I’m back from a huge week of traveling and have a big enough backlog of tasks that procrastination-through-blogging is looking pretty good, so here I am.

Fourth Street is a new-to-me convention, and also a pretty new convention in general. The impetus to attend came from the fact that I wanted to finally, finally meet Marissa Lingen in person after eight or nine years (or more) of pleasant internet-based interaction. The fact that it is also a cool regional con with a lot of other interesting people to meet was icing on the cake. (Marissa, by the way, is exactly as advertised, and don’t let her catch you disgracing your Scandinavian ancestors. It’s possible she will let it slide if you disgrace other ancestors, but you probably shouldn’t risk it.)

I arrived early and stayed late, which is unusual for me, but is much nicer than the rushed Friday evening to Sunday brunch schedule I usually keep for cons. Things started with a storytelling circle on Thursday night, in which I participated, and ended with sushi and ice cream Monday afternoon, of which I also partook.

I would say that Fourth Street is more serious in nature than the average convention, and oriented strongly towards avid lit fans and new writers. There is nothing there for media fans, there are no costumes, no dealer’s room, etc. There is filking, although Fourth Street calls it “music circle,” and my impression is that even that is a bit more earnest than the average con filk circle. (Not a filker, here, so I really have no idea.)

I felt very welcomed by the convention. I was frequently invited to join perfect strangers in their meals and activities. It seemed very easy to me to meet new people, and also easy to retreat or to sociably stick my nose in a book when I was feeling low energy or shy.

The hotel, the St. Louis Park Marriot Spring Hill Suites, is one of those places that caters to business travelers. The meeting space was perhaps slightly inadequate, but otherwise the hotel was lovely. Very clean and well-appointed. The suites were capacious and included a proper kitchenette. The rates were extremely affordable.

There were a couple of slight drawbacks to the hotel, however. Lack of a bar and restaurant left no default option for eating and drinking. Folks quickly discovered a nearby liquor store and adapted, and in the end I think this saved a lot of money, but it still wasn’t quite the same as having a “the bar.”

Also, I got kind of tired of eating out, leading to a major self-care fail on Sunday evening. Being unmotivated to seek out another restaurant meal, which would involve either tracking down companions or doing the lonely “table for one” thing, I retreated to my room and wallowed in self-pity instead. Delivery options were scarce, as I wasn’t interested in pizza. Normally, when I hit that wall, I order room service, but that wasn’t an option.

I realize now what I should have done was fill the minifridge with some basic food from the nearby grocery so that I could have that “don’t feel like going to a restaurant and by the way I am alone in a strange city surrounded by strangers” episode. I will do that next time.

This experience does make me more interested in attending out-of-state regional conventions, because I realized that Michigan fandom is very familiar with me. It was interesting to have conversations with fans and writers outside my usual orbit, and realize that there are rewarding connections to be made and business to be done. (Yes, I did some business at Fourth Street.)

Usually, I either stay in-state where everybody already knows me and my whole deal, or I attend large national conventions with a lot of heavy hitters where folks are not terribly interested in me and my little career, so I am feeling the love for the small regional cons.

Any recommendations for cool, small cons outside of Michigan to visit? (Granted I have limited money and time budget for conventions, but it’s something I’d like to think about.)

My friend Jim C. Hines wrote a good blog post about personal boundaries using a brownie-pushing coworker as a stepping off point. The post and its comments are very interesting reading, and explore a lot of the complicated motivations behind the brownie-pushing phenomenon. As complicated as the problem is, the solution is simple. You set your own boundaries and enforce them. If other people are hurt because you don’t want their brownies, that is their problem, not yours.

Boundaries are something I’ve been working on in the past couple of years. Being an author, even a very obscure one as I am, involves attracting a certain amount of attention. If you are the kind of person who hates to say no and tries to please everyone, this can become a huge source of stress and unhappiness, and will sabotage and possibly kill your writing career. Working on boundary-setting is something I’ve had to do out of self-defense. No choice. Otherwise my time and energy disappear into a vortex.

How am I doing that? Well, a couple of ways.

