Parent Teacher Conferences

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I never know on walking in to a parent teacher conference how I will feel walking out. I’ve walked in feeling like all is fine and left with a pile of new worries. I’ve arrived with pressing concerns and departed feeling relieved. I’ve had conferences where the teacher and I had nothing much to do but smile and agree all is going well. Then there are the times where the teacher and I talk for a very long time discussing options and trying to define the shape of the challenges. Sometimes those long conversations result in a moment of inspiration when one of us suddenly sees an answer that makes everything else fall into a workable plan. Other times we run out of words and sit across the table wishing we had an answer to go along with our commiseration. I’ve had teachers who work with me as a coordinated team and others where every conversation felt like a missed catch, lots of words but no connection. Parent teacher conferences are fraught. I had three of them today. They each gave me insights into the child and the teachers. The new insights have given me new things to do for my kids and some new things not to do anymore. The impact to my workload is minimal, but shifting habit patterns is always a challenge. Contemplating the need to change habit patterns while tired and brain fried is exhausting. Time to sleep and think about it all again tomorrow.

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The Steps to Deciding on Merchandise and then Managing It

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My inventory day yesterday required me to stare at all of the various merchandise that we’ve made over the last few years. Then I started thinking about the decision making process behind creating that merchandise and I thought it might be useful to outline how that works.

1. Cool idea! This is the fun part of creating merchandise, before any work is invested. We’re able to say wouldn’t it be cool if… we had miniatures, there were a t-shirt with a maxim on it, we had schlock patches. Howard and I come up with fun ideas all the time. Fans come up with them too and tell us about them. They have to pass the rest of the steps before they can exist.

2. Broad appeal? For every cool idea, Howard and I have a discussion of whether it will appeal to most Schlock fans or if it will only interest a few. No merchandise will interest everyone, but the more people we can interest the better. Other wise we have a basement full of stuff that no one is buying. Books and calendars interest many fans, water bottles and miniatures only interest a few. We can still make the lower interest items, but it affects pricing and quantities.

3. Costs. There are different kinds of costs involved in merchandise. Production costs are the most obvious. We have to find a supplier who manufactures the merchandise we want. We would dearly love a bowl-sized yellow mug printed with Tub of Happiness, but we’ve never found a supplier who can do it the way we imagine. Space is another cost. Bowl size mugs are physically large and I only have so much room to store things. Every inch of space I give to mug storage can not be used for book storage–and books sell better. There are costs in effort as well. T-shirts take lots of effort because I have to track sizes as well as styles. Merchandise also gets rejected because of shipping concerns. We tend to avoid things that break easily in transit. We also avoid things which require new packing methods. I’m already stocking eight different types of shipping containers. Storing those shipping supplies also takes up space.

4. Price point. We have to evaluate all the various costs of the item against the price we think people are willing to pay. Some really cool ideas are simply not profitable because they cost too much for the amount of money they can earn.

5. Budget evaluation. We only have so much money available to fund new merchandise. If we have to choose between printing a book and making goopy Schlock in a cup, the books are going to win every time. Every item of merchandise we choose means there are at least three others which we can’t fund.

6. Design. All of the above steps are discussion and research. We can do those in the space of an hour if things line up right. This one is when Howard commits art. We have to find space in Howard’s schedule to create whatever thing we’ve pictured. Many cool merchandise items stall in this stage for a very long time. Sometimes we even lose track of them because we’re too busy.

7. Production. This stage begins with sending files to a supplier. Usually there are a couple of rounds of merchandise approval, but mostly this stage is made of waiting.

8. Marketing. With merchandise in hand we have to sell it. Sometimes the marketing begins before the design and production phases. When we run a pre-order it is often to answer the questions of appeal and quantity. It also helps to build interest in the merchandise. Older merchandise still benefits from marketing attention. Most of our marketing plans are “Howard will announce it from the Schlock blog and tweet it.” This works great for Schlock merch. It did not work well when we put out Hold on to Your Horses and realized that Howard’s audience is not mine. For non-established businesses the marketing discussion needs to be up there around step 3, before any money is spent.

9. Inventory management. And now we’ve come full circle back to my inventory day. I have to keep track of all the merchandise so that I do not sell more than we have in stock. It is also critical that I be able to find merchandise and ship it within a day or so of when it is ordered. I have to manage both the physical inventory in my house and the inventory listed in the online store to make sure that they match each other.

