Tag: Stress

Having a Little Trouble

Wow look at that awesome sword! … what? You can’t see it? It’s inside that block of plastic there. It’s going to be spectacular as soon as I can get it out. When? Um … well, the thing about that is …

Nibbles is broken. My band-saw, Nibbles, is doing poorly at the moment. Something’s happened to the alignment of the wheels and the saw blade keeps popping off them. I’ve tried everything I can think of to fix it but the fact is, I’m an artist, not a mechanic.

So, I have six orders left to complete before the year’s end … and no band saw. This makes Ethan sad. Sad and quite frustrated. Making people pretty things and bringing them joy is my happiness. Kind of like Santa Clause without the awesome beard.

I’m working with slabs of two inch (5 cm) thick acrylic instead of my usual 1 inch in hopes of being able to do more 3D cross guards and generally have more freedom of design. I didn’t take into account that Nibbles would not be on board with my decision.

Nibbles is NOT on board with my decision. Nibbles chewed on that bit of acrylic for about twenty minutes and had a breakdown. It’s now packed away in the corner of the workshop questioning its life choices. I may just join it there cause holy cow I am super frustrated.

What am I gonna do? Well, my current game plan is to visit the hardware store tonight and search for something a little bit more robust than a hobbyist band saw. Maybe a chainsaw. No, I’m not even remotely joking. I just need something to strong enough to strap the plastic to and I will take a fracking chainsaw to it if that’s what I have to do.

No, I don’t think you quite understand.

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This slab of plastic weighs as much as I do. The tablesaw I bought specifically to cut pieces off of it is too small to handle it. The chunk I removed to make the sword I’m working on (stalled on) right now took over 3 hours of sawing with that big beautiful wood saw you can see there. I’m going to have amazing shoulder muscles when I’ve finished my commissions for the year.

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You can see where the table saw started crying for mercy.

So uh, that’s my update for now. What will happen next? Not even I know. Stay tuned for more insanity from Inkblade Studios!

Oh dear, I think I need some chamomile

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(Image Credit)

So! On the advice of my lovely friend Lofnbard, I decided to make a page dedicated to letting people know where they can purchase my book. Great idea! So I made one, and it looks nice. That’s not the problem.

The problem is, I went to Smashwords to retrieve the link for my book on their site and discovered that there were some formatting errors that caused my book to be rejected from their Premium Catalogue, namely, that the table of contents isn’t working for some reason.

What does that mean? Well for one thing, it means that if you poke a chapter heading in their version of my ebook on your ereader, it won’t take you to that chapter. This is weird because when last I saw it, I verified that the table of contents was in proper working order. In fact, it’s fully functional on both the Kobo and Kindle so if you’re using either of those devices, you’re absolutely fine.

The other thing it means is that, since December, they haven’t been distributing to all of the channels they were supposed to (ie: Sony, Barns & Noble, Apple, etc) and did not think to tell me about this. To be clear: When last I checked, it was available via all the distributors it was supposed to be and everything was fine. Smashwords neglected to notify me that there was a problem.

Not cool guys. I can’t fix things if you don’t tell me.

Another thing that I find very strange is that I uploaded my book to Kobo and Amazon independently of Smashwords. These two copies of the ebook (the .epub on Kobo and the .mobi on Amazon) are working fine. This leaves me wondering why the very same file suddenly doesn’t work the same when I upload to Smashwords. How frustrating!

I’ve sent an email to Smashwords asking them what’s up. I’ve gone through the file again, reuploaded the perfected version, and tested it in Adobe Digital Editions. Still having functionality issues with the table of contents for unexplained reasons. Hopefully, they will get back to me soon.

I apologize for this inconvenience. I will get it fixed as soon as I can. It would have been rectified already had I been aware of the issue.

Man, it would be really great to just focus on producing good literature for all you nice folks instead of having to constantly run around checking that everything is still working.

Armed Against Depression

This time of year, in the northern hemisphere, we’re not getting much sunlight. It’s cold, and going out means slogging through ice, snow, and slush. It’s easy to feel exhausted and isolated. It’s the opportune time to discuss a common foe against which many writers and artists struggle: depression.

Sadly, there is no silver bullet to put this monster down, but there are things we can do to stop it in its tracks and even chase it back to the dark corner from whence it came. The first step, is arming ourselves and preparing for the next time it rears its ugly head. Here are my weapons.

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Continue reading “Armed Against Depression”

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