Sandra Tayler's Blog, page 48

Spending Saturday

Saturday evening with my four kids downstairs shouting and laughing over Super Smash Bros Brawl. Mid battle my two daughters start singing a song together, one with a familiar tune, but non-standard lyrics. It is a pretty good conclusion for a day which began with me getting up before dawn to find the Greyhound stop where Kiki would get off the bus. Our day has also included some design work for me, Art work for Kiki, homework for Link. We took a break to watch giant robots punching giant monsters and to marvel at the tactical idiocy which did not have humanity setting up a patrol to guard the sole entrance from the monster realm. I mean, why let the monsters get a mile from land before trying to destroy them? Granted, they would still have had problems, but lots less property damage and many lives saved. It is a good thing that the monsters and robots are so fun to watch. Anyway. We probably could have spent more time outside in the beautiful weather. So many of my neighbors spent the day clearing their yards an preparing for winter. That would have been a good use of time. Yet it has been a good day.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Thoughts on Self Promotion

As I’m contemplating making a promotional push for the upcoming Strength of Wild Horses Kickstarter, I’m also doing much thinking about self-promotion in general. Most people I know are not comfortable saying “Look at me! Buy my stuff!” I’m no exception to that rule. In order to get this project funded I’m going to have to do a lot of promotional activities on the internet, but I made a realization which makes all of that easier. I’m not promoting me. This isn’t about me, or my career, or making money. What I am promoting is Amy and her story in Strength of Wild Horses. Unless I promote it, that story will not have the chance to be released to the public. So in the next month or so I’m going to be reaching out to people and saying “Look at this project I love. I think it is amazing. If you think so too, please pass the word along so people can know about it.” I can do that, because I love Amy and her story. I love the pictures that Angela is creating to tell Amy’s story. I love when I hear from people who have the first book and they tell me that Amy’s story is loved by their kids. I won’t be doing self-promotion, I’ll be doing Amy-promotion.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Thoughts in My Brain During the Writer Hangout

I am sitting in a room with four other writers. We’re all typing away at our computers or sometimes just staring at them. Four people being together so we can ignore each other and vanish into the worlds inside our heads. Writers are strange people. This writer’s hang out is an experiment and part of my brain is distracted by evaluating it. Is it working? Do I like this room? What if three more people show up? We’ve only got two more chairs. These chairs aren’t very comfortable. I wonder if the Book Group room at Orem Library would be better. It has cushy chairs. I’m supposed to be relaxing and creating fiction, quieting my brain. Instead there is all this noise. Distractions. The others are all typing. I wonder if I’m the only one for whom the presence of other people tugs at my attention. Or perhaps I just need to adapt, try this again until it feels normal. One thing is certain, if I had not scheduled this Writer Hangout I would not write anything today. The press of other commitments would have taken all of the time.

…

And then I open my story, the one I haven’t looked at in months. I begin typing and my awareness of the others in the room fades. I write. For six hundred words I only hear my characters. Then the room comes back. These chairs really are not comfortable. The other thoughts return, but they are no longer hectic and tense, they flow. I am calmer for having been a writer for awhile. Yet time has come to go back to the other things.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

News and Updates

Tomorrow (Thurs Oct 17) I’ll be hosting a Writer Hangout at the Provo Library from 11am – 1pm in study room #155. You’re welcome to join us. We’ll mostly be writing, but there will also be some visiting. Over the next weeks I plan to hold more of these in various locations until I find one that fits. If no one else shows, I’ll still be there, writing.

This morning we signed a lease on an office/warehouse space. It is a small space for a warehouse, but still bigger than what we’ve had before. I’m surprised how quickly and smoothly picking the right space went for us. I really expected to spend much longer looking around and feeling ambivalent. Instead I’ve got keys in my pocket and a whole new list of things to do. The landlord needs to do some cleaning and fixing, the biggest of which is to the heating system. Somehow our unit is connected to the furnace from the next unit over, which is not ideal. I have to acquire insurance for the location which covers liabilities and possible damages to inventories in case of unfortunate events. I’m also accumulating a list of things to acquire, like garbage cans. Then there will be all the moving in. It is interesting that I’m not feeling stressed by this list. Instead I feel happy, because I’m gaining more space for business and more space for family.

We’ll almost certainly be having some sort of a “help us move” event with food and merch for minion volunteers. If you’re a person with a strong back and think the idea of helping haul tons of books from a storage unit to a warehouse sounds like great fun, please email schlockmercenary@gmail.com to get onto the volunteer list. That way I can contact you when I know more details.