Merchandise is a lot of work, but there are rewards that aren’t measured in money. We love the moment when someone walks up to our booth at a convention and lights up “Oh I have to have that t-shirt! It is perfect!” We agree. It’s why we made the shirt. I just wish that more of the cool ideas passed the rest of the steps into reality.

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Inventory Day at the Schlock Warehouse

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When my front room looks like this:

Then I know it is time to have an inventory day. These packages are the returned merchandise from Chicon with a couple of boxes of books from the UVU Book Academy thrown in for good measure. The Chicon boxes only just arrived because the truck they were in had some cross country adventures on the way back to us. Fortunately the merchandise inside was all fine, just the boxes were battered by being shipped across the country and back again.

An inventory day is when I sort through boxes and put all the merchandise back on the shelves in my shipping room so that I can find it again when I need it. Sometimes an inventory day also requires me to re-arrange my storage arrangements as merchandise sells out and other merchandise is added. Today I’ll definitely be needing to rearrange because one of the things which arrived from Chicago were these:

We have 14 of them and I’ll be putting them into the store as soon as I get some proper product photos taken. That will happen after I’ve figured out where to store them that is not in my front room. The Schlock Mercenary shipping and warehousing department takes up an entire unfinished room in our basement.


There are also two storage units off site where we store large pallets full of boxes of books.
My shipping station is set up more or less in the middle of the room where I’ve got easy access to most of the merchandise.

You can see that I keep the most shipped inventory close along with various sizes of boxes and packing paper. I print invoices and postage in my office, but then I stand at the shipping station to pack the boxes. We usually average between five and ten orders per week during most of the year. November and December tend to average ten to twenty orders per week. During pre-orders we’ll get anywhere from a hundred to a thousand orders depending on what shiny thing we’ve put up for sale. The massive pre-orders are handled differently from the daily shipping.

One of the fun things about an inventory day is discovering that of the ten copies of Hold on to Your Horses that I sent to Chicon, only one came back. One is the perfect number of books to have after a convention, because I know that I sold as many as possible and there is only one left to ship home. Cobble Stones also only had a single copy return.

In addition to all of the Chicon packages, we had a single package from GenCon. The T-shirt collection we had in storage there had become somewhat random. We decided to ship them all home and re-stock completely next year. The box contained some shirt designs which we’ve discontinued.

I put them all into our store so that we can clear out the old inventory and make way for new things. Selling the old inventory makes physical space and provides the funds necessary to make new things.

Sorting through all the boxes showed me that it was time to upgrade one of our stacked pallets into a shelf. So that is my next task for today: assembling shelving. At the end of it all, I will have gone up and down the stairs countless numbers of times. I suppose I can call it exercise. Putting the storage and work space in the basement means that we end up carrying things up and down stairs regularly. Until we’re able to budget for an actual warehouse/office this is the best solution we’ve got.

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Unconscious Doing

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“Can you hand me the sour cream?”
“My backpack is in the front room will you go get it for me?”
“I need a spoon.”

Until I went away I didn’t notice the barrage of small requests my kids make of me just because I am in the room. I notice them now because last week I was not here and they got their sour cream, backpacks, and spoons for themselves. I also notice the requests which are not made because I anticipate them and get them done before the child thinks to ask. I pour milk for the child who is chattering, spoon in hand, but hasn’t yet looked at the bowl in front of her. I put sharpened pencils next to the homework binder to minimize interruptions to the study process. Anticipating the next necessary task is something I do constantly. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it is one of the good gifts of anxiety, which carries over into relaxed tasks as well as worrisome ones. Perhaps I just learned to do this in the years when I was managing babies, toddlers, and preschoolers all of whom really did need someone to pour milk, hand out spoons, and find lost items. Maybe I learned it then and just never stopped.

My children don’t think about it either. They make these requests even when they are physically closer to the requested item than I am. If I’m paying attention and point this out, we all laugh together and they get it themselves. Yet the next time I’ll likely be distracted and just fulfill the request even if it makes far more sense for the child to do so. The thing is, I like anticipating needs and answering them. I like smoothing the obstacles so that important work can get done. Efficiency is pleasing to me and so I put forth the effort to create it whenever possible. This is why my attempts to re-train us all to let the kids do more are like emptying a bathtub with a spoon. Probably a spoon I fetched for a child because they asked for it.

