More Summery Thoughts

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Kiki and Howard are the ones working hard this week. Kiki is finishing up her Driver’s Ed class which includes two hours of range time and three hours of class time every day. On top of that she is taking an independent study science class and she is working on art projects. Howard is trying to work high-speed to build the buffer up in advance of the coming conventions. He wants to get 2-3 weeks of comics done for each week between now and August 1st. I’m working too. The majority of my hours are filled with necessary things. I run the business, manage the house, write, and care for the kids. Very little of my time is wasted, yet I feel like I’m moseying along. This week I’m completely lacking the must-go-fast vibe. I sometimes feel guilty about that when Howard comes home in a cloud of didn’t-work-hard-enough-today despair. Yet I think my relaxation is necessary in the short term. I need a few weeks of mosey so that when must-go-fast returns I will have the strength to do it. I expect it to return full-force one week from Monday when we open pre-orders.

Some of the moseying-along feeling in our house may be due to the fact that we exchanged Gleek for one of my nephews. She is having a rural-Idaho adventure at my brother’s house, while Nephew is here in suburbia with us. Nephew’s presence is new and interesting to my boys. He falls between them in age and the three of them play together for hours without conflict. My house has been quiet all week long, except for those times when the boys play a video game or watch a movie. Even when they are not quiet, it is not the sort of noisy which requires any intervention. It is lovely and I miss my Gleek. I miss her a lot. She called me today because she was sad and not feeling well. We only talked for a couple of minutes. It was enough for me to tell that mostly she’s having a great time. There are chickens! and Bunnies! and Cats! and dirt for digging! It made me realize how much my girl would love to live in a place with bigger boundaries and more independence. I’ll have to provide more of those for her when she gets back.

We need to figure out a way for Howard to have a lull. He needs a month when he can just work calmly and happily without feeling rushed. I’ve been scrambling to try to arrange it for almost two years now, it hasn’t quite happened yet. I have my eye on fall. He gets to go to a writer’s retreat then, and I really hope that it will be rejuvenating for him. I hope that my writing can begin to earn income, so that he doesn’t have to push so hard all the time.

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Summer Afternoons

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Summer afternoons exist outside of measurement by clocks. They commence sometime around lunch and continue to exist until dinner. The surest way for me to miss a scheduled appointment is to place it in the middle of a summer afternoon. I would feel bad about this, except somehow it is hard to dredge up a proper load of guilt and anxiety when the kids are out back running through the sprinklers while eating popsicles.

Unfortunately summer evenings are less timeless. Clocks tick and chime to remind me that it is now 9 pm and many of the things I intended to accomplish remain incomplete. In the evening, when the warm summer sun has vanished, I calculate and plan. I revise lists. I promise myself to work harder because the tasks really do need to get done. But since it is already 9 pm, it really is too late to get started. Bedtime is near and I should unwind for sleep. The lists are made and I’ll get right on them in the morning.

Summer morning defies alarm clocks. We are free from the relentless march of school schedules and I find myself sleeping until I am done. Being rested is good, but when I finally get moving on the day I have a mere two or three hours before I find myself once again in the midst of a summer afternoon. So I slide through days or a week, attempting to be focused and not quite managing it. At the moment this is fine. I’m in a business lull which was extended because we delayed the opening of pre-orders by two weeks. I have to trust that the necessary energy and drive will be available when I need it again. For now, I need to hand out another round of popsicles and spend some time outdoors.

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Facing My Manuscript Yet Again

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Once again I discover why the “Don’t argue with a critique” rule is so important. I got two critiques back on my book in the past week. One of them prompted a strong “you just don’t get what I am trying to do!” response in me. I also felt a bit discouraged about the project as a whole. I did not vent those feelings at the critiquer, thus making her reluctant to critique me again and possibly fomenting familial strife. Instead I let the thoughts simmer. Once all the emotional reactions simmered away, I could see that she was right. She pin-pointed the same problem spots that were also pin-pointed by the second critique (which I opened up just this morning.) Now I just have to figure out what solutions to apply. It will be interesting when my third requested critique arrives if she picks out the same issues.

So now I’m back to fiddling with my manuscript, making it all tighter, feeling like it may be worthwhile after all. I certainly hope so, because I’ve got queries out and it is being entered into a local contest by the beginning of next week.