1. Time. I am in charge of my own time. No one else is. No one is going to make sure that I have time to exercise, to eat right, to pay my bills, to spend time with my family. No one is looking out for that except for me. That means if I myself am not doing the job, it doesn’t get done. Several years ago, I struggled to schedule time for those things, even though I was a freelancer setting my own hours. What happened was that I would make a schedule for myself, but if a client or a business associate wanted the time I set aside for myself, I would give it up very easily. I would rationalize that I could do that yoga class later, or work on that novel another time.

Well, guess what? That other time never came. But I was too afraid that those contacts would disappear if I didn’t accommodate them COMPLETELY. I was afraid of losing jobs and losing friends. I even remember getting up at 5 AM to do a phone interview to Asia once. Crazy!

After a while, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I started small by protecting my yoga time. I decided if someone wanted to set up an appointment during my yoga time, I would do something simple, but very hard. I would say no.

Oh, how hard it was! How many times I caught myself saying yes, then kicked myself. How many times I got off track and forgot what I was doing, and fell into old habits. It took me months to learn how to say no to conflicts with yoga and really stick with it. Maybe even a year.

But once I finally committed to it, I got my yoga time. I really got it. And that opened the door for me to control my own schedule (imagine that!) in other ways. Today my freelance career is very different. I compartmentalize time for my work and time for myself, and it all works because if one conflicts with another, I say no. Sorry. Period.

2. Relationships. Historically, a certain degree of insecurity, social anxiety, and naivete has led me to accept any and all friendship “offers” I receive, and then to work hard to please those friends, at times accepting levels of intimacy I wasn’t really comfortable with. I was like one of those hoarders who thinks she’s an antique collector, but has actually filled her house with stacks of old National Geographics and carefully cleaned out styrofoam meat trays. I made no distinction between relationships that are good for me and feed me, and those that are unhealthy and drain me.

As a writer, this became even more complicated, because our professional networks overlap heavily with our friendship networks. Other writers and editors are not just people we work with. They are people who understand “the life” and who share my values and aspirations.

But spreading myself thin over so many “friends” makes it impossible to build and maintain all of those relationships. The solution? I’m sorry, but not everyone can be my close personal friend or family member. It’s just a matter of physics.

One thing I’ve done is change my facebook friending policy. My facebook is now for real life friends only. I’m sorry if that excludes some people who would like to be included. I have over 200 facebook friends, even under this newly restricted policy. It’s enough.

Another strategy I’ve implemented is saying no to real-world invitations and social commitments. It feels harsh. Oh, so harsh. But once you start saying, “I’m sorry, I’m not available,” it gets easier.

Results. Some good things have come about from the changes I’ve made. One is that I’ve learned how unpersonal and unmalicious some of these denials and exclusions are. There is no ill will behind it, only conservation of limited resources. This makes me more understanding when I encounter those limits in others.

In the past, I have probably not accepted these kinds of limits from others very gracefully, because I had not matured enough myself to understand that you can like and appreciate a person very much, and still not have time for them.

It makes sense. If you think of an extreme case (not myself), a young person who has not been able to develop and enforce self-boundaries because of abuse by the adults in her life, she is not going to understand what is going on when she encounters someone with healthy boundaries who enforces them. She is going to assume that other person will do whatever others ask of her, as long as they are important enough, and so a denial must be a sign of unimportance and uncaring.

Conversely, if a person develops healthy boundaries, and is ok with saying no, and not afraid of being socially abandoned or punished, then she can be ok with denials and refusals from others. She doesn’t need to seek acceptance and approval from others by pushing or pleading with them. She can shrug and say, “Ok, maybe we’ll have a clown limbo contest another day,” and not feel hurt and wonder why someone who is supposedly her best friend would not want to do clown limbo.

These days I find myself much more willing to take statements at face value, and I also am not as bothered if I think people don’t like me, because I do have more than enough friends. I have so many that I have to say no to them sometimes. If a few drift away because they can’t deal with that, then so be it.

As a writer, too, this emotional self-sufficiency can have benefits. As much as we love our tribe, we can’t be best friends with everyone, and inevitably there will be folks we don’t get along with. So what? You make the connections you can, enjoy them, and focus your energy where it will do the most good, which is on the work itself.