I’ve received word that the Tub of Happiness reprint has arrived in LA. Soon it will be on a truck bound for Utah. It will be the first thing delivered to our new location. So I’ll get to see how this works.

Angela is spending this week putting together the final art for Strength of Wild Horses. I expect to spend the lion’s share of next week putting together the Kickstarter page and generally preparing that project to launch. Once it launches I’ll need to do layout for the book and there will be lots of work to do to maintain and push the Kickstarter.

The Jay Wake Book has been sent off for what I believe will be the final test print. If this one looks good when it arrives, I’ll be making it available to the public.

I’m in the middle of layout for Longshoreman of the Apocalypse. I have the recolored strips from Travis and am in the process of cropping them and checking for errors. So fare I’ve gone through about a quarter of them and identified two fixes. Then I’ve got to put them all into place in the book. The bonus story is completely scripted and drawn. I believe it is in Travis’ hands being colored. Hopefully we’ll have the whole thing bundled up and sent off for print soon.

Howard is working on the 2014 Schlock calendar. It is about a quarter complete. I’ll have to take a pause from prepping LOTA and Kickstarter to make sure I’ve got all the calendar layout in good shape. I have to update the handy holiday list and the pages themselves. This one needs to get off to print soon so that people can have their calendars before Christmas.

We also have promised to put together the Unofficial Anecdotal History of Challenge Coins. Editorial work on that project has not begun, but needs to.

On the home front, Link and Patch are needing regular homework support. Fortunately they’re both good workers and we’ve found a rhythm that works. Gleek is enjoying her year of almost complete freedom from homework. Kiki will be coming home to visit this weekend once we figure out if she can catch a ride with friends or if she needs to ride the bus.

Wow. Lots to do. I’d better get back to it.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Getting a Warehouse for Schlock

At some point in the last month it became obvious to me that our business needs a home of its own. We’ve been making things work, reconfiguring rooms as necessary so that our family room is sometimes for play and other times a business space. I like the idea of multi-use spaces and we’ve been doing things this way for a long time because we had to. The trouble is that the highest stress work times are exactly when I would most benefit from having an organized home. Yet those same high stress work times invariably turn my home chaotic because we have boxes of inventory and shipping supplies stacked into most of the corners. My neighbors have almost never seen my front room without stacks of boxes in it. I try to comfort myself that they’re always different boxes. It is not that we’re sloppy, but the boxes are always there.

Not only are there boxes everywhere, but my shipping room is in the basement and our storage units are two miles away. This means I have to haul boxes of books from our storage unit downstairs where I rearrange books into customer packages and carry everything back up the stairs again. As systems go, it is far from efficient. We never have the space to set up a test booth so we can plan ahead. Add to all of this the fact that when Kiki comes home from college to live with us for a month in December and for the summer next year, she will be coming as an adult with an art business of her own. She simply doesn’t fit into the shared bedroom space that used to be hers. Not anymore. Which made me realize that maybe it is time for the business to grow up and move out of the house.

I began looking at office/warehouse spaces today. I expected to spend several weeks looking and thinking before finding one that would work. Instead I made an appointment with one guy who owned three units near each other. I walked into the second unit and realized that it is pretty much perfect for everything that we need, even in the right price range. Not only that but some of the left over furnishings from the prior tenant would come with it and be very useful. I looked around and knew that it would end up being the warehouse that all the other ones I looked at were compared to. I asked a lot of questions, didn’t sign anything, and came home to look at my accounts. There are so many reasons that getting a warehouse makes sense. Yet it is a scary step because it ties us to additional monthly bills and there have been times when money was very tight. We’ve put it off in order to maintain as much financial flexibility as possible.

For the last month, every time I’ve contemplated renting a warehouse I felt calm. All my contemplations on the subject both at church or at home have made me feel like this is the right choice for our family and our business at this time. I came home feeling like I ought to be scared of the financial commitment, but not actually feeling it. Howard and I talked about the space and about taking this step for the business. He felt good about it too. To be absolutely sure, I went and prayed. The answer I got was You know it’s fine. It’s what I’ve been telling you to do for weeks. So after letting all the thoughts simmer for a few more hours, I called the owner of the warehouse and left a message saying we want it. He’ll probably call me back in the morning. I’m still not scared. Well, maybe a little bit. I’ll probably have some scared when I actually sign paperwork because that is a normal pattern for me.