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The Third Day of Camping

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On the third day of camping the adults all lounge in chairs talking while the teenage cousins play a card game and the younger cousins construct a branch fort nearby. The air is warm and cloud cover prevents anyone from feeling over heated. All the scheduled events of the family reunion are over and departure is not imminent. Relaxation is the name of the day. The third day of camping is why I enjoyed going to these extended family reunions.

Of course I can not start with the third day. If I could then it would all be the third day. Instead I must manage the first day when I arrive at an unfamiliar place full of unexpected risks. The kids make me anxious, not by doing anything wrong, but merely because they are inspired to do new things and go new places. I lose sight of them and have no idea where they’re likely to have gone. Did they heed the siren song of the creek despite the warnings to stay away from it? Did they “go for a hike” and lose themselves in the woods? Did they wander into the neighboring campground among people who are complete strangers rather than the familiar-to-me extended relatives who are still strangers to them? My mommy radar ratchets up to full-gain and I don’t sit still much. The first day also has the setting-up-of-camp, the sorting-of-responsibilities, and the joyful-greetings-of-relatives-long-unseen. The first day isn’t all bad, but it certainly isn’t restful even when it tries to be.

The second day of camp is scheduled. There are planned activities and events. This is when all those cousins of four different generations gather and try to create a common feeling based on biological relation and shared laughter. Challenges are issued and met. Games are played. The management of these things requires emotional energy and enormous quantities of tact while trying to cajole the sometimes-reluctant participants. I fall in the sometimes-reluctant category. I can see the value of building family identity, at the same time I prefer a more observational position. I glide through the reunion, touching lightly on the activities, appreciating the enjoyment around me, and keeping track of my younger two children whose activities in camp have just begun to develop predictable patterns. I can now trust that their definition of “stay in camp” is in near accord with mine.

Like the first and second days at camp, the first and second nights follow. I never sleep well on the first night, thus adding a haze of fatigue to the second day. The second night is always better, a fact which I chant to myself in the wee hours of the first night when I snap awake yet again. The bugs and dirt seem to peak about the middle of the second day, then I become accustomed and stop minding. This is good because collecting cups full of inchworms manifests as Gleek’s favorite camp activity. Inchworms are collected and set free constantly. It becomes a pattern and I know that when she’s gone from sight, she is likely at the inchworm hunting ground behind the restrooms. Link and Patch spend more time in camp, tethered there by the fact that Grandpa brought his iPad and DS3. Batteries only last so long before they must be charged, then the boys ping around the camp not sure what to do with themselves so far away from their usual pursuits. By the second day they begin to discover activities. Patch borrows a pocket knife and whittles at sticks. Link helps to build a fort, has a water fight, plays cards with cousins. The first day I hear constant complaints of boredom, by the third day no one is bored anymore.

Howard and Kiki join us on the third day. They come then because they are finally free of the obligations which kept them at home. Howard heads home soon after delivering Kiki, but Kiki falls right in with the third day of camp. Because the rest of us have achieved that over-tired relaxation she is able to skip lightly across boredom and join us in mellow. It is good. We luxuriate in a long slow afternoon and then climb in the car to go home. This trip will not teach us about the fourth day and beyond. Perhaps another time. For now I will imagine them as extensions of the third day, although I suspect that by the fifth day there would be a new phase wherein everyone is oh-so-ready-to-be-done-with-camping-now.

The afternoon of the third day of camping is lovely. I shall have to visit it again sometime.

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The Girl on the Elevator

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Most elevator rides vanish from memory because they are non-events, this one lingered. The opening events of the convention had concluded so Mary and I were headed to our shared room on the 9th floor. With us in the small space were half a dozen other people bound for some floor beyond ours. At six the doors opened and a teenaged girl stumbled into the elevator with a gasp that could have been the intake of breath after uproarious laughter or might have been the end of a sob. We all stepped back to make room for her, as one does on an elevator. She turned and leaned into a corner, her face was red with tears and she continued to give shuddering gasps.

Usually the sight of someone crying fills me with sympathy, I reach out to help unless the situation is already under control. Yet something in this young woman’s face declared “Look how distraught I am. Pay attention to me.” The girl gasped again and snot blew out of her nose, trailing down her face. She turned to the elevator in general and said “Are any of you going to Great America?” This reference to the amusement park a few blocks away made me wonder if she’d been frightened by a ride, but surely fright would have worn off before she finished the trek to our hotel and up to the 6th floor. No one in the elevator answered right away. None of us moved and yet somehow it felt as if all of us had taken a step back from the overwrought emotion on display.

