This is a test of the Movable Type Broadcast System. Had this been an actual entry, this headline would have been followed by substantial content.

Things on my mind of late mostly fall into two categories: money and friends ... and the way time relates to both. Today I’m going to talk about the money part.

As of tomorrow, we are a two-income household: Jak starts a new job, and mine seems pretty stable. This is a source of relief and hope for me, this instant doubling of financial resources.

Jak’s new job is not inherently fascinating but it is certainly lucrative; his shift from academic lab tech to corporate technical writer has nearly doubled his earning power, putting his per-hour rate on a par with mine. Since my income after taxes will almost pay for our expenses, this means that most of the additional money will go to pay down debt.

Even before this development, we were burning out and seeking to pare down our work and time commitments. Now, with the double-day-job, we’re quickly jettisoning all of the freelance work and leads that we had, and putting the publishing business on ice through the end of the year — we’ll do basic support for our existing books, but we’re not taking on anything new.

We’re going to clear the decks still further by hiring a housecleaner. That’s a new thing for me; I’ve never been in a position before where it was actually more economical to have someone else clean my house than to do it myself. Two adults, two kids, and a dog do generate a considerable amount of mess and dirt, though, and it’s already more than we manage with one of us working from home.

My hope is that all of this will free up enough time to preserve our sanity and perhaps even write that the novel. I have one private project I’m working on, and I actually want to spend some time on Polyandproud (which was essentially left to fend for itself for a year and a half while we focused on Per Aspera), but that’s three out of four businesses plus a chunk of household maintenance off our plates.

There’s a wonderful freedom with doing the day job, collecting the paycheck, and being done. I am so exhausted by the stress of running our own businesses, with invoicing and collections and estimates and audits and all that crap.

Speaking of which, last week Baker & Taylor finally ponied up about $5000 they’ve owed us for almost a year, which did wonders for our bottom line. Yay.

So I’ve been running the numbers, and even after allowing increased expense for lifestyle changes (like housecleaning and more eating out), but barring any firings, layoffs, or catastrophic emergencies, we should be debt-free within six months.

Six months. That’s so close I can taste it.

Then ... we start saving for a down payment on a house. What I want more than anything right now is to stop sending over $20,000 a year into the black hole of rent. For the first time since the dot-bust, it seems like a reasonable goal.

Next: friends.

For my entire adult life I have been accompanied by people who breathe music, with gargantuan CD collections and a near-constant soundtrack. My own life, however, has no score. I have found a small selection of music which I like very much, but I still prefer quiet much of the time. I can go weeks, even months, without hearing music and never feel the lack.

I mention this so that when I tell you that about a month ago I was listening to NPR on the radio while driving and heard a local musician playing live in the studio, then came home and looked up her next show and made plans to attend, you have the context to know that’s something rare and special. Without some current sweetie coaxing me out to shows, I attend a music performance perhaps once a year, and then it’s likely someone I’ve liked for years and years, like Suzanne Vega. Music is just not usually something I focus on.

But this woman’s music just got to me, on so many levels. Her tagline is ‘southern-fried jazz’ which is pretty accurate, but it’s neither country, which grates on my nerves, nor the improv sort of jazz which always leaves me feeling disoriented. She had melodies you could sink your teeth into. But the most amazing thing to me was the lyrics, the stories that her songs told. I recognized them, in a strange way that was both comfortable and uncomfortable at once.

Then the interview revealed that she was from Austin, and the recognition made more sense: no wonder her songs sound like a home that wasn’t home; she’s writing about the place I grew up. Except in her voice, these bits of my past which I often remember less than fondly (‘big hair, hypocrisy’) were a source of joy and fond amusement. I was fascinated.

So I told Jak about this show, which was this past Monday night, and we went over to Ballard and had a mediocre dining experience and then hit the Tractor Tavern, where this girl Datri Bean would be playing. Jak got a beer, we sat down and started chatting, and in just a minute or two he looked over my shoulder and said, “Is that Chalo?”