Once everything is squared away with the lease and the facility, we’ll have quite a bit of work to do getting tons of merchandise shifted from their current homes and into the new space. It’ll be a new phase of our business. The next adventure.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Fall Vacation

One of the advantages of being a younger sibling is that you get sneak previews into what is coming in future life stages. My younger three are getting a peek into college life this weekend. They’ve heard about dorms and colleges for most of their lives, but now they’ve walked around a campus, eaten in the student cafeteria, seen their older sister’s room, and heard stories about roommates. I keep hearing them say things that start “when I go to college…” Link in particular is looking around the school in picturing himself attending there. Which would be fine with me. I like this school, but we’ll make sure that when the time comes for him to pick a college that he doesn’t default to this one because it is the only campus that is familiar.

We rented a condo for this trip. I’ve discovered that a condo which sleeps six is more expensive than a hotel room, but less expensive than two hotel rooms. With the condo comes a sitting room, two bathrooms, and a full kitchen. Being able to cook our own food brings the cost of eating down. So far we’ve rented condos in both Moab and Cedar City. Both experiences have been good. We all love the Moab condo so much that we’ve gone back to the same one three years in a row. Having the condo space means that after we’ve been out together all day, we can spread out and have space from each other in the afternoon. Then we can gather and watch a movie together in the evening. It works out far better for us than trying to share a single hotel room.

I’ve had to learn not to attempt to script every single moment of a vacation. Sometimes vacation means going out and doing things. Other times it means hanging around the condo while the kids play on mobile devices and I sneak in an hour of working. Tomorrow is our last day here. Then we’ll bid Kiki farewell and drive home. That will be nice too.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

The Right Journal

“Every time we go to the book store, you buy a journal or two. Are you like a collector of journals? How many empty journals do you have anyway?” Gleek asked me. We were on our way home from the bookstore. She’d earned a trip out to buy something fun and while she was there I decided to see if there was something I could use to replace my almost-full journal. I opened my mouth to protest, but the answer to that last question is at least six. Pretty sure most people don’t have six empty journals waiting for words. I don’t collect journals, not really. There is no joy in just purchasing them, nor in having lots of them. It is just that once I start a journal, I have to live with it for the next year or more. This means it has to be one I like, and it is common for me to bring a journal home and realize it is not quite what I want.

So I’m not really a collector, more a picky journal keeper. For a long time I just bought the same brown or black journals because the size and texture were right. But lately I’ve wanted something prettier. I found it in a book from Peter Pauper Press, but I don’t want to get the same book again. I want something different, but still pretty. Which leaves me looking at journals that are too big, too small, to thick, too expensive, too puffy, not pretty, too plain… etc. This time I think I’ve settled on buying a book that is labeled as a refill for fancy leather journals. The cover of it is blank, which means I could do something pretty with it.

I find it amusing that Gleek is the only one of my family who has noticed my accumulation of journals, since she is also a lover of notebooks. None of hers are empty. They all have bits of stories, journal entries, sketches, and other snatches of writing in them. Almost none of them are full. Where I pick a single notebook and stick with it until it is full, Gleek flits between books as strikes her fancy. Which is fine. I like having someone who is happy to spend twenty minutes looking at journals with me.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Birth Stories

I remember being in the hospital, having just given birth to my fourth child. Howard was there too, I think the new little guy was tucked into the crook of Howard’s arm. This sort of scene is often accompanied by glowing descriptions of the wonder of life and how all of the stress is worth it, rhapsodies on the miracle of birth. That was certainly how the story of my first birth went. We were in a glow every time we looked at her, even when we felt exhausted or stressed. My second and third births also had a measure of glow, but not to the extent of that first one. The fourth birth was different. I remember feeling exhausted and somewhat in despair. I wanted to feel glowing and happy. I knew that I would love this new little person with all my heart. I was already doing everything to keep him safe and cared for, but it did not feel glowing on that day. We were too exhausted from Howard’s stressful work schedule, from four days of stop-and-go labor, from sleeping poorly in a hospital room, from knowing that birth is only the beginning of all the caretaking. I knew that tiny miracle represented weeks and months of insufficient sleep. It was hard to feel happy about that when I was feeling so worn out.

My mother came for all of my births. After my first birth she took care of me as I learned how to care for a newborn. For the rest, she took care of my older kids, plying them with stories and games while I did most of the infant care. Each time she stayed for about a week, which was just enough time for me to want to be in charge again. That fourth time she stayed for two and when she left I still wasn’t quite ready to manage it all.