I’d barely had time to process the young woman’s behavior and my reaction to it when the elevator doors opened again. Floor 9. I hesitated for just a moment before the “it’s my floor I must get off” instinct kicked in. Another woman had leaned toward the girl, obviously intending to help. Her motion triggered the “situation is handled” circuit in my brain. Mary and I stepped off the elevator and the doors concealed the unfolding drama from our eyes.

“I’m a little glad not to be dragged into that.” I said. Mary agreed. Yet thoughts of that girl resurfaced throughout the weekend. Because I walked away I would never know if her drama was the over-reaction of a young person or if she was in true distress. Her behaviors were so out-of-context from everything else. Her entrance was so over-the-top that My brain had to circle through suspicion before I could engage sympathy on her behalf. She was well dressed and healthy. She had no physical injuries. In some ways her behavior seemed like an act, part of a scam. All of these factors bounced around in my brain, but our exit arrived before I had enough data to figure out how I should feel about her.

On the final morning of the convention I was ambushed by an unexpected pocket of sadness. I found myself discussing with Mary my homesickness for California. It was an odd homesickness, because I’ve visited my native state many times and never felt it before. Mary listened kindly as I sorted my thoughts out loud and offered tissues when the conversational paths made my eyes leak.
“I’m sorry.” I said as I wiped my eyes and blew my nose.
“Why do people apologize for showing honest emotion?” Mary mused in a quiet voice which made clear to me that she thought no less of me for my tears. Before I could answer her question, Mary found the answer for herself. “Because we don’t want to be the girl on the elevator.”

Displays of emotion are hard to ignore. We’re wired to pay attention to them, to react. The emotions of others either draw us in or repulse us. I wanted to defend myself from the emotions of the girl on the elevator. Whatever she was feeling was strong, like an undertow with the power to pull a swimmer out to sea. I am not surprised that I reacted by stepping out. Social convention says that we only reach out to strangers when we are truly desperate, that level of desperation was out of place in a hotel elevator. If the girl had stepped on the elevator calmly, if she had been trying to hide her tears, I would have felt differently about our encounter. It would have demonstrated a level of rationality which would have increase my belief that she really needed help. How odd it is of me to be more ready to help someone who has a measure of control rather than one who displays open desperation.

I wish I had better or more solid conclusions to draw from this. All I have are observations about how easy it is to decide to step out of someone else’s crisis.

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Emperor Pius Dei Arrives at Our Door

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I woke this morning to a head full of stress. We’d been told that the advance copies of Emperor Pius Dei would ship out yesterday, but I’d gotten no shipment notifications. Even if the package shipped out today, I did not think it could arrive before we were due to open pre-orders on Monday morning. While we can open pre-orders before the advance copies arrive, we really don’t like to. I like being able to hold the book in my hands and know that we have something which is of salable quality. Holding the book in my hands quiets all those voices in my head which gleefully list all the ways It Could All Go Wrong. Howard and I discussed the situation and decided that we would open pre-orders anyway, particularly since we’d already announced that we would.

Then the doorbell rang and a lovely Fed Ex lady handed me a box. It was full of these:

We have our advance copies and my panic can now subside.

The arrival of advance copies and impending opening of pre-orders shifts my life into a different gear. I’m pulling out rusty skills and putting them to use creating product pages and stress testing the system. I’ve done this 10 times. I know how it goes, so the jitters I feel are not a surprise. I’d gladly skip them if I could, but the opening of pre-orders is when all my zen about our finances vanishes. Either we’ll sell enough books to continue paying our bills through the end of the year, or we’ll be scrambling to restructure our lives around a massive financial hole. Book printing and mortgage bills need to be paid whether or not the Schlock fans decide to spend money. They have never failed us yet. I know I should trust in them because they are awesome people. And yet I can’t help feeling that each book purchase is a gift to us and I can’t make myself expect gifts.

