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Last night Drew and I watched Silence of the Lambs and then The Shining.  Loved them both. 

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Silence of the Lambs was shot more artistically than I expected it to be.  Through most of the dialogue, the characters’ faces are framed up close, looking straight at the camera.  Constantly staring into Hannibal Lector’s eyes is frightening all by itself.  The performances were every bit as good as people said they were. 

Also, I was very surprised by the plot.  Apparently I hadn’t had it as spoiled for me as I thought I had. 

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I’d seen The Shining years ago, and it was every bit as scary as I remembered.  Maybe more so.  

I remembered it being a pretty straightforward horror flick.  But I’d forgotten what makes it so scary.  There are supernatural elements, but the crux of the scary is that the female protagonist is locked in a hotel with her abusive and homicidal husband.  And it isn’t just the supernatural elements that make him that way.  Their relationship shows patterns of abuser and enabler from the very start. 

Stephen King understands not just how to scare people, but what actually makes people scared.  The Shining is scary not because of the ghosts, but because there are real women whose husbands talk to them that way, yell at them that way, isolate them that way, threaten them that way.  Because some husbands really do kill their wives.  And even if they aren’t literally isolated in a snowbound hotel, abusers are good at making their victims feel like they are.  Yes, the supernatural elements are scary.  But scarier by far are the pieces of the film that are real. 

Also, Jack Nicholson is the scariest person imaginable.  Not even Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal can compare.

That is all. 

Dear Janci Patterson of  August 2007,

I regret to inform you that in two years, you, hater of all things mathematical, will have the unfortunate experience of becoming, among other things, a business accountant. 

It is tempting to believe that the decisions that lead you to this predicament are those you’ve just made–becoming engaged and deciding to start a business.  But that isn’t true.  You put yourself on this path many years ago.  Let’s review.

In your first year of college you decided to become a writer.  (This is not the decision that causes you to become an accountant.  Hang with me.)  For many years, people responded to this news by asking you what you were *really* going to do with your life.  This lasted until right about the time you finished your third novel.  And it was good.  You were a senior at BYU.  You’d been doing this writing thing for four years, and you weren’t quitting.  Good for you.

It was during these years at BYU that you discovered that some of the reason people stopped asking you what you were really going to do with your life had nothing to do with the quality or quantity of your writing.  It had to do with your gender.  Roommates, teachers and church leaders all spouted the general counsel that it was a man’s job to provide for his family.  It was also good for women to educate themselves, but it was a woman’s responsibility not to prepare to make money, but to find a man to marry who was prepared to support her and her children.

Here it is, Janci.  Your first step onto this path.  Do you remember what you said?

You told them all that you couldn’t bring yourself to hold some guy to a standard you didn’t adopt for yourself.  You knew being a writer meant you’d probably never make much money.  But you loved it.  And if whoever you were going to marry loved something that didn’t make much money, then so be it.  It wasn’t fair to ask more of him than you asked of yourself.  You’d figure out how to make it work together.

And there it is.  Your choice for your life, made years before you even met Drew.  (And yes, you’re really going to marry him.)

The decision you’ve just made to support him in his goals to paint minis for a living was just a follow-up to the decisions you’ve already made.  And so you’re going to figure out how to register a business, how to bring in revenue, how to juggle the myriad tasks of business ownership, and *gasp* how to be your own business accountant.

You’re not scared yet, but you will be.  Once you get past the stress and business of being engaged, once you open up that business account, once you graduate and lose the safety of the teaching job, you’re going to feel the fear.  You’ll be scared that this task is bigger than you.  That it requires skills you don’t have.  That you’ll fail. 

Business ownership is a big elephant, but you’re going to eat it one spoonful at a time.  Every month there will be a new task to learn.  You’ll make mistakes.  Then you’ll fix them.  You’ll pick up one piece at a time until the whole thing is running like a well oiled machine.  And money will come in.  And you who hate math, who majored in English, who can’t imagine why people go into Finance–you’ll do the accounting.

And it won’t be that bad.  Because the business is something you and Drew own, you’ll love every piece of it.  Even the accounting.  It’ll be all yours, and you’ll be responsible for it, and you’ll love to watch it grow.

I’d love to tell you it all turns out okay.  That the business continues to grow.  That you’re able to actually meet all your goals.  That you won’t fail.   But I’m not far enough ahead of you to be able to see it yet.

When I get there, I’ll let you know.

Janci Olds
Garden Ninja Studios

I have been up to my ears in Quick Books all day.  I am sort-of-not-really-almost done with 2008.  The good news is I’m getting faster at making the program work.  The bad news is 2009 is 2-3 times bigger than 2008, and I’ve fried my brain into a wad of goo.  Seriously, the only other thing that fries my brain like this is writing. 

I think I’m done for today.  I’ll start again tomorrow. 

I talk a lot about writing process.  Writing fiction (or most things, for that matter) is a very difficult task with many parts and many stages.  In order to do it efficiently and effectively (with the goal of being a professional who can actually turn a profit on the effort), it’s helpful to know what processes works for you.  I used to tell my writing students that the goal of trying out different processes was to help them work smarter, so in the end they spend less effort for greater output.  They really liked the less effort part.  In truth, so do I.