In hindsight I’m pretty sure I had low level postpartum depression after that fourth birth. I didn’t recognize it because I’d not experienced it with the others. I remember holding my son and telling him he needed to hurry up and learn how to smile at me, because I needed some sort of a reward. He did smile a few weeks later and I emerged from fatigue and difficulty.

Ten years have passed and the pictures of my newborn son make me feel all mushy and happy, just as the pictures of my other three children do. The fact that I did not feel glowing and euphoric in the hours following his birth, or that I struggled for weeks afterward, does not matter. Sometimes love arrives in a rush, sometimes it seeps in unnoticed and fills the spaces. Either way, what matters is the constant nurturing and building of a relationship. My baby boy is now ten years old. The things I’ve done to build a relationship with him these past six months matters far more than whether I chose to bottle feed or if I had to take breaks from his fussing when he was two weeks old.

There are thousands of ways to do things wrong as a parent, but there are also thousands of second and third chances. I am grateful for this every day.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Adventures of the Postal Pigeon

About a week ago I opened my mailbox and burst into laughter. This is what I saw.



I think it was nice of the mailman to give her a pillow, don’t you?

I knew instantly who the pigeon was from. My friend Mary had tweeted a picture of her outgoing mail just a few days before. The pigeon was featured in the tweet along with a link to the Pigeon Post site. I even considered buying a pigeon kit because the whole idea seemed fun to me. Mary did not mention to whom she was sending the pigeon, hence my delighted surprise.

If you followed the link to the pigeon post page, you’ll note that postal pigeons have legs. This pigeon lost hers in transit.



But her message arrived intact. She sat on my counter for several days, and made me happy every time I looked at her. I was tempted to keep her, because of the happy, but the purpose of a postal pigeon is to carry messages, so I wrote a letter and refilled her pouch.



She went into the mail almost a week ago, so she has probably already arrived at someone else’s house. (First class mail arrives in two days.) I hope that friend is as happy to see her as I was.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

The First Visit Home from College

We watched the calendar, all of us, for the day when Kiki would come home to visit. We watched the clock on the day she was coming so that everything would be prepared, sheets washed, room decorated. We watched the driveway at the time she was due to catch sight of her as soon as possible.

Then she was here. Then there were hugs. We laughed. We had an evening full of being together, watching a show, playing video games. She snuggled her kitty, laughed with her siblings. I looked on them from upstairs and once again I was counting to four instead of just three. It was wonderful. Life was normal and right.

Except, we had to figure out where to put her suitcase and how to set her up for sleeping. We had to move Gleek back up to the top bunk. We had to return to the careful dance of getting Gleek to go to sleep first to dodge the frequent bedtime grouchiness. We needed to remember how many pizzas to cook with an extra person in the house. Having Kiki here made us all see the ways that the patterns of our lives have shifted in a dozen subtle ways. We are so glad she’s here. All of us have drifted to be near her just because we can. Yet her being here is no longer part of the regular rounds of our lives.

This morning Kiki was tired. She doesn’t sleep well in unfamiliar beds, and the bed that used to be hers has become unfamiliar. The dorm is sort of home and our house is sort of home. Kiki has made the discovery that though there will always be a place for her in our house, it is not the same place that she used to have. She doesn’t get to go back, just forward.

Kiki and I sat this morning and talked about how best to make space for her when she comes home. This time we made space for her in the room that she and Gleek used to share. But Kiki and I looked and knew, she does not fit in that room anymore. Kiki is grown up and needs a grown up space. On her next visit we’ll put her on the fold-out bed in my office. Perhaps that will be better.

This evening I dropped Kiki at the home of one of her college friends. They have an event this evening. It is the reason they came up from college. This friend has her own room and it is still exactly as she left it. The comparison was striking. Kiki packed up all her things when leaving our house. This friend always has a familiar space to return to. Kiki is propelled toward her future, this friend has a measure of security that isn’t available to Kiki with the way that we have done things. I don’t know that one way is better than the other, just reflective of different families and requirements. Some day Kiki will own a space that she can make exactly as she would like.

We have one more day with Kiki here. Next weekend we’ll go and visit her. This will let the other kids see the school, see her dorm, meet the friends that Kiki has found. It will be a different view on this new stage of life that we have entered. All of us are figuring out how this needs to go.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.