I did have a nice moment when I lined up all the books to take product photos. We’re offering an “Emperor’s Bundle” which includes all seven Schlock books at a discounted price. I looked at all the books arrayed on the table and knew that those books would not exist without me. I have worked and sacrificed to make them exist. Howard has worked and sacrificed. For a minute as I looked at them on the table, they were their own reward. Then I photographed them so that they could go out into the wilds of the internet and hopefully return with friends bearing gifts of money.

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New Things I am Learning

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1. How to research and query agents. I’m starting by asking my friends about their agents, once I’ve dried up that source of information I’ll resort to the internet.

2. How to set up our online store for a pre-order. This is one of those things which I expected to learn once, but instead I have to re-learn every time I do it. The software keeps updating and changing in between pre-orders. Also our needs shift and change from book to book. On the list of things to research for the store: how to set it up to deliver electronic only files and if it can track orders based upon how a customer arrived at the site. (It would be useful to be able to figure out if a tweet or a blog post is more effective in driving sales.)

3. Graphic design. I have text books sitting on my desk and gathering dust. I fully intend to study them and get better at this job I’ve been doing for four years now. I want to know how to purposefully create rather than just muddling through.

4. How to manage four kids at home all day and still get my work done. Again, it seems I should know how to do this, but the kids change from one year to the next making hard things easy and introducing new hard things. Also the summers have different demands, different camps, different scheduled items. Last year there were swim lessons, this year I haven’t scheduled any. This year there will be a summer drama camp if I can ever get in touch with the teacher long enough to get the kids registered. Generally I get it figured out just in time for everything to shift around again.

5. Marketing. There are always marketing things to learn. If I learn and apply marketing skills then (in theory) we will have more money. More money means less immediate stress. I like being less stressed, but I still don’t like marketing.

6. Freelance non-fiction writing. I’m just on the front edge of this, beginning by emailing some people I know who do it. I have enough writing skill that I could be earning money this way. But before I can earn money I have to figure out how to find people who are willing to pay for my words. Then I have to figure out what kinds of words I am willing to sell. Ideally I’d be able to sell some of my essays with only minor revision. Getting paid is not the only aspect of this which interests me. I like being able to say things which are useful to others.

7. How to make over a dress. I already know a lot of sewing, but a make-over project is inherently dictated by what already exists. I have to figure out each step as I go. I’m also doing researches on acquiring discounted materials.

8. How to pick up and start writing a new project after completing a large project. This one is harder than I would have thought.

It would be so lovely to be able to focus on learning one new thing and be really excited by it. That is not my life. I’m not sure that luxury comes to very many people in this world. At least most of these things do not have fear attached. I like it when I can learn without being driven by terror of failure.

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First day of Summer Break

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It is now 4pm and I have accomplished exactly none of my usual Monday Morning business tasks. A small piece of my brain is ready to panic since this is obviously evidence that I will never get any work done all summer long and we are dooomed. Except we aren’t. The first day of a new schedule is always rough. I’ll see how it goes again tomorrow. If the problem persists for more than a couple of days, I’ll make adjustments. We’ll make kids and business co-exist in the house during the same hours one way or another.

For now, I’m tired and done trying to work.

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Snippets from the Weekend

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Our friend Mike got baptized yesterday morning. It was one of many decisions he has made to change his life from drifting and unhappy, into focused and goal-oriented. Mike has taken control of his life and is choosing who he wants to be. The fact that he picked our church brings us joy, but even more joyful is seeing how he chooses every day to do hard things because they take him where he wants to go. Most adults are not willing to dare to change so much about who they are. It inspires me to look at my own life and see if there are things that I am afraid to change.

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Yesterday evening Howard was grouchy and decided to get out of the house. He wandered his way down to the Provo Festival of Books where several of our published author friends were presenting. Within an hour he called me because he’d arranged for a whole group to head out for dinner. I set Kiki and Link to babysitting the younger two and then drove myself down to join them. The world is a wonderful place when we can gather a group of friends for dinner and then later realize that 4 of them are New York Times bestselling authors and one was a Nebula award winner. All that authorial importance at the table and somehow the evening was completely lacking in ego. I love being at the table with high-energy creative people. They work really hard and that is why they have succeeded. Just as inspiring to me were the other people at the table, the ones who have not yet earned banner success, but who are also high-energy creative people. Dinners like that one are one of the rewards for the fretting and work we do much of the rest of the time.