“I think you had to leave because you’re so big. You fill the house.” Howard said as we were discussing my absence and trying to sort out why we all had to do this hard thing. This statement led to much teasing as I pointed out that perhaps different phrasing might be appropriate from a husband who is trying to welcome his wife home and make her feel loved. But after the jokes about wording were complete, I had to acknowledge that Howard is right. This is my house, arranged in the ways that I’ve selected, the schedule is primarily my design. Everyone else flows along with these things because I do a good job organizing. I do such a good job that until I’m not there to do it, no one stops to think if there could be another way. I’m pervasive and we could only see it by removing me from the picture for a week. A really hard week during which the folks at home sometimes despaired that they could keep it all together. In contrast I wrestled, not with guilt exactly, but with a deep part of myself which was convinced that leaving was a major dereliction and would cause harm. Logically I knew it was not true, but that deep place inside me believes that one of my primary jobs in life is to reduce stress for everyone else, particularly for Howard and the kids. I couldn’t even see this driving need until I put myself into a place where I couldn’t perform that function. Now I see it. Now I see how it has me fetching spoons and back packs every single day.

I think seeing it is half the battle. I can’t unknow this and I don’t want to. Seeing it will cause a hundred little shifts in my responses to these unthinking requests. All those tiny changes are likely to result in large pattern shifts over time. It will be interesting to see how much things are different in six months.

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Being Back at Home

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One nice thing about being away from home for a week, it makes me glad to return to all the little tasks of the house. I’d completely forgotten that there is a satisfaction to dishes and laundry. Doing these things definitely becomes a burden over time, but being away from them for a week let me remember when I first started doing my own laundry and felt very grown up about it. This evening I enjoyed the process of planning and preparing dinner, even taking time for extra touches like putting a pitcher of water on the table so that everyone could remain seated instead of constantly bobbing out of their chairs to go get drinks or salt. I need to try to remember that these things are nice instead of always feeling burdened by them.

Kiki cried last night. At first it just seemed part of her head cold or perhaps just a cranky day. However it quickly became apparent that the real reason was that I had come home. She’d been strong and responsible all week long, with me home she could relax and confess how hard it had all been. Except, she told me, it wasn’t all hard. Lots of it was interesting and fun. She liked being grown up, but it was really nice to stop for awhile. I hugged her tight and reassured her that I want nothing more than several months of all of us staying home. It was what she needed to hear, not just that I would be here, but that I wanted to be here. She’d been picturing me off having a gloriously fun time only to return to the work of mothering. I did have fun, but I also spent a lot of time wishing that I were at home doing my regular things.

The other kids did not cry, but they were all quick to drop what they were doing and come hug me. Then they ran back to their things. None of them had tales of woe or worry. They were just glad to have me back.

So today I’ve been picking up where I left off. I’ve shipped out the orders which accumulated in my absence. I cycled many loads of laundry. I tackled the accounting. I slept in my own bed. All is well. Yet there are still reminders of my trip. I just picked a leaf out of my keyboard, remnant of sitting outside to type. I’ve also decided to aim for writing 500-1000 words per day. Those words can be blog posts or fiction. I’m not going to post word counts publicly, I’m just going to try to stretch a little and see where it takes me. If I don’t do something, then it would be all too easy for me to just dive into routine. I watched today how all those little tasks, which I was newly happy to do, each took a bite out of my day until it was consumed. If I want to write, I have to prioritize writing. So I shall.

For now, it is time to step away from the computer and complete the remaining small tasks of the day.

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Arriving Home

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I’m home. This is a deeply happy thing, like in my bones happy. I started to feel it on the flight home as I approached Utah. I wish I knew if physical proximity to my heart’s residence actually had an effect or if it was all the effect of knowing that I was going home. Part of me would like to believe in a connection to the place I have created here, as if I could draw strength from the ground I have nurtured. I certainly felt like the forest around Mary’s house nourished my spirit. On the drive from the airport I immediately noticed how brown Utah is and how few trees it has. The only natural forests here are in the mountains and they are very different. Another part of me thinks that whole idea is a little bit hokey, but it doesn’t matter because I’m back with my people.

So how was my trip? I ask myself the same question, and I think it is going to take me a week or more to figure out the full answer. For today and tomorrow I am unpacking and resettling. I’m not going to have the mental and emotional space to figure out what this trip has done for/to me until after I figure out how it has shifted things here at home. In my absence my kids have learned some additional self reliance and I should not hurry to take back the tasks that they did for themselves this past week. This requires me to observe. Watching the group effort to pack lunches was certainly interesting and useful. It resembled the lunches on the retreat–make the ingredients available and let the people serve themselves. I’m also going to discover tasks that have piled up, waiting for me to return. But there are no crises and that is good.