Go ahead and start saying no. When nothing bad happens, you will feel awesomely free.

Here are a couple of other meditations on writers saying no by Amy Sundberg and Laurel Amberdine.

Entropy is generally one of the less organized forces in the physical world, for obvious reasons. It doesn’t have to mount a concerted attack. It just sort of sits on you and waits. Not so this weekend, however. We fell victim to so many entropy attacks that we think entropy and gravity may have switched gigs temporarily just for fun.

Act I, the Washing Machine

Things started out not-too-upsetting with a washing machine breakdown. We were early adopters when Frigidaire/Gibson came out with their front-loading, stacking washer/dryer units in the late-nineties, and we’re still using them. Every couple years, though, there’s a belt that wears out or a switch that fries or something, and we have to replace it. That’s what happened Friday, when the washing machine failed to finish its cycle.

It wouldn’t have normally been a huge problem, except that we were just about to travel for the weekend, and I had a washing machine full of soggy-but-not-clean laundry, plus a pile of Defcon 5 sweaty workout clothes that I couldn’t just leave sitting around for 48 hours.

Frustrated, but not yet beaten, I carried the soggy-but-not-clean load and the Defcon 5 sweaty workout clothes up to our porch (the same one that soon won’t exist) and laid it all out flat on the floor to dry as it was, or at least to mildew evenly, and we left for our weekend trip to Grandma’s farm on the west side of Michigan.

Flashback, the Chainsaws

At this point, actually, we’d already been puzzled by the odd behavior of our chainsaws. We own two Makita chainsaws, a small one and a big one. Earlier this week, Brent found that neither one would start, which is odd. The small one had been used, but the large one was brand new. He is trying to remove some brush and small trees in advance of our home renovation, so it was really frustrating that instead of doing the actual job, he was spending a lot of time repairing his tools so he could do the job. That turned into a theme for the weekend.

There seemed to be some progress when Brent bought some fancy, super clean mixed 2 cycle gas and small chainsaw started up. But then big chainsaw gave it a stern look and both of them clammed up and refused to start at all. That situation, too, was unresolved when we left for our weekend trip.

Act II, the Lawn Mower

Grandma’s five-acre lawn was in need of mowing when we arrived. My son had reached the age of thirteen, traditional age of lawn mowing among my people, so I asked if he would like to use Grandma’s riding mower to mow the lawn. Our nephew, who was there helping Grandma with some other stuff, warned us that the battery was dead and we’d have to jump start it to get it go.

There ensued more than an hour of lawn mower repair activities before we finally got it going. The lawnmower battery was completely dead. Brent ended up pulling a battery of the same size and type from a chipper that was broken in a different way, but had a usable batter. This other battery was not completely dead, but it was also not charged, so the lawnmower still needed a jump start, provided by our car, but the theory was that the battery would charge up and the mower could now start on its own.

This was where we first suspected entropy was out to get us. The barn is full of power tools and old vehicles. But Grandpa stopped doing much in the way of farm work or tool maintenance a couple years before he died in 2011, and since then obviously even less has been done. Every time we thought of a tool or piece of equipment that could solve our current problem, THAT tool or piece of equipment then manifested a malfunction of its own. It was like being in a tragically backwards Rube Goldberg machine, where before we can mow the lawn, we have to do a list of other time consuming chores starting with unclogging a drain fifteen miles away.

We did get the mower started, however, and Glen mowed most of the lawn before the mower stalled and would not start again.

Act III, Watering the Corn

My nephew, the same one who warned us about the lawn mower, planted about half an acre of corn at Grandma’s house, and he was very excited to see it had sprouted. The weather has been very dry, so I offered to water it for him the next morning, before it got too hot. I thought that would be pretty simple and hands off. I was so wrong.

After four hours of moving the sprinkler around the cornfield, but ending up with alternating dry patches and swampy patches, I stood near the sprinkler while it was running to figure out what the problem was. It turned out it wasn’t resetting itself. If I poked the mechanism with my finger, it would swing back to the beginning of its arc. Otherwise, it would just sit there and throw water onto the same spot forever.

