writing

Writing in Church

By / July 27, 2014 / 2 Comments

My observance of my religion is not practiced in grand gestures, lone pilgrimages, or big revelations. It is me sitting on a padded pew with an open journal in my lap. Sometimes I write for pages, not great spiritual insight, just the daily cares that are in my head. I write all the things which I think are too boring for others to want to listen to. I repeat myself because repetition of thought is necessary in a life that is full of repeated tasks. In that journal I am allowed to spill words without concern for audience. Or rather I’m writing to a very specific audience: myself and God. I like writing my thoughts during church, because the location affects the shape of those thoughts as they spool onto the page. I never can be sure afterward whether there are threads of inspiration in those thoughts.

I do listen to the speakers and the teachers. I probably should be better at putting down my pen and giving them full attention. Some weeks I do. This was one of the weeks where my thoughts were noisy and I had to pin them to a page where I could examine them. I’ve learned to trust that when there is something in a talk that I should hear, I will suddenly find myself listening without having made a conscious decision to do so. Words, phrases, stories, jump out at me sometimes. Even if I was lost in my own thoughts the moment before. Sometimes I write down the pieces which came to me, a non sequitur in the middle of other thoughts.

On some Sundays I flip through things I’ve previously written and my own words jump out at me. I meant them one way when I wrote them, but I need them in a different way when they come to me again. I can only flip through a few months of thoughts. Anything older than that is in a different notebook. The physical requirements of the pages force me not to dwell too much on the past, but to keep moving forward.

I write journals at other times and places besides church. I have the stack of notebooks to bear witness to this. I used to segregate my thoughts into different notebooks, one for life journaling, a different for story fragments, a third for random notes of phone numbers and measurements. Now all of these things go into a single book, one that fits into my purse. All of it is there and none of it is explained. Sometimes I picture a future historian puzzling over cryptic fragments of sentences. A couple of times that “historian” has been me.

Writing my thoughts during church is a small observance. It is a way for me to commune with myself and with inspiration from God. I come away with a clearer plan for what needs to come next. Sometimes I’m given specific directions that are not always what I want to hear. Other times I’m reassured that my choices are good. I don’t know if any of that is apparent in the words themselves. They probably read like someone rambling endlessly about the same routine things that she rambled about last week, last month, last year. Yet I know that last week the flow of feeling and inspiration which came with the words was different than this week. Small observances can be powerful, particularly when they are repeated over time. This is how I build my faith and give myself peace each week. It is how I rest and refill so that I can meet the week to come.

BYU Special Collections Tour

By / May 21, 2014 / 3 Comments

If you are ever offered the opportunity to tour a university library’s special collections department, say yes. Howard and I got just such a tour today deep in the basement of the Harold B. Lee Library on BYU campus. On our way in, they gave us bright red visitors badges and our very own security guard. Though really his job was to protect all the things from us, so I guess he wasn’t really our guard. We also had three librarian archivists leading us on the tour to show us the coolest things. It was part sales pitch “See, we’ll take good care of the things that you give us.” But mostly they were excited to showcase their collection and genuinely thrilled at the history that they’ve collected, restored, and preserved. Justifiably so. I came away filled with awe, not just for the things they showed me, but for the dedication and love that goes into making sure that generations to come will be able to see the same things.

The first thing we noticed were the shelves themselves.

They looked like a wall when we first entered the vault room. But they move to create aisles so that librarians can find the materials they are seeking.

It was impressive to see these massive rows slide around noiselessly. We were cautioned to be wary about being between them if they began to move. They have sensors that are supposed to prevent motion if something is there, but the casual way that they mentioned sensors failing made me sure it is a thing that has happened more than once. Fortunately only some metal stools have thus far been sacrificed to the gods of mechanical shelving.

Our first stop was where they keep the first printings of The Book of Mormon. I was startled when the librarian pulled one out of its box and let us hold it.

I’ve seen one before, but not to touch. I was awed to be in contact with a piece of my religious history. I was also impressed with the array of first editions in different languages that they had.

The early Mormon people were not wealthy. It speaks of how much they reverenced this book that the constructions and bindings are all so beautiful.

I spent a lot of time in general looking at the bindings and details of books. I noticed how many of the older volumes had ridges on their spines.

I asked if those ridges were decorative or structural. It turns out to be a result of the binding methods that were used.