In some ways I don’t want to unpack my brain from the trip. I know that some of the contents of my head have shifted and there will be changes as a result. Creating those shifts is exactly why I went. Yet, I’m tired and sorting it all out sounds every bit as difficult as going on the trip and being on the trip. Right now I’d really like to just have things be calm and normal. One of the things I have to figure out is if this desire to retract into ordinary routine is a wise impulse to allow time for writing, or if it is me trying to escape anxiety by making myself smaller. The two possible reasons require opposite responses from me. But I don’t have to figure it out today. Possibly not even this week. For this next week I will focus on creating calm stability for everyone in our house.

How was my trip? It was good. It was hard, but only because of things I carried inside my head. The location was lovely. The company was delightful. The food was excellent. I’m glad I went. I’m sorry that my going caused stress for Howard and the kids, even though letting them learn from stress was part of the point. I wish I’d been better able to disconnect my own stress and anxieties. I came home and the house is as I left it or perhaps even a bit cleaner. I think I will be able to incorporate more writing into my days here at home. I don’t know if the trip was necessary to making that change, it will definitely color the stories I write. And I get to sleep in my own bed. Now if only I could just get the lingering mosquito bites to stop itching.

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The Final Day of Writers Retreat

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As writing goes, this was not my most productive day of the retreat. In part my brain is tired. It is not used to having so much time allotted to writing, thinking about writing, reading research for writing, and talking about writing. It just fizzled a bit. Also a very large portion of my brain remained determinedly focused on the fact that I get to go home tomorrow.

The day did include several lovely conversations and I feel like I’ve finally come to know most of my fellow retreat journeyers. We acquired in-jokes and a shared lexicon of references. It no longer feels odd to walk into a room, sit down next to someone and just start writing without speaking first. I noticed this fact because there was a new visitor today and I found myself reluctant to intrude on him, which let me know I’d gotten comfortable with everyone else.

I did do some writing math, which is the sort of thing I do when I’m trying to remain focused on writing even though my brain is tired.
During this week I’ve written 4211 words of blog posts and 2109 words of fiction. Averaged over 7 days that gives me about 902 words per day. These numbers feel pretty paltry when most of the writers here are aiming for 2000-3000 words per day. But even before I came I knew I would not be able to measure the success of this retreat by word count. I actually had an exchange with Mary pre-retreat where she suggested I define success for the retreat.

I count as my first success that I came with a secondary success that I did not leave early. This was a seriously scary trip to take for reasons that are not logical and which I’m still trying to parse.

I got to hang out with Mary, which is always a win. I will extend that success to cover everyone who was here. I’m glad to know all of them.

I hoped to finish my draft of Strength of Wild Horses. I haven’t.

I saw a cardinal. I only saw him for a moment and only on the first day. It was like a little promise of hope. And I now know why they’re often referred to as redbirds.

I walked in the woods every day, usually more than once. I took lots of pictures.

The last measure is observing what opens up in my head when I’ve put away all the business, household, and parent thoughts. I wasn’t able to fully put them away, but I was also able to begin creating fiction. I don’t think this one is complete yet. I need to go home and step back into my usual routines in order to be able to tell what has shifted around in my head.

So tomorrow I go home. Until then, here are a last set of forest pictures taken right after a rainfall.

The vines in the forest continue to fascinate me. I was explaining to Marilyn that we don’t have vines in western forests and she answered “Oh really?” as if she could not imagine a forest without vines and moss everywhere.

Mosses also fascinate me. Especially when I got up close to them.

When you get even closer you can see all the tiny fronds.

This mushroom made me think of a dancing skirt. I could imagine it frozen mid-motion.

When I arrived almost all of the leaves were green. By today leaves are beginning to turn colors and fall. I suspect next week the whole forest will change colors. I’ll not be here to see it.

I’ll be sad to leave the forest. I’ve walked all the paths into familiarity and yet I find something new every single time.

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Letting Go of Home Thoughts is Hard

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One of the reasons this retreat is being difficult is that the schedule tracking portion of my brain will not stay switched off. Occasionally I can be fully present in Tennessee, out in the forest, part of a conversation. But then I’ll happen to glance at a clock and without me bidding it to, my brain does the calculation to Utah time and supplies the fact that at home Howard is helping the kids get out the door to school. This wakes up the portion of my brain that is convinced that I’ve committed gross dereliction of duty by not being present at home to manage the schedule. I’ve left my kids before. I’ve left them for a week before. But I usually arrange for them to be on vacation or visiting with relatives. They are outside the usual schedule as much as I am. This time they are at home, following routine. I am not. But my brain keeps tracking their routine and telling me that I should really check up on homework or bedtime or a dozen other things.

