No, Seriously... Get Back To Work

(Not you -- you go ahead and keep reading. I'm talking about ME.)

I know I said essentially this same thing a week ago -- vacation is over, get back to work -- but I managed to blow three perfectly good work days getting sick and stuff. I also found myself needing to learn how to draw better because some ambitious yahoo scripted a sequence that the artist did not actually know how to render. 

At any rate, here it is, Monday a week later, and I've done less than half of what I needed to do last week. This week some big, new things appeared the list, and none of the old things went away.

Here's a 10,000 foot view of the list:

  1. Script, pencil, and ink a week of comics
  2. Three trips to the gym, minimum
  3. Read, review, and re-write my way through 35,000 words of tie-in fiction for Privateer Press
  4. Read, review, and add footnotes to The Body Politic.
  5. Add margin art to The Body Politic

The first item is about 20 hours of work. The second is six. The third is probably twenty-four. Numbers four and five? I expect those are at least twenty hours of work each.

Theoretically, then, if I put in a 90-hour work week, I can be done with all of these things, and NEXT week's task list will be much shorter. In practice, however, creative endeavors don't allow for ninety productive hours across six days. I suspect at least thirty hours of this stuff is going to be pushed off another week. 

Good news, though: last week Sandra and I successfully spent $91,527 to have challenge coins manufactured. Getting that order placed was a huge stress-reliever. A stack of money is a wonderful thing, but as most any small businessperson can tell you, a stack of money is typically a stack of contractual obligations.  This massive cashier's check (more than four times larger than any previous single business expenditure we've made) represents, for us anyway, the first step in fulfilling those obligations.

The coins themselves won't arrive until late May, however, so if you backed the Kickstarter and your address is going to change during the month of May or June, please email schlockmercenary@gmail.com with the details. Of course, if you haven't given us your address yet, go to schlockcoins.afterthecrowd.com and do that. 

Ugh. "Spend forty minutes writing a blog post" wasn't even on this week's list, but here we are. And I can hear Sandra up in the kitchen, laying out her notes for numbers 5 and 6... it's time for one of our over-the-kitchen-counter business meetings in which the blur of a distant task list resolves into frightening, soul-crushing detail. 

(I wrote that last bit with a smile. I love my job.)