things over which I had control, I then thought through what each thing needed from me, what the worst cases for failure were, and how I would respond to the worst case. These monsters do have teeth, but if I have a plan I’m much less afraid that I’ll get bit. Then there are the things over which I do not have control. For those things, I have to choose as best I can and exercise faith.

The process did not banish all my fears, but they feel much more manageable. Even better, I’ve identified the fact that all sorts of factors in my life have been in flux over the past week. Tasks have been flying at me far faster than I could get them done. This was panic inducing. It made me doubt my ability to accomplish all of the tasks that I have agreed to undertake. But the furious pace will not continue forever. In fact the closing of Sketched Edition ordering has slowed things tremendously. And once I am able to stay ahead of my to do list, I will not be so afraid that I can’t handle the rest of work ahead of me. The settling will also give my inner financial squirrel time to inventory our storage and come to grips with the fact that we no longer need to be in scrambling mode. I keep trying to tell the squirrel that we have money now, but with all the other noise in my head, she doesn’t quite believe me yet.

So there are my monsters in bright light and I am less afraid.

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Buried, but digging out

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It is now approximately 1 pm. I have dug myself out from under the mountain of critically urgent tasks. This means I can now start on the mountain of urgent tasks. Only the kids get out of school early on Mondays and I no longer have focused business time. Instead I have fractured mother duties combined with attempts to reduce the mountain. I’m hoping to dig out by late tomorrow.

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Eye of the storm

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Today is Sunday. On Sunday I can hide from all the business tasks. This day is for church, and family, and solace of spirit. Last week was a storm of urgent business tasks. More urgent business tasks lurk and wait for me on Monday morning. Part of me wants to rush past Sunday so that I can get started. I want to tackle those tasks and get them done so that they will cease to plague me. Another part of me wants to huddle right here in the middle of Sunday. In this space I am excused from many of my every day tasks. I don’t want to leave the calm in the eye of the storm. Especially since all predictions say that this storm of busy is going to last until the end of April. Then it will change shape and last until June.

We reached sigh of relief on the pre-orders. Except then we realized that the production of the XDM project will delay the release of the next Schlock book. The profitability of XDM is a big question mark. We all think it is marvelous and that it will sell well, but there are no guarantees that a couple of thousand people will agree with us. This means that to truly breathe easy, we need to squirrel away 8-10 months of income rather than just 6. With the re-adjusted math, we’re not to sigh of relief yet. But we are definitely out of the bind panic zone, which is good. And pre-orders still have a couple months left to run.

I have too many things in my head and not enough time to sort through them.

Eye of the storm Read More »

It goes like this…

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A customer emails me because they are having trouble with their Schlock order. Within minutes I email back solving the problem (or at least addressing it, not all problems are easy.) Then customer responds, pleased with how quickly I answered. My answering email is the electronic equivalent of the lazy hand-wave which implies that it was no trouble, I just happened to be at my computer. Because it isn’t like I am sitting at my computer obsessively monitoring the opening hours of the pre-order. I am certainly not refreshing reports and doing math to see if we’ve got enough to pay bills for the next six months. I’m also not checking the blog comments, and the forums, and email, afraid that there will be some huge glitch that will prevent thousands of people from being able to purchase our merchandise. I am calm. Of course I am calm. I’ve done this pre-order thing before. It doesn’t make me so jittery that I can only sit still if I’ve found something to distract me. Something like checking those reports another time. I am not rapid-fire answering email as a release for nervous energy.
Of course not.
Well, maybe a little.
Okay, that is totally what I am doing.

The good news is that we are halfway to sigh of relief and a third of the way to hallelujah. Now I need to get away from my computer and distract myself some more.

It goes like this… Read More »

Creating a process

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This morning I sat down at my computer to begin layout on the XDM project. It took me 30 minutes of mucking around to figure out that I did not know where to start. All of my options looked equally laborious and some of them looked flat out broken. 30 minutes more sorted things out and the process began to fall into place. Now I have a list of steps that I can follow. I have created the process by which everything else will get done. Now that the process is in place, everything afterward is just following through.

One of the things that was baffling me this morning is that the process that Howard and I have established for the Schlock books, does not apply well to the XDM project. Partly it doesn’t apply because XDM has so much more text. Partly it doesn’t apply because we have two additional parties to include. But the biggest reason is that we need to get everything done so fast. The short time frame does not allow the standard process for book creation.