I can’t escape from home thoughts yet home feels so far away. I’m really not sure what conclusion to draw from all of this. I’m not sure how this knowledge should affect future decisions. Does this fall into the “Don’t do that again” camp or is it that I need more practice letting go?

In the category of less conflicted lessons learned: don’t wear ballet flats into the woods, or if you do, spray with mosquito repellent first. The tops of my feet look like I have chicken pox. These bites don’t itch as much as the bites from Utah mosquitoes, but twenty-five bites on my feet is enough to draw notice. Particularly late at night when I’m trying to sleep and thinking about home things instead. I probably should be spending those wakeful hours thinking about plot things. But it feels like an additional dereliction, as if fretting over the home schedule is penance I must pay for not being there. And simultaneously I can also feel guilty because I have this opportunity and I am wasting it by thinking about home instead of thinking about writing fiction.

Over all, this is being good. I hope it is being good. It will take me months to see the results of what coming has begun. Hopefully I’ll be able to step back into my regular schedule and none of us will be sufficiently dinged by this experience that repairs are necessary.

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Bits of Stories all Around

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One of the reasons I like walking in the woods is because I see things that beg to be made into stories.

This little clearing was completely covered by this round leafed plant. My brain wanted to explain that the ground was somehow sacred and that I must tread lightly.

These mossy holes in the river bank look like a fairy apartment complex to me.

The structure of these mushroom caps make me think of terraced alien life forms.

I passed by this log and immediately thought of troll skin, or perhaps the skin of some long sleeping mountain giant.

And nearly running into this web across the path reminded me of the spiders and webs in The Hobbit. I’m pretty sure Tolkien met some actual forest spiders before writing that one.

A friend in a writer’s forum mentioned how good it was for writers to do right brained things, like tromping the woods or drawing pictures, instead of always being tangled up in words all the time. I agree. I need to spend time filling up my idea well. Of course a forest is not the only place to find ideas. The jug pictured below is in my room at the retreat. I’m in “Dr. Walker’s room” which used to belong to an actual turn of the century doctor. Many of his medical texts line one of the benches. Seeing them fills me with thoughts about historical medical practices. But the jug also drew my attention. I thought it was kind of cute. Then I got up close for a look. I think those may be human teeth in the jug’s mouth.

Surely these are simply baby teeth that some artist collected after they fell out, but my brain assures me that there are other stories I could tell about this jug. This is particularly true since at the moment I’m reading Mamma Day, a book which has voo doo as a plot element. For now I’m trying not to think about the story possibilities inherent in that jug since most of them are creepy and I sleep in the same room with the thing. I’m sleeping in the same room and the house is over 100 years old. The possibilities for ghost and horror stories abound. But I’ll ponder that when I’m far away back home.

Speaking of home, I miss it a lot today.

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The People at the Retreat

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It occurs to me that I’ve spent three posts talking about the forest and I probably ought to talk about the retreat itself and the other writers here. I knew Mary Robinette before coming, of course. I’d also previously met Alethea Kontis. Everyone else was new to me. I figured they had to be good people since they were all invited by Mary. The group here is fairly small, ten people. Getting acquainted has been a leisurely process because most everyone is spending hours each day staring at their computers deep in story. When I began taking pictures of the folks here and asking permission to post them to the internet, staring at screens was most of what I photographed.

Mary Robinette Kowal, Michael Livingston, Monte Cook, and Shanna Germain writing on the porch in the evening.

David Levine deep in story.

Kate Yule at work.

It is not always work. Ellen Klages takes a break from writing by reading Glamour in Glass.

Alethea Kontis communing with the forest.

We tend to gather and talk at meal times. It helps that Mary cooks the most fantastic dinners.

Sometimes we talk about story or the projects we’re working on, but meal time conversations tend to be about anything and everything. Over lunch today we actually had a conversation about conversations, which was rather meta, but fascinating. I like being around other writers because they pay attention to random things and then think about them. I usually learn a lot. We talk and then we scatter and ignore each other for a couple of hours.

It is an odd mix of socializing and solitude. Yet it is exactly what it needs to be.

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