Category Archives: Essays

This is a very boring name for me writing about the stuff that’s on my mind. I strive to make the essays more interesting than the word “essays” and this description.

Essays

Hot Cocoa, My Way

News of Snowpocalypse 2015 had me craving blanket forts and hot cocoa (but not necessarily snow,) and then I realized that my hot cocoa recipe is good enough to share. Here it is:

Ingredients
  • 3/4 cup Hershey’s baking cocoa (the powder)
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 3/4 cup water
  • a dash of salt
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • Milk, and some mugs
Optional ingredients*
  • 1 tbsp Terva-Siirappi (Finnish pine tar syrup)
  • 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
Preparation

Put the cocoa, the sugar, and the water in a small pot. Bring it to a boil, stirring constantly with a whisk. It’s ready when it’s smooth — no cocoa clumps, no sugar granules.

Add the salt and the vanilla. At this point you have a standard dark chocolate syrup.

Add the cinnamon and the tar syrup. The cinnamon adds a very cozy aromatic flavor, and the tar syrup gives it a hint of smoke for some extra-very cozy. More tar means more smoke AND more sweet.

Now that the syrup is ready, take a mug, fill it partway with milk, and then microwave it for a minute or so. You want hot milk, not boiling milk. Now fill the cup the rest of the way with the chocolate syrup you’ve made. For an 8oz mug I do 3/4 cup of milk and 1/4 cup of syrup (at least when I’m talking about it publicly. It’s possible the syrup-to-milk ratio moves from 1:3 to 1:1 when nobody is looking.)

Stir. Enjoy.

(*Note: no, they’re actually not, but since you probably don’t have Terva-Siirappi on hand right now you get a pass. It’s remotely possible that the same effect can be achieved with a tiny bit of liquid smoke, but I’m not going to perform that experiment until, in desperation, I realize that I’m out of Terva-Siirappi.)

Essays

How My Project Budget Works

In 2014 I created a spreadsheet for project management that allowed me to be a little more realistic about what I can and cannot do. The result was that I had a very productive year in spite of losing four full work-weeks to influenza, and we went on to deliver two books, two slipcases, and a calendar in time for the holiday shopping season. And that last bit? That’s kind of a big deal when it comes to the bottom line here.

I’m doing it again in 2015. Here’s how it works:

  1. I carve my time up into twenty-hour blocks called, intuitively enough, “half-weeks” of work.
  2. I make a list of projects, and I guess how many half-weeks each of them will take. A convention weekend is a half-week. A big convention like GenCon Indy is a full week. The Writing Excuses retreat was 3 half-weeks, and I budgeted exactly right that time. Each project becomes a row in the spreadsheet. Each is assigned a priority based on the month in which it needs to be complete.
  3.  I include the comic, 52 weeks of which will take 52 half-weeks of work (This assumes that I’m able to bang out a week of strips in 20 hours. This is increasingly an unsafe assumption.) This got a priority of 9, because I needed it at the bottom of the list. I know that one has to get done each and every week. Duh.
  4. Oh Magog, the math. The spreadsheet balances my projected half-weeks of work, and subtracts it from the pool of 104 half-weeks in a year. The spreadsheet then tells me that I have too much on my plate, so I revise the estimates or prune projects. This happened in January of 2014, and after careful revision I had a year’s worth of work that fit inside a year, except that 8 months of work needed to fit inside of 5 months. But I could SEE this, and knuckle down accordingly.
  5. Each week I update the amount of work remaining in the tracking column for each project, and I input which week of the year it is in a cell that determines the size of the pool of remaining half-weeks. The spreadsheet then automatically calculates the balance, and usually it tells me that I need to cough up 60 hours or 80 hours of work during an upcoming week in order to catch up.
  6. I color-code the projects based on whether they’re scheduled items (Conventions or vacations that chop time out of my schedule), and whether they’re complete (lime green, with grey text — these are items I don’t need to look at or be distracted by, because DONE!)
  7. The spreadsheet sits in my Dropbox where I share it with Sandra. She can review it and see how I’m doing. She can also update it, though she never actually did that.

I know there are other tools for project management, but when I looked into them I realized that the amount of time I would spend learning how to work something I paid for was about equal to the amount of time I would spend building a spreadsheet I knew innately how to use, and could quickly reshape to fit the way I want to plan things. I don’t have a sanitized version of the spreadsheet to share, but maybe at some point I will.