They showed us one of the oldest “books” in existence. A cuneiform tablet.

There we all were, six of us staring in awe at this evidence of the first writing of humanity. It was thousands of years old. It is also a receipt for beer.

We didn’t have a chance to see the most elaborate illuminated manuscripts, but this lesser one was still amazing.

The gold shined across the pages and we could see that all the letters were hand drawn. I could have stared at that for a very long time. But there was a different wonder to see. For a time it was popular to create hidden paintings on the edge of book pages. My photo does not do this justice. Fortunately the internet can show you more clearly.

Seeing this one kind of makes me want to take some of my One Cobble books, the really thick ones, and paint something on the edges.

I’d mentioned Jane Austen, so they took me to where the Austen books were. A librarian took this first edition copy of Emma and put it into my hands.

I’d seen this pattern on endpapers of books before, but figured that it was some sort of 70’s thing. Instead it appears to be authentic to the era when Austen was publishing.

I would have loved more time to look at each of these things, to sit with them and really comprehend each one individually. The immensity of what they have down there is staggering. There are fifteen miles of shelving and they’ve just been given five more miles. More than once I was glad of our guides, because I would have had to wander to find a way out.

Books are not the only things they have. This is the Oscar for the movie Camelot.

These days Oscars are not allowed to be sold or donated. They are supposed to go back to the academy. This one was acquired by special collections before those rules were created. I love that you could see the place around Oscar’s legs where he’d been picked up and carried, or perhaps held aloft in triumph.

We got to peek at the cold vault, though we didn’t go inside.

Instead week peeked at it through a window while standing in the yellow lit ante chamber. Film has to be kept cold. It also has to sit in the ante room and come slowly up to temperature before it can be manipulated. The yellow light did strange things to vision. We didn’t stay there long.

The library is making massive efforts to digitize as much of the collection as they can and to make it available online. This set up is for exactly that purpose.

It allows for simultaneous photography of both pages while protecting the book and the spine. All a human has to do is raise the glass, turn a page, lower the glass and photograph again.

They’ve lots of books yet to do.

I walked out of the building with a renewed respect for librarians. They were as excited to show us the amazing things as we were to see them. I could hear in their voices how much they value history, which was why it felt so strange that they’d like to have some of our papers. This is why we got the tour, they want to create a Howard and Sandra Tayler collection into their massive archive. They reach out to alumni who are creators with this sort of request and they found us. This leaves me feeling honored and…with an odd feeling I don’t quite have a name for.

To be remembered is the dream, isn’t it? I’ve read essays from scholars who create treatises on the correspondence of Jane Austen. In daydream moments, I’ve looked at letters and journals of my own and wondered if someday there would be a researcher glad to have them, or at least my great grandchildren might be interested in family stories. Now a library actually wants these things. They are things which have been taking up space in my house because of that daydream. Yet I’ve seen the preservation infrastructure that they have. I know how much all that effort must cost and I can’t imagine anything that I produce being worth the expense to preserve it for generations. Then I think of all six of us hovering in amazement around a little stone beer receipt. None of us have any way of knowing what future generations will want to reference.

So, yes there will be a Howard and Sandra Tayler collection in the Special Collections of the BYU Library. We don’t know yet what will be in it, nor how much will be public during our lifetimes. But if nothing else I can stop having to decide to throw out things which might be interesting for future generations, but which I haven’t the space to store.

Special collections is well worth your time to visit and if you are so lucky as to be offered a tour. Say yes.

Filling the Waiting Space With Other Work

By / May 20, 2014

I have been informed that the shipment of books will not be arriving this week after all. So now we’re back to the original schedule instead of the week early schedule. This leaves me with a space of time where I’m accumulating and processing orders, but not yet beginning to sort invoices for shipping. The busy is coming, but it is not here yet. Not only is it not here, but also I’ll be handing off portions of the work to Kiki. Even at the busiest, it won’t be as crazy as it has sometimes been.

I’m going to use the time to push through the challenge coin PDF. I my second preliminary layout for it today. The first preliminary layout showed me how I did not want to organize the stories. I knew it was wrong, but hadn’t a clue what would be right. So I talked with Howard and he said it should read as if you were sitting at a bar where folk were swapping coin stories. The moment I heard that, I knew it was the right approach. It helped me figure out what stories go where, because one story can be a set up for the next one. It gives a narrative flow to the whole project. Today I started defining the design space. I threw in a top and bottom border element which is vaguely like what we’ll actually use. I put page numbering in place. I defined the styles for basic text, pull quote text, and sidebar text. All of these things need to be refined, but when I took it to Howard he agreed that the shape is right.