I turned around and sure enough — he’s almost seven feet tall, and so a bit hard to miss. Chalo and I went to the same high school in Austin and were friends of a sort — as much as two smart but quite socially awkward kids in the midst of great drama could be friends. I still have, in a box somewhere, two poems that he gave me the year I ran away from home — his senior year, my junior. One poem was about me, the other about him, and reading them years later I was struck by regret that I’d not known him better than I did.

I’d found him again in Seattle a few years ago ... or maybe he found me; I can’t quite remember now. We exchanged emails, had lunch and caught up a bit; he had a sweetie and a cool job working for a rocket-science think tank. Not long after that he helped us on one of our many moves, and we talked about getting together for dinner or something with his girlfriend when she was back in town, but then I got wrapped up in drama a little closer to home, and we fell out of touch again.

Well, I got up and went over to say hi, Jak in tow, and Chalo looked plenty shocked to see me there, but not as shocked as I was a minute later when he revealed that Datri Bean was his sweetie. After which, thinking back, I did recall him mentioning the name ‘Datri’ in an email or two, and you’d think I’d remember such an unusual name, but no, and I just sputtered and laughed and marveled at the circular, coincidental-yet-inevitable feeling the whole thing had.

So I met Datri, finally, strangely, and her show was excellent, and one or two of the stories took on new resonances, as I realized for example I’d been to the house where she met her sweetie. I chatted with Chalo a little, and he gave us their address, and ... I don’t know. Maybe there will be friendships there. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, if you want to listen to Datri, see her web site. I prefer the live solo recording from KUOW — just a girl and her piano — but try the CD tracks too.

I have been a fan of the idea of Community-Supported Agriculture for several years now. It does require a certain time commitment to cooking, and a certain willingness to experiment with new vegetables and recipes, but I found getting the weekly box of random food to be a lot of fun. Sometimes you can really tell the difference, too — storebought strawberries, though about three times the size of the organic farmed ones, taste like sawdust in comparison.

The Seattle area is blessed with a multiplicity of programs to choose from, and I decided to do some more thorough research into the individual farms this year before signing up for one. And that was all — I planned to select a good program, pay my subscription, and take my weekly food box, end of story. But as I’ve read about CSAs and associated topics over the past couple of months, I’ve come to feel that’s not enough.

I have become convinced that in the very short term — no more than five or six years — we are going to be feeling the effects of oil depletion to the extent that our food supply is going to be significantly altered. It’s not something most people ever think about, but moving food around this country comes at an incredibly high cost. Produce travels an average of some two thousand miles from farm to table, and that’s about to become economically unviable. A lot of the food we’re accustomed to will simply be unavailable; the rest will be exorbitantly priced. Within a decade our whole experience of grocery shopping is going to be turned upside down.

So CSA has become about more to me this year than just quality produce and a bit of environmental ‘voting with my wallet’. I’m interested in getting to know the people running the farm; I want to contribute to that community. It occurs to me that there may be some long-term benefit both in learning about sustainable agriculture firsthand, and in building social equity against the coming upheaval.

To that end, I’ve started a dialogue with one of the local CSA farmers, one that seems to have quite a community built around their share program, with a lot of supporting events. We may work out a barter arrangement where I provide advertising design in exchange for a produce share. I hope to visit the farm and participate as often as my day-job schedule will allow. If this all works out, I’ll probably be writing more about it in the coming months.

Meanwhile, I highly recommend looking into CSA in your area, and joining one if you possibly can. Even if you don’t get down and dirty about it, the food is a lot of fun, and any small contribution you can make to supporting sustainable agriculture in your area may matter a great deal by the end of the decade.

(Except if you live in New York City, in which case CSA isn’t going to help nearly enough — you just need to move. Get off that overcrowded island within the next three years. Really.)

I’ve been startled, recently, by the number of friends and acquaintances who’ve turned up pregnant this year, many of them for the first time. It’s practically an epidemic. I mean, is it the improving economy? Something in the water?

Anyway, though I realize it will appear that we are just jumping on the bandwagon, I do have an announcement of my own: Jak and I are expecting in October.

I realize this will come as something of a shock to most of you. To answer some of the obvious questions: yes, this is a planned event — rather extensively planned, in fact. Jak and I are both very excited, if more than a little nervous. We’re discussing possible names, but haven’t settled on one yet.

