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I seem to have wended my way into the evening hours of a very busy day. Mondays are always very full of task switching because I have the post-weekend catch up along with any shipping and accounting. I may need to move my accounting day, but I’ll assess that after I’m done messing with tax paperwork. Regular accounting is routine. Tax accounting is annoying and urgent, particularly if the government changes the rules when I’m not looking.

Also in the category of “complaints” I would like to register it as unfair when a 10 second long power outage manages to kill a computer. We are hopeful that swapping out the power supply will solve the problem and we have someone scheduled to come do it at 7 pm tonight. This would be good because Howard really needs his machine for all kinds of important stuff.

Despite today falling firmly into the “insanely busy” category, I would like to note that I am in the process of cooking a not-from-a-box dinner. Rice is cooking. Meat is browning. Then there will be food. That Sunday planning really works. If I had not had a plan, then we would have defaulted to corndogs and frozen burritos, or buying food. Late. Because I would have dithered for at least 30 minutes as I tried to decide between spending money and saving time. I hate the dinnertime dithering. Doing the actual cooking is fine, but the pressure to decide quickly drives me nuts and delays everything.

Tomorrow should be less insane. I will have larger blocks of time to focus on a single type of task instead of switching rapidly. Also, I get to go out to lunch with fun people.

I have been pondering the shape of the next six weeks. Howard is going to be insanely busy trying to get all the pictures drawn for the XDM project. I will be somewhat busy doing the layout, but my busy will have significant gaps as I am waiting for Howard, Tracy, and Curtis to give me things to lay out. Mostly what I will be busy doing is managing the family schedule as a mostly solo act. When Howard gets stressed it becomes critical for our days to have structure. Things like meals and bedtimes need to be very predictable. Unfortunately when I get busy and stressed the schedule goes all skiddly wampus. Bedtimes have been out of whack ever since the daylight saving time shift. I need to put them back. I need to get back to cooking dinner and enforcing homework times. I need to be aggressive about disallowing things that muck with our evening schedule.

I also feel like I need to be taking time to do my own writing. This is the opposite of last year when I felt like I needed to put it down and focus on other things. Fortunately keeping our schedule intact includes keeping the spaces in the schedule in which I can write. This is good. I should probably sit down today and plan meals for the week. It is much easier for me to execute an existing plan than to come up with one from scratch. Hmm. I think this should be part of my Sunday evenings for at least the next six weeks. I need to sit down and review the coming week and plan out how everything will fit. My planner is going to get heavy use for the next few months.

This morning I slept until I was completely done with sleeping. Five days per week I am the first person out of bed; the one who makes everyone else get up. So I figure two days per week everyone can just muddle along without me until I am good and ready to be awake. Sometimes the ratio is 6 days to 1 because of early church, but this year we have church in the afternoons, so I sleep on Sunday too. The extra sleep is necessary since I tend to run on a sleep deficit most of the time.

Not surprisingly the remainder of today has been pretty effective. I mentally scheduled myself for a bunch of house/family stuff and it is all done now. Well, not laundry. Laundry is never truly done. I should probably do some more today. Also left to do is making all the kids bathe. The influx of spring weather has been accompanied by increasingly dirty kids as they spend hours playing outside. Not today though. Today they’ve spent most of the day at the kitchen table constructing Pikmin characters out of Crayola Model Magic clay. Each of them has a small army of figures now and the game spans three territories spread across the entire table. This burst of creative energy was begun by the fact that I said they had to clean their rooms before playing video games. But they are having so much fun that they’re still playing with their figures even though I made them stop to clean their rooms. They’d rather play their own game than be hemmed in by the restrictions of the game itself.

After the rooms were clean, I spontaneously decided that we should all head over to the grocery store to use the coupons for free ice cream cones. It was a fun little mini-outing. I need to do more just-because fun things with the kids. Saturdays may be a good space for that. Weekdays tend to be all scheduled.

Yesterday I wandered out front and ended up talking with some neighbors for an hour or so. As I walked out I had a head full of publishing/writing concerns and the knowledge that Howard had been nominated for a Hugo. But within minutes of starting the conversation I realized that my head was full of things which had no relevance at all to my neighbors. Their days do not include contracts or printers or shipping. Instead the conversation revolved around community affairs in our neighborhood; concerns about a neighbor who is having a rough time; discussion of things at the school where all our kids attend; that sort of thing. It would be very easy for me to develop a feeling of alienation. There is this whole huge section of my life that is outside my neighbors’ experience. Instead the conversation was refreshing and good. Such conversations bring me back to ground and remind me that there is a community here that needs my attention just as much as the communities online.