One of the hard things about starting to design a new book project is that every decision extinguishes another possibility. I love the bar conversation format. I believe it is the right one for this project. But it means the death of my original concept which was to sort stories by service. Each choice narrows the project into what it will actually be. In the refining stages it is easy to see how each change makes the project better. In the early stages there are so many possibilities and they are all so ephemeral that it is hard to see which will work best. I end up spinning in paralysis of choice. Today’s work means I’m past that stage. (I hope.)

The other work I’m going to try to push forward in the next few days is writing. I’ve just hit the mid-point in my novel. I wanted to have the draft done by the end of June. I’m not sure I can make that, but it is worth reaching for. If nothing else, I want this to be a week where I average 1000 words per day across both fiction and non-fiction writing. That’s a good writing week for me. I’ve even set up a spread sheet to help me track. Now I can look back and see when I was writing and when I was focused on other things instead.

I have plenty of things to keep me usefully busy while I’m waiting for books. Yet somehow part of my brain would really just like to sit and wait. Not that waiting is fun, I don’t like it much at all, it is just that even when I’m trying to get the other things done, part of my brain is focused on waiting instead. This makes the waiting feel much longer. Not my favorite.

Digging out Weeds

By / May 10, 2014


This was my front flower bed at 9am this morning. Grass has always been a challenge in this bed. I’ve fought with it for years, never quite able to eradicate it because I was reluctant to really dig up the bed for fear of hurting hidden spring bulbs. Then I had two or three summers where I did very little gardening. The grass began to win and this year there were no spring blooms. I decided it was time to take a shovel and dig everything up. When I began digging, my hope was to dig it out and buy some flowers to plant to make things pretty. Within a few minutes I could tell that the grass was so pervasive and wide-spread that the only chance I had to really get rid of it is if I employ a bare earth policy. I need to dig up this bed every few weeks all summer long to be able to find all the hidden grass and morning glory roots.

Step one is mostly complete.

You can see that I left the peonies, a couple of day lilies and some flax down at the end near the rock. These are good strong perennials and they are the basis for the flower bed that this will become. For this year they’ll just sit there surrounded by dirt. If I succeed in my war of attrition on the grass, then when cool weather arrives in the fall, I will plant some more perennials. I have all summer to think about which ones I want.

As I was digging, I thought about this bare earth approach in other areas of my life. There is often a stage in creating something beautiful that is downright ugly and a whole lot of work. Last year was a bare earth year for our family as we cleared away lots of mess and reconfigured some relationships. This year the kids are poised to bloom. Right now my novel is in a bare earth phase. I’m just working and it feels like there is no way that it can ever be a thing of beauty. But sometimes it takes a summer of digging weeds before there can be a summer of flowers.

Pieces of Posts

By / May 9, 2014

Earlier today I made a joke on Twitter about how pieces of four blog posts were all fighting in my brain. Then I sat down with a pen and paper to discover that it was at least seven posts. None of them have a chance to be full blog posts unless I get them sorted out a bit. So I’m going to throw the pieces here either to live as little fragments, or perhaps to be rescued and turned into full posts later. Either way, they’ll be out of my head. It was getting noisy in there.

1. While I was out walking yesterday in Salt Lake City with Mary Robinette Kowal who has professional theater training, we were stopped by a man with a very sad story. Within two sentences I recognized the classic Stranger in Distress scam. He picked up pretty quickly that we weren’t buying it and the moment he did, he dropped the act and walked away. At which Mary said “and I applaud that performance.” Later she critiqued the things he was doing wrong in trying to engage sympathy and explained how it could be done much better. Let me say that I hope that Mary never turns scam artist. She’d walk off with all the money.

2. I was in Salt Lake to attend Mary’s reading and to visit with her. So I wore my casual clothes instead of professional appearance gear. So I was taken by surprise to be recognized and to have to introduce myself as an author after the signing. Note: I should have been more prepared for it in that context. It brought to my attention how I have very different modes of approaching the world when I expect to be invisible and when I expect to be putting myself forward.