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The snowball bush is finally in bloom. Usually the blooms arrive in mid-May, but they were delayed by the cool weather. This means it is time for the annual snowball bush flower fight. This is where the kids pick snowball-shaped clusters of white flowers and throw them at each other or fling them into the air like confetti. Also in full bloom are my irises. They’re swirling their petals like Spanish dancers and filling the air with a spicy floral scent. These things thrive despite my neglect of them in recent years. I hope that this summer I can spend more time with them.

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The thought arrived during the closing hymn. We were on the second verse of “Be Thou Humble” when I knew that though my currently-in-query-process book and all my future writings will bring me criticisms, the good accomplished by them will far outweigh the negative criticism. It was a calming thought. I have been much worried about how bad reviews and hateful comments would injure me. My book is based in my life and it will be very hard to remain objective. I have some of the same concerns in my blog. I often have an impulse to leave things unsaid and thus shield myself. But the good will outweigh the difficulty. I can hold on to that.

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The chore lists have been updated and placed on our bulletin board in the kitchen. Each child has a grid. Seven days of the week across and ten weeks down. Each day that they complete their list of chores they fill in a square. At the end of the week, each filled square represents allowance money. Each completely filled week adds to the bonus which they can earn at the end of the summer. It is a new iteration of an old system, and thus more easily understood by the kids than explained in words. They all contemplated their charts, running calculations in their heads about money they could earn and what they could buy. I look at the charts and hope that they will help tame the household chaos and teach my kids the value of daily effort. Howard and I also have daily household chore lists. We could learn the same daily effort lesson in regards to household maintenance. The system will probably fall apart. I just hope it is tight enough to last through 10 weeks of summer.

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I sat on a stool in my kitchen reading out loud from a manuscript page. Kiki was rolling out biscuits as she listened. Link and Patch just sat in chairs, listening with bright eyes and smiles. Mom reading aloud is fairly common, but this story was about them. One of the rules I set myself for my book was that the kids would get ultimate approval about what I say about them. This was their chance to hear my words and tell me what they thought. They loved hearing the stories, even when the stories were about their mis-behaviors and childishness. We still have more to read, but thus far only Link has requested a change. It is a minor wording change which will leave the heart of the story intact. It is a small thing to do to acknowledge to my kids that their opinions matter to me.

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The Gateway to Summer

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It is the last day of school. Two of my kids are at their elementary school for an hour and a half. My junior high and high schoolers are both at home since no one takes role on the last day and they don’t see much point in wandering around in the halls carrying yearbooks. In 30 minutes I’ll retrieve the younger pair and the school year will be officially over.

The end of a school year is usually an event of high emotion to me. I’m either eagerly ready to be done with a year that is hard, or dreading the end of a year that was good. Often I feel both ways about different children, or even the same child, if the year has been particularly… interesting. For the past few years I looked toward the onset of summer schedule with dread. I panicked about organizing 6 people in one house all day long so that work was maximized and squabbling was minimized. I also tend to dread the influx of lunches. Fixing meals is not my favorite activity and with the kids at home I have three per day instead of just two. The end of the school year also carries with it much angst about what the following year will be. No matter how hard the current year was, it was at least a known quality. The year to come could be so much worse.

If you pay attention to tenses in the previous paragraph (but not too close, my tenses probably don’t hold up to intense scrutiny) you will notice that I talked about all that high emotion in past tense. It has all been absent this year. Today is the end of school and my entire emotional reaction has been to shrug and dust off the summer chore lists from last year. It is possible that I simply used up all my end-of-year hand wringing back in April when I helped my older two register for classes and filled out paperwork for my younger two to be transferred to a different school. All the choices are made and my psyche seems inclined to let them lay until (probably) sometime in August. Also there doesn’t seem to be much point in panicking about having all the kids home while I’m trying to work. I’ve done it before and sorted it out. We’ll figure it out again.

What I’m feeling is not apathy. It’s not that I don’t care. It is that I don’t feel stress. The calmness is nice. I can save all my panic for the upcoming book pre-order, book shipping, and three major conventions in six weeks. Perhaps it is simply that Conservation of Anxiety means that I’ve already met my anxiety quota for the summer and I don’t have any left to spill over onto the end of school. Except that I don’t feel particularly anxious right now. I feel like we’re going to move calmly and seamlessly into a nice summer routine.

Tune in next week for : Sandra finds her stress, a blog in four parts about how bored kids can squabble over anything.

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