Back at it Again! (Patreon)

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Okay hello patrons it is Sunday and I'm back! Sorry I didn't get around to recording something last night .. it ended up being an emotionally difficult day with everything happening in the world and I just I wasn't feeling up to it, but I'm recording today! And I hope you're doing well. I hope you've had a decent couple weeks. I had a really good break and thank you for understanding and allowing me to take that break. 

So... the lead up to the Kickstarter, finishing the book and getting the book out the door... That required just so much output from me, like so much emotional output and noise and energy... And then after that getting everything rolling from the Kickstarter getting stuff made, coordinating all those resources to get everything rolling ... it was a ton of energy and a ton of stress. And then two weeks ago was really the first point where I felt like I could get away with a break. And I just really desperately needed one after all that output and energy. And it turns out it was a really good time to take a break from social media... It was loud. Every time I dipped in a little bit it just was really overwhelming. To the point where now that I'm trying to come back to social media it's been quite strange.

I don't really know what to say about it other than it's important, and there's a lot going on, and no action seems big enough. But we're all in this together, so! I still need to think about how best to approach things going forward on that front and I think I still have a lot more thinking to do but I also feel like I can't stand back from it any longer. Now that I've had this little break to recuperate myself and get myself into a better place... it's time to start putting energy back out again. And I don't know what shape that's going to take but I don't think we know what shape the world is going to take, so we'll figure it out.

But on the plus side of the reason that it was a good time for me to take a break was because I had submitted a bunch of stuff out for production and all I had to do was wait for it to come back!  And the miracle of that is a lot of it did come back! So I got magnets! These turned out pretty good... pretty cute! I'm very happy with them. The pin I'm super thrilled with. So this little guy has a [I don't know if it will zoom in on it properly...] this little guy has a treatment that's called sandblasting on it which I haven't seen a lot of other people doing but I think it really makes sense for this pin because it is a cloud texture. And I think it turned out pretty well, I'm pretty happy. I got two stickers! Very thrilled with these guys, you have seen them on Patreon-- the designs. They had to make a couple of little alterations to get to the final design and I'm not sure they needed this much bleed but apparently they did... so that's what that is. And I got a little card. So the purpose of this guy is to protect-- to physically protect the extreme edition bookplates, because I'm mailing those independently and those will need to be protected from bending and scuffing, so I wanted something to protect it. And I mean-- why just send a blank card when I can make something nice. 

I also got the proof back from Hemlock-- so this is the new book one. The only thing I've changed is the ISBN on the back and the ISBN in there and I updated it to third edition. But everything else is exactly the same and it looks really good! I'm really happy with this. This is really impressive to me because this is actually digital press. So the purpose of the Kickstarter and the purpose of the investment that's required is for a process called offset printing. And if you're not familiar with printing books, basically offset printing means that you have four colours: CMY and K-- which is black. (Sorry... Cyan, magenta, yellow and black) and occasionally you can also get a Pantone colour added which is a very specifically blended type of ink. So this book was K and a Pantone red. And basically the images for every page are transferred onto a plate and then the inks are laid down one at a time and aligned. And that tends to get you the crispest image... The highest resolution printing, the best quality output is called "offset printing". And offset printing is the process that I got for the two new books and it's the process that I originally had done for this book. But... since I did not need that many new editions of book 1, I didn't want to invest in an entirely new run of one, they told me that they might be able to do to offset-- sorry-- on a digital press. Which means basically that it's like a really fancy high-end laser printer. But it's great! I mean it put out a really impressive product. I'm really ...[you're not able see this on the WebCam] but when you have it in person and you look at the quality of the line... basically what you're typically looking for is fuzziness or pixelation along the edges of sharp lines. I hardly notice any of that. So I'm really impressed with that that product. And that'll be book 1.

And of course book 2 and book 3 [I meant books 4 and 5!!! I really have been on break!!!] so those a been a little bit delayed. Not terribly delayed and the reason for the delay is a good reason. So books four and five are the most important part that Kickstarter, right? I wanted to make sure that every little detail was perfect, every line was crossed, every-- you know-- the book is going to be the best product it can be. So for that reason I'd been sending it back and forth for a bit more revision than I originally thought it would require. It's not a bad thing... I think taking the time to do it right is important. And the good news is just yesterday I was reviewing the final PDFs. The final PDFs for book 4 and book 5. So we're hoping to have them to the printer maybe in the next couple of days. So after that you will see this Kickstarter fulfilment process definitely rolling a lot faster because all the all the other stuff is in and the books don't have to get shipped anywhere they're going directly to the warehouse so as soon as that stuff is in we will be ready to start kitting. And that's exciting! It's progress, it's things moving forward and that's where I wanted to be. 

So then it comes back to what's next. Thanks everyone who provided feedback on the inventory series of posts that I did on Patreon recently over the last couple months-- or just the last month-- I put out four different ideas, I believe? I put out Interpolation which was the story about engineers in a small town in Canada... and that one seemed to resonate with people quite a bit which makes a lot of sense given what I've written in the past. I wrote a bit about science fiction, I wrote a bit about Flitzybon which a few people liked, the Flitzybon story that I thought about making, and (what was the other one?) Lost Omens. So those four ideas are not my only four ideas, but they're probably the four most developed ideas that I had. And looking back on those... it's weird, none of them are-- I'm not like champing at the bit to to work on any of those in particular, but I think I have to work on something, you know? I have to get something moving. So I think I'm probably going to start work on interpolation in a low-key way. There's a lot of artistic development that I need to do for that in terms of character design, location design, and detail work where I have a lot of the story backbone already finished. 

And aside from that I think I'm gonna do some visual research ...some work that I've been doing before in terms of what types of art styles resonate with me, what am I really interested in, and also improving my baseline level of artistic skill. So there's a few projects to put around that in terms of things I want to improve and things I want to draw. And other than that I think it's just a matter of continuing to move forward and wait and see what comes up.

So I think that's all I'll say for now it's almost a 10 minutes that we've been doing this. Glad to be back, we're coming into February pretty soon (yikes!) and I will see you around online. Bye!