My attention is so fractured these days. I do not pay as much attention to local things as I used to. These wonderful neighbors of mine are why I don’t have to. You see I know that they are all paying attention. I trust them to keep tabs on the school and the neighborhood. This frees me to put much of my attention elsewhere. However like any good community member, I also need to take time to come back and really contribute. After talking with these women I have an idea of where my contributions are needed most. Communities thrive best when there are lots of people paying attention and really devoting themselves to making the community work. Often these devoted people are the quiet ones who work behind the scenes. I used to be a person like that. Increasingly I am becoming more visible. Having visible people is also necessary. All the different people with different interests and specialties working together is what makes a community strong.

So I was staring at the list of Hugo Nominees (this is something you do when you can hardly believe your husband’s name is there and so you have to check just to make sure. Again. For about the 57th time) and I noticed something. All the other nominated works in the Graphic Story category have two to six creators attached to them as well as a publisher. For Schlock Mercenary there is just Howard, and I am his publisher. Somehow this really underlines for me the sheer crazy impossibility of what we have undertaken. It really should not be succeeding, and yet somehow through hard work, and scrambling, and more hard work, and lots of help from friends, and encouragement from fans, and even more hard work, and some kind of a miracle, we keep going. The scary bit is that so much depends upon Howard and upon me. If either of us fails, it will all fall apart. We must be crazy to undertake this challenge…and yet, there is his name on that list with people who have been creating graphic stories for far longer than we have. This blows me away.

Schlock Mercenary: The Body Politic was nominated for a Hugo award in the “Best Graphic Story” category! We are thrilled. I look at the list of other nominees in the same category and I’m not sure how we sneaked on there. We’re up against
Girl Genius Volume 8 Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones by Phil and Kaja Foglio and Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)
The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle by Jim Butcher (Del Rey, DaBel Bros)
Fables: War and Pieces by Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, Steve Leialoha, Andrew Pepoy, Lee Loughridge, and Todd Klein (DC/Vertigo)
Serenity: Better Days by Joss Whedon, Brett Matthews, Will Conrad, Michelle Madsen, and Jo (Dark Horse)
Y: The last man vol 10: Whys and Wherefores by Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra, and Jose Marzan, Jr (DC/Vertigo)

So we’re pretty sure that Howard won’t be bringing home a shiny rocket ship, but honestly we do not even care. Just making the list is amazing.

Now I really want to go to Montreal with Howard. I already wanted to go, but now the want has been trebled. So now I have to go see what financial and childcare machinations are necessary to free me up for a week in August. Also, I need to renew my passport. And maybe buy a dress.

When Howard and I first released Under New Management (four years ago now) we did some math and figured out that if we could just sell 10 books per day, that would cover all our bills. It seemed an impossibly high number. Fortunately the huge pile of sales which occurred when we first released new title allowed us to bank money against the months when sales were much slower.

Today was not a special day in terms of sales or publicity. Howard made no announcements, we didn’t mention books in our blogs, we did not do anything to draw attention to the fact that there are Schlock books available, and yet we sold 9 books today. Yesterday we sold 8 books. There are still days when no one stops by our online store, but more and more often we are seeing the days when store sales are sufficient to pay for that day’s worth of bills. This is good news. The difference is not in the total number of sales, but in the fact that we have multiple titles available. This is why we are pushing hard to get more books into print. We want to reach a point where Schlock Mercenary can not only pay our bills, but also provide jobs to other people.

It is amazing how getting to take a shower first thing transforms the day’s tasks from impossible to possible. I got all the critical tasks done with dispatch, then discovered a small pile of routine tasks which I also got done. Then in the afternoon I stepped away from everything to walk over to the school to meet up with my kids and walk them home. The exercise was good. The fresh air was marvelous. And I got to observe first hand why my kids always come home with pockets full of rocks and odd bits of metal. Yes, my children scrounge in the gutters for “cool stuff.” This could also explain why a 10 minute walk can take as long as 40 minutes.

I’m still very tired because of the not sleeping well, so I’m afraid I am short on insightful thoughts. Instead I will send you over to Mental Tesserae where my friend has a very nice post about happiness and the randomness of life.

I think the most annoying thing about being wide awake at 2:30 AM is the awareness that I will be much better equipped to handle the things I am fretting about if I could just get some sleep first.