We didn’t want poor Grandma to have to struggle with this sprinkler later when we weren’t there, so we decided to lay out the soaker hoses they had in their barn. This ended up taking hours. I had to use ALL of my college calculus to figure out a way to cover all of the corn with the hoses we had. Then there was the process of running back to the barn to turn the water on to test the hoses, finding a problem, turning it off, and starting over. We had to switch out three of the hoses for leaks and bad connections. We finally got it working and turned it on. All told, it took from about 8 in the morning Sunday until 2 PM to get the corn watered.

Act IV, Lawn Mower Again and Always

It still seemed like the lawnmower might just need a better battery, so we tried charging up the new-old battery we put in it. First we had to push the lawnmower back into the barn, which was not easy since it apparently has no neutral gear. We got it into the barn, and Brent hooked it up to the battery charger, which may or may not have been working properly. The battery appeared to charge. It made little buzzy charging sounds. But when we tried to start up the mower, nothing happened. It wouldn’t turn over. It wouldn’t even try.

Although Glen was standing by with his ear muffs ready, we were not able to get the mower started so he could finish the lawn.

Act V, the Washing Machine Again No I am Not Kidding

I went through all of my spare clothes watering the corn. It was a sweaty, messy job and I had to change after my confrontation with the broken sprinkler. After being out in the sun a couple hours, I fantasized about spraying myself with the hose, but then decided to hold out for a shower, which would be much better.

When we were done with the hoses and the mower, Brent and his mother made a quick trip to the store, and I started a load of laundry. Brent was out of clean clothes, too. I grabbed all of the clothes we weren’t wearing and put them in Grandma’s washing machine while they were out, intending to shower as soon as I had some clean clothes to change into.

When Grandma got home, she said, “Oh, you fixed my washing machine?”

I said, “Um, it’s broken?” Around that time, the washer quit working, and could not be started up again. I was left with a small load of laundry floating in very dirty, ice-cold water. By that time, Brent was already in the shower, not knowing that laundry apocalypse had struck twice.

Very lucky for him, I had left him a not-very-dirty outfit that he had worn to a party the night before, so he was able to put on something less dirty than he was wearing before. In fact, I’d even picked up that last outfit, figuring it might be a good idea to wash everything, since we were going home to a broken washer. Fortunately, I decided it was too much trouble and I would just wash what we needed, so the new washing machine breakdown left us mostly where we started.

At that point, we gave up and headed for home, with our wet clothes in a plastic bag.

Brent managed to fix our washer here at home (knock wood), so I think Gravity and Entropy have gone back to their regular jobs, and Entropy is only just sitting on us, not smashing us under its boot heel.

The passing of Ray Bradbury has not touched me in a particularly personal way. Since enduring so much personal loss in the past couple of years, I am wary of claiming the losses of others as my own. Compared to the megaton nuclear impact of losing a loved one, any little electric shocks of grief I may feel over the loss of an acquaintance or celebrity are merely pale echos, and the energy I spend attracting attention to myself by eulogizing someone who is already excessively eulogized could be channeled to writing a sympathy note or giving support to someone close to me who needs it.

Okay, what can I say, I’m a little neurotic about death these days.

Anyway, all of this is to say that I do not have a eulogy of Ray Bradbury, or a testimonial of how his writing changed my life. I do, however, have a cute anecdote that illustrates his legacy.

Yesterday, I was chatting over the fence with my neighbor. He said, “I thought of you today, because that scifi writer died.” “Ray Bradbury?” I said. “Yes,” he answered. “Do you still write scifi?”

I told him yes I do, and fetched a copy of the June issue of Analog for him, with my story, “Titanium Soul.” I’d meant to give it to him anyway, because Smitty the cat from Titanium Soul is, in fact, his much-beloved cat, who died five or six years ago. (The neighbor in the story, however, is not modeled on the real life neighbor.)

So while I understand that Bradbury has not been able to write for more than a decade, his passing is reminding many people of what they love, or once loved, about SF. In addition to many copies of Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury’s passing may also inspire a few people to check out the newer science fiction, and discover new authors to love. Maybe they’ll even stop by the magazine rack at their bookstore and pick up a copy of Analog.