Essays, Journal, Reviews

It’s 2015! Hello, Back to the Future, Part II

We watched Back to the Future, and then BackToTheFutureIIBack to the Future, Part II with our kids last night. The 2015 imagined by Robert Zemeckis was a satire (of course,) and lots of people have discussed where it hit and where it missed.

It was particularly interesting to watch my kids react to the film. Flying cars and hoverboards? Very cool! Self-drying clothing? Don’t be silly. People sitting around a microwave pizza engrossed in the programming on their wearable devices? Well, duh. Why’s that scene even THERE? We know THAT.

Remember the bit where Marty, Jr. watches six channels at once on the TV? My kids shrugged. Six is kind of silly. They max out at two or three — YouTube in one window, and a sandbox game like Minecraft or Terraria in a another,  and a play-through video in a third. Why would you do six if none of them are interactive?

All that aside, they liked the film, and they’re really looking forward to the third one at some point today. Me, I remember being kind of upset at the “downer” ending of Back to the Future Part II, and my memory of it was Marty standing in the rain. No, it ended with Doc Brown saying “Great Scott!” and then fainting, and those last moments of the film were far more enjoyable than I remember them. Maybe the films of the last 15 years have reprogrammed me to enjoy middle-act endings.

I could be wrong, but I think the big thing that Back to The Future Parts II and III gave us was a rebirth of serial cinema. Without their commercial success, Hollywood wouldn’t have greenlit Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and comic-book movies might still be what they were in the 80’s. Hollywood thought Zemeckis was crazy at the time. I’m glad he had Spielberg on his side, because I’ve loved the serial cinema of the last 15 years.

Essays, Journal

The Anxious, Exhausted, Exasperated Imposter

Yesterday afternoon and evening I had some issues.

Each week it falls to me to do the write-up of the Writing Excuses episode that will be airing Sunday night or Monday morning. Usually it falls to me to do this on Sunday, which is not my favorite day for getting work done. It’s also not an activity I love, because listening to myself talk while not being able to correct the stuff I get wrong (now that I’ve had more time to think about it) is painful.

This Sunday I got an email from Producer Jordo explaining that this latest episode (9.52: From the Page to the Stage) had serious source audio problems which took a long time to clean up.  Also, he said that he’d had to pull the episode from our queue for Season 10 because even after our big episode scheduling thread, we’d screwed up, and needed to post 54 episodes during 2014, leaving Season 10’s first quarter two episodes shy of where we thought it was.

Worse still, this particular episode is one in which Brandon was unavailable, so it fell to me to drive the discussion. It’s not a thing I struggle with, but those are still big shoes to fill.

Add to that the fact that I’d had horrible insomnia the night before, and I was having some mental-health moments (my inner spectator is pretty good at telling me when the depression or anxiety is unfounded)  and perhaps you can understand the perfect storm I was caught in.

I was, no lie, AFRAID to listen to episode 9.52 so that I could write a single paragraph, add some categories and tags, and post it. I was tired, anxious, frustrated, and suffering from imposter syndrome thanks to a mixture of external stimuli and bad brain chemistry.

I finally forced myself to do my job, and I could tell that the episode was pretty good. Maybe even great. Jordo’s cleanup on the audio was awesome, and the discussion flowed really well. But in spite of what I could clearly hear as a solid installment in the Writing Excuses franchise, I was still anxious and miserable. I was hanging out as much as possible with my inner spectator, but it’s easier to watch misery than to be it, but only barely.

Bad brain chemistry. Lying in bed an hour or so later I told Sandra that what I really wanted was to be happy so I could get out of the bleachers and ride the happy part instead of hiding up there while misery dominated the playing field. Only when I said it I think I rambled more.

This morning I feel fine. Sleep helps, as does a fresh dose of medication, a good breakfast, and a couple hundred milligrams of caffeine (it should be filed under “medication,” but it’s mixed with the 24 ounces of water I get at breakfast so it’s in its own category.) I look back at last night and am amazed at how poorly I was coping. Why was that so difficult? Was it really that bad?

Answer: Yes. Yes it was. And that’s why I write about these things. I need to remember that the bad brain chemistry days are real things, and while it’s possible that I’ll stop having them altogether, I’m not helping anybody if, while I’m happy, I decide that I don’t actually have a problem.

(Note: Further insight into my mental health can be found in the creative non-fiction piece “No. I’m Fine.” which you can read and share at no charge.)