3. One of the places that Mary and I went was Decades Vintage Clothing where we looked at all the lovely clothes. I love that store. With current budget and time limitations I couldn’t buy myself any clothes, not even for projects. However I did notice a bin of handkerchiefs. One of them was so lovely (Hand embroidered!) that I realized it needs to be in the book I’m writing. So I bought it using the spare change in my purse and brought it home.

4. We’re in the midst of pre-order preparations. Mostly this means that Howard has to blog to let people know when ordering opens. I took some of the iconic art from the book and put it up on eBay for sale. Howard is also going to do some guest posts and other publicity related things. This marketing is important, but it also means the beginning of the pre-order anxieties. Illogical or not, we’re always afraid that THIS pre-order will be the time when no one shows up to buy the book. We’ll throw a party and no one will show. We try very hard not to play the “What if” game, but until we see how the ordering goes, there is a big question mark in the middle of our financial plans for the next six months. I don’t like staring at big question marks.

5. Kiki has been on the job as a Tayler Corporation employee for a week now. We’re still figuring it out. I’ve learned that I have to do a better job of giving her predictable work hours. I’m also still training her on what needs to be done and how to do it. Yet I can see already how much better my life is going to be with help. Kiki did the matting for the eBay art. She’s going to take over most of the routine shipping. She’s helping me organize and plan ahead in ways that I just haven’t had time to do before. I think I’m going to miss her help very much when she goes back to college in August.

6. I’ve moved my accounting day from Monday to Friday. Surprising how a small change can make everything fit better.

7. There are fourteen school days left in the year. I am so ready to stop tracking school assignments. In fact, I kind of did for about a week there, but now I’m trying to be good again. The switch into all the kids being home all day brings its own challenges, but I’m about ready for it anyway.

8. One of the things I did during my day in Salt Lake City was sit down and write words for House in the Hollow. It was really hard to get started again. The whole thing feels a little stupid, which is a normal stage for the muddle in the middle of a book. So to paraphrase Chuck Wendig; this is my beach storming draft. Get out of the water. Establish a beach head on the sand. Don’t Die. Hopefully I’ll find the flow of it again.

9. Howard and Kiki have conspired to hire her for Tayler Corporation artwork. I’m excited at the project. It is going to be fun.

… and I think that’s it. Surely nine posts is more than enough to make one head feel very crowded indeed.

The Mother at the Pool

By / April 10, 2014 / 1 Comment

The other mother at the pool reclines in her bathing suit. She reads a magazine, often looking up to engage with her children in the pool. Other times there have been more people, today it is just me and her with four children in the water. I sit in the shade, fully clothed. My laptop is open and I type. I don’t don’t know if she is judging me for the choices I display. It hardly matters. My imagination supplies judgement for her, giving her a critical voice. I am obviously a workaholic who can not leave her computer at home. Or I am the disengaged mother, more interested in updating facebook than spending time with my kids. She has no way to see that I am a writer. I’m stealing this time to craft stories, because all writing time is stolen from something else. Each moment I am aware of what I neglect.

Along with the guilt for not treasuring each splashing moment with my children is the litany of how I should write differently. If I write fiction, I’m aware of the blog post that did not happen. If I blog then some part of me mourns the fiction time. Then there is the incessant knowledge that I ought to write more letters to my Grandmother, my daughter at college, my parents, siblings, friends. My head is so noisy with self-judgements, it is a wonder that I can find words at all.

That tanned mother on her lounge chair with her magazine likely has no thoughts about me, other than to tell herself what I think of her. So young mother across the pool, enjoy your quiet hour, because motherhood does not often supply hours when the kids are happy and need nothing. They can entertain each other for a time, my kids and yours, while you read words and I create them.

Re-Considering the Covers of the Cobble Stones Books

By / March 21, 2014 / 2 Comments

I’ve been increasingly aware over the last year that there is something lacking in the covers of my Cobble Stones books. I was pleased with the covers when I made them, but even then I thought they could probably be better. I didn’t know how to make them better using the skills I already possessed. I couldn’t even see why they were wrong, I just had a vague sense that they could be better somehow. I called it good enough and put the covers on the books. Then they didn’t sell. Not only that, but I watched during conventions when all the other covers on the table got perused or picked up and examined. The Cobble Stones covers did not. Ever. The only time those books sold was when someone who reads this blog came to the table specifically looking for them, or when people listened to me read out loud from one of them.

