Vlog 20170313 - Sun Peaks! (Patreon)

Hey everyone! Sorry this is a bit late, on a mini-holiday for Spring Break with a bunch of friends. Six adorable children in the house who are very well behaved and sweet but their activity has made finding a recording time a bit tricky ;)

I recorded our roadtrip across the Coq' (Coquihalla highway) which is very normal for any of us which live in BC but pretty beautiful I think if you're not from here :) The vlog itself starts ~3m in and at the end are some little skiing clips :D Trevor has some better photos at his instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BRkBwaFhQCe/?taken-by=canadaka

Here's the transcription!

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Okay! Hello everyone, it's Monday, sorry I couldn't get the vlog up last night. Actually, I've been travelling, so I'm here right now in Sun Peaks which is outside Kamloops, BC. And I've been staying in a house with 10 adults and 6 young children. So... it has been really hectic and loud around here, and so every minute where I'm like "I probably *could* record right now..." it's just been chaos and noise going around, and then by the time they all settle down and go to sleep, their bedroom is right next to me and the walls are pretty thin so it's like -- I really don't want to wake them up and start that all over again. 

So! I'm recording today, Monday. Been two days of skiing here, so... not too tough. This is a trip that we do every year, kind of a "spring break" thing, trying to get some of the last bits of skiing before the season ends. And it's been decent, I dunno. It's really weird how no one is here on this mountain. Despite it being spring break. The crowds are almost nonexistant. Which is a big departure from Whistler where we're used to, y'know... You drive there, it takes you like 45 minutes to park, then every line is like 20-40 minutes long in the lifts and then it takes you three hours to get out of Whistler and then another hour and a half to drive home. So it's worth it to us to get just a little bit of time skiing in. 

Otherwise, I've been working hard. The BackerKit survey finally finally finally went out. I'm really glad everyone has been filling that out really quickly, it's going to make things really easy and straightforward. I might have mentioned before but the big hangup there was shipping prices, like, things were changing and I needed verification. But now all of that is done and that is out and rolling. 

I got proofs for the book last week -- so, the book cover I should say. Because we're doing -- we hit a stretch goal for the foil treatment and I wasn't 100% sure which foil I wanted -- which would work best with the cover that I had designed. Because I designed it to work *without* foil in case we didn't hit that stretch goal. But the good news is - we did hit that stretch goal and I just got what is called a "strike test". So, my printer was very kind to arrange for me a test where a bunch of different foils were put on top of the cover in the same shape that I had defined with Mia, my designer -- and that way I was able to see and compare a bunch of different foils. And, with that information I felt confident in making the decision that I'm going to make, and I think everyone's going to be pretty happy with it. :)

So we've got clear holo on book 4 which is kind of shiny but you can see what's underneath and then a little bit of rainbow iridesence, but book 5 is silver holo and that's like very very rainbow-shiny. And I'm pretty happy with it!

Other than that the next step for me was signing bookplates - which I brought here with me on vacation - and I have now signed every single one! Hooray! There's over 300 in this box that I've had to sign. And it takes awhile, yanno? I think... everyone always asks me to sign stuff for them and I wish I could but even signing 300 of the bookplates was really tough and I know that that's just a warmup for the Extreme Editions that I'm going to have to be customizing. That's probably the last hurdle for the book. I'm really, really relieved that I don't have to spend my time actually packaging and shipping books because that means I'll be free to focus on the Extreme bookplates and hopefully get those out in not-too-long a time. 

So it's really exciting! Step by step we are getting closer and closer to wrapping up this Kickstarter, and it's rolling more or less on time. Pretty quick by Kickstarter standards I think, and yeah... that was my goal. To get this out the door as quickly as possible. 

Let's see, other news... so the only other thing I think I have to report is that unfortunately I got rejected from the Climate Change anthology that I pitched to. So those were at the $5 level, which is all of you -- would have seen the pitch that I had put together. I'm still really proud of the pitch that I put out and like I said in that post: it's not personal, it's not anything specific... the reason that they gave me is that they just had way more submissions than they could accommodate so that's normal, that's fine. I'm kind of bummed, I mean, I really wanted to be a part of that anthology of course. So now I'm really grateful that they gave me that news really quickly though because quite often what happens is that you submit to -- [my arm is getting tired :P] you submit to an anthology and it takes months before you hear back on whether you're accepted or not. So you're kind of mentally blocking a little bit of time out to make that piece happen in your schedule but you don't know when it's going to come back. 

But I've got other stuff to do. It looks like I'm gearing up to start inking -- my friend Sfé runs the Beyond anthology and they asked me to ink their piece which is a tremendous honour and I'm really really excited to work with them on that piece. So, they've started pencilling now and I'm going to be inking their work. I don't know how much of that I'm going to be able to share but I'm really glad that I have something to put my effort towards going forward. 

And that's about it! Whew! Keeping forward, moving along and I'm hoping to be back on getting some creative juices flowing now that all of this Kickstarter uncertainty is starting to get out the door. Alright, thanks for your patience and I will see you soon! Baiee!