If we were not pressed for time, I would use the following steps. First have the author write the entire book. Next an editor looks it over and makes recommendations. The author revises and resubmits. At this point the editor hands off the book for a rough layout and sends it out for continuity/copy editing. The layout person throws text onto pages and then tells the artist where pictures will be needed. The artist draws the pictures. While the artist is drawing, the rough layout is approved and final text is handed over for layout. Then the layout person puts everything together. The completed package gets further editing passes to catch any errors. Then the whole thing goes to press.

This will not work in the time we have. Tracy and Curtis are still writing sections the book. Howard needs at least 4 weeks to draw all the pictures. I need several weeks to do layout work. If we wait for Tracy to finish writing, there won’t be enough time for the drawing, let alone the layout. So, we’re going to have to work in sections. Each section of the book will go through the process individually. So on any given day Tracy will write Section 5, Curtis will write Section 8, Section 2 will get an editing pass, Howard will be drawing for Section 3, and I’ll be tweaking layout for Section 6.

It will all be chaotic madness that will gradually coalesce into a completed book. The last week of the schedule is supposed to be the time when we all comb over the compiled book looking for errors and things to tweak. There are going to be so many errors. It is impossible to have a process this crazy and not have errors. Many of the errors will remain unfound until after the book is printed. Hopefully this will make the first edition special and collectible. Hopefully there will be many editions after this one in which all those errors can be eliminated.

Time to get back to work.

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Mired

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Yesterday was a super effective day. Super effective days are always followed by days where I feel like I’m wading through a mire. Today has been a mire day. I still got stuff done, but it was a mighty effort to motivate myself to do anything at all. This evening needs to contain down time so that tomorrow I can be effective again.

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Why Write?

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The other day I picked up a book of essays and found a paragraph that made me cry because it so perfectly explains how I feel about blogging. The book is Leaping: revelations and epiphanies by Brian Doyle. In the section I read Doyle is trying to answer the question “Why write?”

Why then? Why do I write?
Because I see little stories everywhere and I like to catch them and show them to other people much as a child catches a moth and exhibits it with glee to friends and passersby.

Yes. That is exactly why I blog. I read that quote and my heart unfolded because Doyle’s words are exactly right. It fills me with joy to see the exact words that describe my experience. It also makes me a little sad, because I did not say them. Now that I’ve found the perfect words, to use other words feels paltry. This means that any time I answer the question “why blog” I will have to use Doyle’s words instead of my own. I wish I could have found my own perfect words.

I am aware that I probably will write my own perfect words in the future, because experiences evolve. Doyle’s words are perfect at this moment, but in a year, or two, or ten, my experience of blogging will have changed shape. It will need different words and Doyle’s words will not change. Then I will need to find new words to describe this different experience. I will make my own words again. Or perhaps at that distant juncture I will trip across another set of perfect words to describe my experience of writing. Or perhaps the perfect words will describe some other aspect of my existence. With all of these writers out there trying to explain everything, it is inevitable that someone has already wrapped words around my experiences. If I search hard enough I could find it. When I contemplate this, I begin to wonder why I bother writing at all. It has all been said before, hasn’t it? Even this question is not original to me. Doyle asked it and answered it with a quotation from the writer James Boswell who also asked the question then answered it thus:

Every size of readers requires a genius of corresponding capacity. Some minds are overpowered by splendor of sentiment, as some eyes are offended by a glaring light. Such will gladly contemplate an author in humble imitation, as we look without pain upon the sun in the water. Every writer has his use.

Every writer has her use. Sometimes the use of my writing is merely my own personal joy in finding the right words to wrap around my meanings. Sometimes my words become the perfect words to describe an experience for someone else. I must also contemplate the fact that not everyone is a writer. It is hard for me to picture since written words are so integral to my thinking and because the majority of people with whom I spend time are writers in some capacity. But there are out there people for whom words are difficult. There are people who depend upon writers to give words to their experiences. There are people for whom discovering the perfect words is a godsend because they can’t make the words themselves. Sometimes my words end up being those perfect words. This always astounds and awes me. It is not like I have given a gift, but more like a gift passed through me and I am merely touched by the passage. And so I scribble in the hopes that I will be similarly touched again as my words touch others.

And as I write, I discover things I did not realize I knew. I began this entry to talk about a set of perfect words which encapsulated my reasons for blogging, but in the process of writing I have discovered whole vistas of reasons that are not contained in the quote about capturing small stories. Already the words are no longer perfect.
But they are still good, and I will borrow them from time to time as I am speaking or writing about blogging. When I do, I will credit Doyle for writing them which is the only gift I can give him in return for the lovely words he shared with the world at large. I do not know if the rest of Doyle’s book will prompt as strong an emotional response as his prologue about writing, but I look forward to finding out.

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