I’ve spent some time trying to figure out what to do differently, particularly as I’m contemplating releasing a new book in the series this year. I’m going to need another cover and I didn’t want to replicate the mistakes I made with the first two. So I did what I should have done before designing covers. I went out and found several books that are very like mine in tone and content. Then I stared hard at the covers. I found they all were mostly plain with a single image and then text. In comparison the cover of Cobble Stones 2011 is busy and confusing.

I chose to photograph photographs because that was within my skill set. I chose images that had actually featured on the blog, because that seemed appropriate to me. I thought that having lots of images reflected the episodic nature of the book’s contents. I tried to make sure the images had an implied journey. Up close you can see all those things. From more than two feet away, or at thumbnail size, the book just looks…brown with something jumbly going on.

In contrast, Kennison’s book grabbed me from across the room. The blue drew me in and the title captured me. In fact, that is how I found Kennison’s book. A teacher had it on her desk during a parent teacher conference. I kept sneaking glances at the cover and scribbled down the title at a moment when the teacher thought I was taking notes on my student.
Here is another stark comparison.

For the Cobble Stones 2012 book I was in a tearing hurry. It is even less cohesive than the first Cobble Stones cover. With the first cover I refined it multiple times and engaged the help of a friend with an artistic eye. We shot all sorts of arrangements and selected the best one. For the second cover, I did it all myself in the space of an afternoon. It shows. None of the images match to any of the essays that are inside it. All they share in common is the fact that they appeared on this blog during 2012. I suppose that is fine for a sampler book, but the cover image is supposed to be an advertisement for the contents, not an extension of them.

The cover for My Grandfather’s Blessings demonstrates to me the importance of a good subtitle. In creative non-fiction, memoir, and essay books the title catches the reader, the subtitle elaborates and sells the book. I need better titles than: Cobble Stones with a year appended. I need to make clear that these are books in the Cobble Stones series, but each book should have its own title and subtitle. I suspect the first two will always retain the titles they currently have. I intended them as samplers, and they’ve served that purpose. Incidentally this will also solve a problem I’ve had when packing and shipping orders. The titles of the books are so similar that I have to pay special attention to which book was ordered. In fact I put the words “snow” and “sand” into the item description just to help me differentiate. This is manageable with two books, but could get very problematic with more.

For the print editions of the first two books, I’m stuck with these covers for awhile. I have over a hundred copies of each book and it doesn’t make sense to spend money re-printing them when they still haven’t broken even. I’ll continue to sell them at conventions and use them for promotional purposes. The next Cobble Stones book will be different. I may try to do a more thematic arrangement of essays. I’ll definitely see if I can work with a cover designer who has the necessary skills to produce the right cover.

Of course the other reason the Cobble Stones books haven’t sold is because I’ve put so very little energy into marketing them. People can’t buy books if they don’t know the books exist. With both books, I kicked them out into the world with very little support because there were so many other things going on at the time. I hope I can do better for future books.

By the way, I highly recommend The Gift of an Ordinary Day by Katrina Kennison and My Grandfather’s Blessings by Naomi Remen. They are both excellent.

Strength of Wild Horses Advance Copies

By / March 20, 2014

With all the other things going on, I forgot to share the joyous news that I’ve received my advance copies of Strength of Wild Horses. They are beautiful. They match the original Hold on to Your Horses books in all the ways that I hoped they would. I am really excited for the rest of the books to arrive so that I can send them out into the world. Naturally the Kickstarter backers have already had a chance to read the book. I sent them all a PDF, as I promised. I really like fulfilling promises. So happy.

Bumps in the Road

By / March 12, 2014

Life is rolling along and everything is feeling good, then whump. I hit a speed bump, or a pot hole, or maybe it was both a speed bump and a pothole. Anyway my tire is flat, which seriously impedes my ability to keep rolling along happily. It’ll all be fine. I just need to find the jack and change out the tire. Then I can roll along again. Right now I’m in that moment when I’ve rolled to a complete stop at the side of the road and I’m trying to remember where on earth I keep the jack. I’m hoping it is here in the car with me.

The things which flattened my tire today:

I looked at the list of things I really should have gotten done already, the list of things I ought to do today, and I compared these lists against the actual hours I have available between now and midnight. The numbers of things are far more than the hours.

I thought about the parenting things which I have left to do this week and how they are going to interfere with the work things. Or maybe it is the other way around. Either way something important is going to have to slide.

