Bah Humbug

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What’s this? This, my friends, is a visual representation of how busy/distracted/stressed I have been today. You see, I love chocolate. This chocolate is of the Toblerone variety – a particular favourite. So for me to have a bite and actually forget about a piece…

Well, this has never happened in my twenty-some years of life.

I thought I was going to have the pleasure of moving this blog onto its own domain today, but something isn’t working correctly. Alas, here we are to stay for now.

On to the zine review.

Dear Anonymous 3 Arriving & Second Print Run

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DA3 contributors have been awesome and let me know that my little loves have been arriving all over the world. What a rush. The feedback from both the contributors and other readers has been completely positive so far.

They’ve all gone so quick that I’m already onto the second print run for DA3.

Will Dear Anonymous 4 be even bigger? Even better? We’ll have to wait to find out. But 3 and 4 will be the first issues to be released within the space of one year…

Hola Yola Pepsi Cola

It’s a public holiday here in the land of Victoria, Oz, so if I do have happy mail, it’ll have to wait until next week. (The post, anyway. I’m all over that post box come tomorrow.)

To say that I’ve dropped the ball with posting here and with zine reviews feels like a bit of an understatement at this point. I’m not into the apology posts, but I am into pictures. So here is photographic proof that I’ve been trying to organise my life:

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Labelled wire baskets, people. Labelled wire baskets.

I’ll give you a moment to calm down.

There, there. I know.

Part of the organisation was buying a domain (that I will be applying to this blog soon) and setting up an email on that domain. That’s right – I have a zine email address.

nyx@seagreenzines.com – All zines, all the time.

I’ve had a lot of orders come in, started a new Etsy store for my digital stuff, started creating coptic stitch journals (hail the Cherry Blossom journal!), had orders for ‘baby’s first year’ journals (which I’ve never made before), so on and so forth.

So that’s me caught up. How you been? Whatcha been up to?

Oo! I did almost forget an upcoming zine… Here’s a hint…

F

Eventually…

Eventually, I will stop being a workaholic.
Eventually, I will be strict and only allow myself to work normal hours.
Eventually, I’ll be able to say ‘no’ and.or ‘not right now’.

Eventually, I will learn to put the deadlines I set in my calendar. That way, when I say that Dear Anonymous 3 will be sent out to contributors at the end of January, Dear Anonymous 3 will be sent out at the end of January.

Hell or high water, these are going out to contributors on Monday. After that, I will actually stick to my commitments like posting up two reviews a week and engaging with other bloggers.

Dear Anonymous 3

Sick Day

Yesterday was a sick day for both me and my computer. I required a lot of rest and sleep; my computer required a rebuild. *wince* Today I’m a smidge less foggy than yesterday, so I’ve spent most of the day finishing up some cards while reinstalling all of my programs.

Very exciting stuff, I assure you.

However, just in case you are bored, this happened:

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Back soon.

Chookless Head*

It’s interesting how quickly something can become a part of your life. While, in reality, I missed two reviews and Sunday Call for Subs (the latter not really ‘missed’, as no one had a claim on it). Not the end of the world by any means. But I do still feel a little odd when I miss a day here.

All for good reason. Wanderer had a rather significant birthday on this weekend, so I did have to dedicate some time to finding memes to plaster all over his Facebook wall. My favourite:

weird balloons

I was also responsible for the birthday cake. Wanderer requested chocolate cheesecake with chocolate chips. I did him one better and included a chocolate base, chocolate ganache, and chocolate chips sprinkled on top. This is what that looks like:

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On another note…

The good news is that my technical difficulties appear to have stemmed (knock on wood that it remains in the past tense) from a software problem rather than a hardware problem. Also, while I have run out of some ink on my printer, I still have plenty of good ol’ black so I can finish up DA3 without a problem. I’m hitting that hard today because I *love* some of these letters so much and want to see them in final form.

A little stumble in the beginning of the year is certainly nothing new for me. The world keeps turning.

Now for zine-making!

*Chookless Head? Well… Headless Chicken = Headless Chook + switch it around = Chookless Head

Technical Difficulties

It’s interesting how much time, energy and worth we put into technology. I don’t think you can really comprehend the degree to which it is part of your life until the connection with it is threatened.

I’m thinking about this today because my computer is acting up. Anything more complicated than an email has become irritatingly difficult. But it wasn’t until things started freezing and not even opening that I began to feel the threat to that connection.

What I find interesting is that – after I copied my files onto an external drive – I thought of this blog. I was unhappy about the prospect of being late (again) with zine reviews. I didn’t like the thought of being disconnected from this cyberspace. I knew that this blog and the people I am ‘meeting’ here have made me happy, but I didn’t realise to what degree until the possibility of not being here arose.

This post is a bit scattered. You’ll have to pardon me. I meant to simply get on here and post that the zine reviews might be delayed this week.

Alas, sometimes my train of thought is more like an old hiking path – interesting but often hard to follow…

Haha. Until next time!

Working (Zine-ing? Zining?) Away

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I walked into my work room this morning and found this sketch on an A5 piece of paper. I couldn’t help but smile, feeling glad that the sketch I’d hovered over before I went to bed last night actually looked good in the light of day.

I’m not very skilled at drawing, so I always hesitate to draw anything. But I’m also not exactly rolling in money, so I can’t justify buying stock images. This set of scales is mental to be a visual joke to go along with one of the letters for Dear Anonymous 3.

(Side note: Biggest issue of DA ever.)

It’s nearly always a pleasant surprise to see what I’ve left on my desk from the night before. I feel like I’m almost two different people. Morning and most of daytime me is much better with doing more buisness-related stuff, data entry, etc. Nighttime me is much more creative. Night is when I sketch, draw, work on the ‘art’ that goes along with the letters. If I know that I’ll have time during the next day to work on something that I’ve been tinkering away with at night, I’ll even leave creative/design notes for myself to read in the morning.

I’m not exactly sure what that makes me (besides a workaholic), but I like it. It makes me feel like I’m in tune with some sort of natural rhythm.

PS. No mail this week!