Okay, you can stop screaming now. I’m not pregnant, nor am I likely to be; what we’re expecting is not a baby but a book.

After Steel Sky, Per Aspera is going into hibernation for the rest of 2006. In the vast quantities of time freed up by not publishing other people’s novels, we’re going to write our own. Jak’s been talking about a collaboration for some time, but as of mid-February we actually developed an idea and committed to it. It’s a fantasy novel, and our ambitious plan is to finish it by October of this year, and shop it around to agents and publishers just before and during World Fantasy Con, which we will be attending (in Austin, first week of November).

So there, now I’m publicly committed to the deadline. Yeep. Even with Per Aspera on cruise control starting in May we don’t exactly have empty lives, and finding enough not-exhausted time is going to be tough.

Then there are the tricky negotiations involved in the collaboration itself. We’re very comfortable writing and rewriting things for each other; an overwhelming percentage of anything either of us has written in the last five years — business correspondence, marketing copy, even most of our personal letters — has been vetted and tweaked, if not completely overhauled, by the other before anyone else sees it.

But the one thing we’ve never done is collaborate on a piece of fiction. As soon as we started laying out the groundwork for this book, it became apparent that our working styles for fiction are utterly at odds: Jak’s approach is systematic, while mine is organic. He wants to assign values to a set of prefabricated boxes, an idea I view with something very near horror; I want to let each thing grow naturally from the one before, which frustrates him to no end. But we’re adjusting ... and at least we don’t have issues of jealousy or insecurity or blame to complicate things.

It’s because of my experience with those sorts of problems that I made a private vow, some years ago, that I would never live with another writer again. I rarely say ‘never’ anything, being the sort who knows exactly what kind of strange curves life can throw, but at the time I was convinced it was just categorically a terrible idea.

I’m deeply glad that I chucked that promise out the window when Jak came along. Not only because I would have been missing out on an amazing partnership, but because of this potential for a whole other level of sharing and creation.

I’m very hopeful about this particular idea, too — I think it could be both emotionally powerful and marketable. So, wish us luck with our new baby. *smile*

I think I insulted the Traffic Gods by my implication that I was handling my new commute with aplomb; the very next day the 520 bridge closed during the evening rush hour, leaving half of the population stranded on the wrong side of Lake Washington. It took me three solid hours of stop-and-crawl traffic to get around the lake on the north side and home. So, in case anyone’s listening: you’ve made your point, bridge commutes suck, please don’t do that ever, ever again.

Jak and I have made visible progress on our life improvement projects, amidst everything else. We sold the aquarium last week for a tidy little sum; I’ve painted all the living room except for the front door frame, and put several boxes’ worth of books on the newly-painted built-in shelves. We bought a new desk and drawers (happy birthday to me!) and have partially rearranged the office to accomodate; I’m hoping to put the new desk into use as early as today. I have filing trays for incoming bills and checks now, a significant improvement over our previous strategy of ‘throw them on the dining room table and hope we can find them later’. And don’t look now, but a budget is taking shape ...

And then there’s the ‘two steps back’: we are in serious crunch time for getting Steel Sky to press and appropriately marketed; we’re rushing to try and make the pub date but things are slipping hither and yon. I personally am the bottleneck for final jacket design, printer negotiations, and the design of two print ads. Besides that and the day job (and commute) I also have a chunky freelance gig (phase one estimated at about 50 hours of work) and Still More Accounting (royalty statements, 2005 taxes, invoicing all the various people who owe us money). Jak finished filing the audit paperwork, only to have them turn around and ask for a bunch more ... some of which we don’t even have, like shipping receipts for every package we’ve ever mailed. Who knew anyone would ever want three years of post office receipts?

Plus, our sizable debt load is about to increase by another ten grand for printing Steel Sky. The way publishing works, it’ll be at least six months before we see the first trickle of income from book sales. My paycheck will just about cover our monthly expenses (our rent alone eats up about 45% of my net pay; four-bedroom houses in Seattle are not cheap) with nothing left over for debt reduction. So I’m hoping Jak can find another contract job for at least part of this year, despite our general overworkedness, because if I’m going to sell my days to the corporate machine, I’d really like to get out of debt as a result. *sigh*