DOOM!

I'm not prone to panic attacks. They don't generally do a lot of good, and I'm in the habit of having too much to do to spend a lot of time hyperventilating.

Five in the morning, however, is a different story.

I woke up gradually, but made the immediate mistake of thinking about closing EMG for Christmas. This has bothered me enormously since we first got our plane tickets. We spent three hours on the phone trying to arrange to leave a few days before or after Christmas so we could meet Jake's mother and sister (who already had tickets) in Grenada. Three hours of 'well, let's try through Chicago' and 'how about routing through Europe?' and 'maybe if we stay overnight in Timbuktu,' and we couldn't get closer to Christmas than the 13th on the early side, or the 7th of January on the late side (which wouldn't have allowed us to do more than pass the relatives at the airport).

So I've laboriously posted 'EMG will be closed!' all over the pages, a few weeks in advance. (Wrongly, I might add, before I double-checked my tickets... I will be closed the 12 Dec - 12 January, though I will be back sooner than that and catching up. I had posted the 15th - 15th before I thought to check, and this was part of my depth-of-the-morning angst)

For about an hour, I lay awake, my brain gibbering at me non-stop.

OMG, the business will fail while I'm away. No one's going to notice the away warning. People are going to order the day I leave and then get irate when they don't get their order by Christmas. I have 170 emails to answer and I won't get to all of them before I leave! I'm going to come back to an inbox full of hate mail! My one shot at fame and fortune will come while I'm away! All my artists are going to quit in a huff because I probably won't manage to finish all the web updates! Someone's going to hack my site while I'm gone and put up porn! There will be revolts in the street! My house will burn down! All my EMG files will get corrupted! My printer will spontaneously melt! Everything's going to fail miserably! I'll never make it without a day job! I suck! Doom doom DOOM!!!

There are drawbacks to being creative, namely that an unoccupied brain will go on and ON without some restraints. Mine went on for about an hour before I was able to distract it with fanfiction smut ideas and make it go to sleep.

Woke again feeling all tired out and slightly grumpy when the alarm went off. Had great ideas for that fanfiction smut, at least. Doom level is low, but the tired-out, dear-heavens-what-AM-I-doing feeling lingers.

Days of work countdown!

Five!

Randoms...

The most useful skill you can EVER cultivate is knowing when to keep your mouth shut. IMHO.

Also, that awesome pdf program torrent linked me too has copy-protection and some other goodies, which greatly makes me want to explore the idea of offering the coloring books in protected download format (for sale, but much cheaper than the printed books). I shall have to poke at my artists when I get back and see what they think of the idea.

My brain is just NOT behaving today... it wants to wander all over the place and not stick to anything for long enough to accomplish a thing. Bler-dee-bler-dee-bler...

Wish3

Volume 4 is Da Bomb.

Syl gets a lot of credit for helping to put this one together (I mean, way beyond the fact that she's ya know, the artist...)! It looks fantastic, much slicker and more deliberate than the previous volumes. Like it was *planned* to be printed this way.

The very astute may notice in a few minutes that I'm raising the price on the previous volumes, because I hadn't priced them at all intelligently. New to this publishing thing, I am. Losing my shirt, I was. And I wasn't really at market value at all. These are gorgeous things, and as much as I like to be affordable and stuff, I'm not printing hundreds at a run, and I just can't afford to be selling dirt cheap when I'm not printing dirt cheap. And don't worry, Syl gets a healthy chunk out of the price increase, so your money isn't going to my trip to Grenada or anything. (Actually, EMG has never paid me a cent. It's paid for my laptop and printer of course, but every dollar EMG makes stays utterly, entirely separate from my spending money. I haven't even ever paid myself artist fees. Even my tablet came out of my work wages. Watch me flounder around trying desparately to justify charging a reasonable price for a beautiful product. I'm such a goon...)

Anyway, to sum, Wish3 Volume 4 = Very Awesome. I will be posting it for sale in a few here and will edit to include a link. Stay tuned!
Edit: Did you stay tuned? Or did you wander off to find a station that wasn't playing commercials? Anywho, Volume 4 is up: HERE

And ye GODS do I detest dialup...