The problem is, finding and creating an effective process takes a lot of hard, hard work.  I spend many years weeping and wailing and gnashing my teeth over my writing.  Tasks that take me a few hours now took weeks or months then.  But as I persisted, the process became easier.  I developed a groove, discovered discipline, fine tuned the steps, and strengthened my mental muscles.  Because of the processes I have developed, writing is much, much easier and faster for me now than it used to be.

This is true of other things, too.  Communication and mediation between two people requires practice and process.  When we first got married, Drew and I spent a lot of time hammering out disagreements.  At times it was frustrating.  At times I was impatient.  The effort it took to make (sometimes simple) decisions was exhausting.  But I took comfort in the knowledge that the difficultly wasn’t caused by the decision at hand.  It was caused by our lack of communication process.  We didn’t know how we went about disagreeing or making decisions together.  And so we had to have a long conversation where we figured it out, and then another long conversation on its tail where we talked about what went wrong in the process of the argument, and how we could do it better next time.  We don’t have those conversations very much anymore, because we’ve developed a rhythm.  Like with writing, the energy to maintain that rhythm is insignificant compared to the energy it took to create the process. 

I’m currently learning a new process for business accounting.  Sandra kindly came over and talked me through the capabilities of my new Quickbooks program.  At first I was confused, but as I’ve poked at it, I realize that I now understand the basic functions of the program.  I’ve begun entering 21 months of backlog, which is giving me practice at making the program go.  I can see how it’s better than my old process; it connects the dots automatically that I have previously been connecting all by hand.  I’ve made a process list for what I anticipate I’ll have to do each month to keep the accounting going.

Unless I’m very far off, I predict it’s only going to take me one hour per month to maintain the system.  But in order to set up the system I’m estimating 40-80 hours of work.  It’s not just that I have to type in all the backlog.  It’s that I don’t understand the process yet, so for each step I have to search for the right functions, make errors, erase the errors, search some more, find the function, troubleshoot the function, and then identify the next step.  

I’m frustrated and I’m scared.  I don’t want to take on such a huge burden.  It feels like I’m going to be struggling with it forever.  But I’ve felt that way about things in the past that are now easy for me.  And right now I have the space in my life for creation of process.  Right now the process I was using before is still sufficient, but it isn’t scalable for the kind of business growth we’re hoping to see.  If I wait until the very hour we need a more complicated process, I’ll end up having to learn it in a rush, adding time-crunch stress to my already stressful learning.  Better to adapt early and avoid future conflict. 

Because eventually energy used to create this process will become enery used to maintain it.  And then the excess energy will spill out and be sucked up by other tasks.  What is now hard will one day be easy.  I just have to develop the process, and learn the rhythm. 

My computer decided not to be able to reinstall windows even after I formatted it, because it’s just that jacked up.

So I trucked it down to Best Buy to use up the last of my warranty. And the nice service representative was friendly and helpful, took down the information and shipped it off to the service center.

And I. don’t. have. to. think. about. it. anymore.

Best Buy’s customer service stuff makes me so happy I could cry. Sure I’m without my computer, but I can use Drew’s.

Happy, happy day.

The last week has contained the hacking of our site (fixed), the dying of our wireless network (fixed), and the acquisition of a horrible virus that poses as antivirus software (not yet fixed).

I just want the world to go away.

This lj fell off my radar for a while. Here are three photos to make up for it.

I have been a ball of stress lately.  I am supposed to be calmly investing in the projects we have going.  Instead I am constantly trying to distract myself from stress.  Granted, the things I’ve been doing to distract myself are mostly productive.  The house is clean.  We have a new mini case all put together and organized.  (Looks much better than it did!)  But the painting has not been happening because painting allows me too much time to think about how stressed I am. 

There are a few events that should lessen my stress.  One should happen today.  A few others should happen this week.  I really hope they all come down in the next three days, so that next week I won’t be so tense anymore. 

*sigh*

This was supposed to be notes, not complaints.  Whoops.

Yesterday we went to IKEA to buy the mini case.  I just love furniture stores, especially the kind where they have everything set up like rooms.  I have since I was a little kid, for some reason.  They make me all happy.

It’s raining today, and the rain also makes me happy.  It feels like Bay Area winter, which is so much better than Utah winter, which I am dreading.

September has been a slow month, which is only a small part of the stress.  We’ve got an avalanche of business coming down on us (probably starting today), so I’m not really worried about the lack of money coming in.  I’m more stressed about how crazy October and November are going to be, mostly because we cannot yet do anything about any of the projects.  *sigh*

Tomorrow is October 1st.  I’ve been counting down to it for several reasons.  I have a feeling October is going to be different from August and September.  I really hope I’m right.  If nothing else it’s the beginning of several events that will keep me busy and not thinking about the stress.

My dreams all have the same theme lately.  Trying to get somewhere, and my legs are stuck, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to move very far.  Walking up a hill, and the hill keeps tilting so the grade gets steeper and steeper, until it’s fully vertical and there are no handholds and I can’t pull myself the rest of the way up.  Looking for something, but my eyes are blinded and I can’t see to find it. 

I think I must be feeling powerless.