We had a boom year financially last year. That means that this year we have a boom year for paying out taxes. I planned for it. I saved for it, but the number still feels a bit like a gut punch. I end up revising my plans for what I think we can afford this year. It is time for me to go over the budget again. I’ll just add that to the list.

Related to the finances, all the old anxiety demons have come howling out of the dark places where they’ve been hiding. “why can’t you plan better?” They howl at me. They blame me for spending too much, for not saving enough, for not being as frugal as we once were. And then once they get up a head of steam, they’ll start in on the many and varied ways that I’m a failure as a human being. So I’m spending psychic energy not listening to them and trying to shoo them back into their dark holes. Out of my head forever would be better, but I’ll tackle that when they are not surrounding me in a swirling mob. One at a time I can get rid of them. En masse, I’ll settle for having them shut up.

Howard has been suffering medication-related insomnia which has not helped him feel calm and happy. So we’re tinkering with that this week. The big bill punches his anxiety buttons too. That’s extra fun. His internal howling voices get restless when he’s having a depressed day. So later today Howard and I will, no doubt, be conferencing about these negative thoughts, both his and mine.

That’s it. I really thought there would be more things, but I’ve been sitting here for ten minutes and everything else that has floated through my head lands firmly on the good side of the ledger or is covered by the list above. Howard and I have both been writing prose fiction. He’s under contract. I’m not, but I know I’m writing the book that I need to write. Maybe I’ll find a contract for it later this year. Kiki is home with us for the week, and that is really fun. Link has been taking control of his homework and is going to bring all his grades up to passing before the end of the term even though he was out of school for a month. Gleek is excelling at horseback riding and I see the things she learns there spilling into other areas of her life. Patch hasn’t been showing signs of anxiety. He just earned his arrow of light and will go to scouts for the first time tonight.

So very many things are going well. I just wish there were two of me to keep them all going.

Adding Something to an Already Full Book (and Life)

By / February 26, 2014 / 1 Comment

I’ve been working on Schlock books this week. Longshoreman of the Apocalypse will be heading to print in about a week. I’ve also been working on Massively Parallel, which will be the biggest Schlock book we have ever made. The page count is 256 pages in the preliminary layout. It was really important to lock down the page count so that Howard could have a firm number of pages to plan for the bonus story. It is a sad day when Howard has written a ten page bonus story and the book only has seven blank pages. It hasn’t happened to us yet, but I’ve been afraid of it often enough that I started working layout early and nailing down the basic layout before telling Howard to start writing.

I knew that MP was going to be big when I started working. In fact both Howard and I were afraid that it was going to be much bigger. We worried about spine strength and whether we ought to split the story into two books. So my driving focus as I began to put strips into place was “waste no space.” In most Schlock books I’m very careful not to split up a multi-row strip across pages, even if I have to add white space to do it. For MP, I broke that rule some. I still tried, particularly in dramatic story moments, but I leaned toward taking less space. Then there we were with 256 pages and nineteen of them were awaiting a bonus story. Then I talked to Howard about my process. He agreed to the necessity of splitting multi-row strips across pages, but asked that I go back through and make sure I wasn’t splitting them across page turns. I knew that I had and we certainly had enough spare pages to re-shuffle. But how many pages would it take? Every page added meant a white space created for which Howard would have to draw margin art.

I was surprised then when the very first added page had a cascading effect through the following thirty pages. I shifted strips around, placing for dramatic effect and to keep multiple rows together. At the end of thirty pages, I was staring at a blank page. I had just majorly improved the book and not reduced the number of pages available for bonus story. I went through the whole book that way, optimizing for story instead of space preservation, and I ended with a 256 page book that had 13 pages available for bonus story.

It is counter-intuitive, but there are times when adding a thing does not result in less for all the other things. In January we added cello lessons for Patch and horseback riding lessons for Gleek. These things combine to use up at least four hours of my time per week. As packed as my schedule gets, it does not seem I can spare those hours. Yet these things slipped right into our lives without even a ripple. If anything, I’ve seen a reduction of stress and an increase in productivity. That was unexpected. I’m thinking about this because there is a writers group that I’m considering adding to my life. Logically it is going to use up some time that could be spent on other things, but I hope it is going to do that magic trick where it just enters my life without diminishing the time and energy that I have available for all of my other things.